Retroview: THE LAST BROADCAST

Ok, I really should have seen this a long time ago. I mean in 1999. Why? Because I continue to declare The Blair Witch Project to be one of the most important horror movies since the 70s and worthy of the same shelf as the game-warping Asian horror from the late 90s. So what? Well The Last Broadcast was made a year before the BWP and attempts the same thing. I knew that at the time. I allowed the very pleasurable hype engine of the later film take me with it and celebrated that instead.

Two public access tv hosts try to save the sinking ratings of their paranormal show, Fact or Fiction, by taking up a suggestion sent in by a viewer to investigate the legendary Jersey Devil. The Jersey Devil is a cryptid like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot and has been part of the folklore of the Pine Barrens area for centuries. Perfect. So the guys pack a paranormal sound recordist and a psychic and head off to the woods to look for the monster. Hang on ...

This film begins with a number of talking heads including the director relating how what we are about to see is a murder case. Four men went into the woods and one came out. Two mauled bodies were found and one disappeared. The survivor, the psychic, has been charged, tried and convicted for the murder of the others but has died in prison.

What we get from this point on is a slowly tightening weave of interviews, video from the excursion and the director's own narration as he investigates the case, being convinced that James the psychic was innocent of murder.

This is not a found footage film in the sense that it has come to be applied (an edit of raw footage assembled and presented as a finished fiction feature) but a more of a mockumentary. There is a music score throughout and the sole source of raw footage is from the incident. The difference creates the sense of reportage which in turn supports the veracity of the whole. Regardless of genre see also This is Spinal Tap or more recently (and closer in intent) Lake Mungo.

And then in the third act we are given a twist which necessitates a third party which blows pretty much everything we've already seen out of its closed circuit and into ... well, where? I'm not going to spoil anything but it is easy to find a warning about this anywhere with a Google search without jepoardising a fresh first screening. While I an fond of fourth wall renovation whether used comically or not I cannot explain this one: while the change to it happens in swift muscular fashion there is nothing further offered as to why it has happened. We are left to conclude that it was just easier to complete the picture if a literally new angle was introduced. And then the final shot introduces something else again and bids us ask further questions about the purpose of the entire exercise. This is the mystery of The Last Broadcast but rather than leave us haunted by mystery it just makes us shake our heads and ask what the point was.

The Blair Witch Project appeared at the end of the year after The Last Broadcast was released. If you were a moviegoer back in the terrible summer o' '99 you will remember its internet marketing, one of the first viral campaigns. It was enjoyable buying into it. The website (not even blockbusters had their own sites at the time) offered such delicious teases in video snippets and a forum all cloaked in gloomy backgrounds and creepy audio. The meme of its actuality was propagated but it was needless. The movie worked regardless. And how.

What they got right was to brush the verifiers (tv-style interviews) away and dive straight down among the shoulders of the players, the people we already know have gone missing never to be found. What we saw once this was established was the steady breakdown of the team's internal relations in a setting that increasingly seemed inescapable. A mounting dread was worsened by some genuinely terrifying incidents and then by the end we descend with them into a hopeless darkness.

The BWP's approach was old decades before its release and more recently Jean Teddy Filippe's extraordinary series of very short films The Forbidden Files showed the same thing could be achieved in miniature. But BWP still works as a feature film. Not the first found footage feature it became the one to cover in the following decade  and with very little popular or critical success until Paranormal Activity and Chronicle. Too many cover versions missed the point.

While Blair Witch has not been diminished by its descendants The Last Broadcast has. Not just right out of the gate with BWP but in later examples of the faux documentary like Lake Mungo which used the veracity of improv interviews to very clever and unsettling effect and managed its found footage into real drama.

But while The Last Broadcast might sit crushed beneath an avalanche of the greater success of its followers it remains a curio rather than a pioneer though pioneer it is. It was apart from anything else deemed the first desktop feature (made entirely on digital video and assembled at home). But it has more than its share of merits in its effectively designed dread and use of the interviews to pose more questions than they answered (the interview or testimony in a mystery scenario must frustrate by the incompleteness of its information). But I can't help feeling that if the ending had been better conceived, its potential for the extraordinary realised, it would have been a game-changer. Even then, I wonder, would Blair Witch still eclipse it as a superior imitator? The answer is lost to us.

Unsungquels : pres and ses that deserve some love Part 1

Sequels 'n' prequels. Let's just call them quels. Yes, those annoying puppies of hit movies that gnaw around your ankles and yap, trying to outdo their progenitors. Sometimes they're better but mostly you just have to say "quel damage."

Here are a few I like.

AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION

 Here's a case of a sequel far outstripping its folks in depth and effectiveness. The Amityville Horror is an adequate  70s piece falling between a ghost story and the still popular demonic possession subgenre. The problem I have with it is that apart from one really good scare (eyes!) it isn't really scary. The best moment for me is when the priest once again has his phone line reduced to buzzing static when speaking to Mrs Lutz. It's a moment charged with a real sense of despair. There's a sadness to its inevitability that lends more weight to the climactic scenes than they deserve.

So if sequels are just good bits of the originals writ large why is Amityville II The Possession such a subtle and creepy film? Well, I say subtle. The thing ends in an excorcism that was conceived of like a shopping list. But the central theme of guilt from the incestuous union of the son and daughter of the house and the forked road each sibling follows afterward does allow for subtlety. The impending doom of this, involving the girl's various overtures to her brother and refuge sought in the church, the brother's spiral downward into what might be possession or psychopathy or just intense controlling guilt, is a richer experience that a lot of higher profile dramas that might add a more acceptable but befogging hysteria to the issue. Here a sensitive subject is made troubling by the casualness of its core act and then channelled into severe allegory. But the allegory remains grounded in the pain of family dysfunction.

Ok, so once you get to the big payoff the movie just tries to outdo every Exorcist cover version that came before it, amping up the latex as though it was stolen from George Lucas' garage. But as with most thrillers and all whodunnits once it's clear that the conclusion will be rushed and put together with gaffer tape I don't really care if it's done well or not. The bulk of Amityville II is the depiction of disturbing behaviour with enough light around it to avoid sensationalism (until the end) and engage the noodles. As such it embarrasses its predecessor and could easily have been retooled to drop the association. But the world doesn't work so.

Oh yeah, and it's much scarier than the Amityville Horror, with a constant sense of otherworldiness pervading. Eerie.

BLAIR WITCH 2: BOOK OF SHADOWS

The really interesting thing about this one is that they hired a documentarian to do a slick fiction film. Joe Berlinger had made a significant feature documentary about some goth teens who were accused of murder: Paradise Lost. I haven't seen it nor its sequel but it was deemed strong enough stuff for the Myrick and Sanchez team of The Blair Witch Project to hire him to direct the sequel. Berlinger's idea was to make the events of the tale a matter of ambiguity that might change with perspective. Artisan, who'd had such a monster success with the first film went all Hollywood on the sequel and turned the risk control down to half a unit and released the film recut with some re shoots to make the events definite.

First, the fun bits. Blair Witch 2 is set in a world that knows about The Blair Witch Project. It's on the media and back at Burkitsville, Maryland, there are stalls selling twigs fashioned into the stick figures from the movie. There are also tours of the woods for the curious. One of them is led by a guy only recently released from a mental health facility. he takes a group of the kind of people you'd expect to go on such a tour and horror ensues. Or does it?

The narrative is framed by a lengthy police interview in which the surviving tourists give their accounts of the events which are variously supported and contradicted by video evidence. As the testimonies proceed we settle into the story's digesis and, apart from necessary returns to the frame, all goes narratively well.

Berlinger's most noted work had been in the depiction of evidence and its manipulation, of witness and testimony. Here, backed by a digetic realm aware of the artifice of a realistic looking feature film (ie the original), Berlinger tries to set up something for the audience to not just think about but enjoy thinking about. The facing mirror approach has a pleasantly intriguing effect and it's wrapped up in the immediate high gloss surface of an American feature film.


Fine, but is it any good? Actually, yes, one thing Blair Witch 2 doesn't forget to do is be a horror film. After you get past all the clever clever intentional stereotypes among the cast and the tricksy references to the original, what you still have is an increasingly eerie supernatural tale delivered with great atmosphere. The cast and their material range from sharp to stock, as though they know they're in a knowing movie featuring knowing characters who know etc etc but that's all to the film's strengths.

I saw this film at the cinema on a blisteringly hot Melbourne afternoon with a fellow horror movie fan (heya Polly!) and enjoyed the afterchill on the walk through the dusty heat. Berlinger says on his dvd commentary that this is not the film he intended and that changes he was involved in were often done under protest. But he also admits that he did make the changes and must live with the results. Bingo! Don't remake a mistake, learn from it and do the next thing with the lesson in mind. And where do you put the protest? In context where everyone can see that you're not just mouthing off at the suits.