The Last Broadcast (1998)

Internet chat rooms buzzed with the idea that Daniel Myrick and Ed Sanchez, the directors of the groundbreaking indie horror flick The Blair Witch Project, stole their idea from a rough draft of The Last Broadcast, publicized years before that film materialized. Whether this is true or not is almost irrelevant, given Blair's vastly different approach: It prefers unexplained recovered footage, rather than the documentary-style re-creation that Broadcast favors. Blair's technique ends up being far more ominous and chilling, but Broadcast certainly posits some intriguing ideas of its own in the missing filmmaker department. Most impressive is that it comes across as far more polished than the kind of amateurish pet project one might expect from a film with the unspeakably tiny budget of 900 dollars. It also weaves a complex story line involving a handful of shady characters, and does a believable job of creating back stories for them -- like Blair, it tries to assert that these events really happened. But the documentary approach remains too hermetic to convey real terror, too after-the-fact to suggest the ongoing presence of danger. The droning documentarist lulls his viewers to sleep with his dispassionate sleuth work, leaving them without any sense of the lost characters and only a limited inclination to keep out of the woods. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide