The Last Broadcast

The Pine Barrens, New Jersey, 1995: a young, amateurish TV crew set up a live web/cable simulcast on the legendary Jersey Devil, keeping a video diary as they go deeper into the woods. After the gruesome deaths of two of the party and the disappearance of another, the fourth (psychic, psycho or sad nerdy fake?) was convicted of murder. But documentarist Leigh (Beard) reckons injustice may have been done, and explores further - and it's his investigative film we have here. It's not, of course, as anyone who's seen The Blair Witch Project will know. Weiler and Avalos' film is also fake documentary, and its publicity implies that since it was (allegedly) made months before BWP, it may have influenced it (though Sanchez and Myrick would have had to move sharpish). It may even be better. Baloney. While there are striking parallels, this film's more complex ambitions - it's less a horror chiller, and more a thriller-mockumentary with modernist pretensions - are its fatal flaw. The decision to indict the media as a source of injustice, even evil, means that the laboured narrative goes wildly awry towards the end; and the use of the investigative documentary format renders some lines so portentous, they're unintentionally funny, while also wrecking any potential for tension.