Curse of the Blair Witch

ere's an unedited comment from one of the scads of message boards teeming with debate over the veracity (or lack thereof) of The Blair Witch Project : "That movie scared the crap out of me and I have heard that it is a true story, so shut up, because I saw an interview with people talking to the three students' parents. Which, by the way, was heartbreaking. Show some respect people!" You gotta appreciate the caring pugilist stance even if the writer is absolutely dead wrong. Whereas The Blair Witch Project, the mock theatrical documentary, was a little too loosely structured (not to mention anticlimactic after the hype) for my tastes, I was very impressed with Curse of the Blair Witch, the mock non-theatrical documentary which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel as a pre-Blair release marketing ploy to drum up interest (successfully, judging from the whopping boxoffice numbers). As you may have heard: "In October of 1994, three students filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary...a year later their footage was found." Portions of their footage from the documentary on the Blair Witch are intercut with wide-ranging interviews from townspeople, relatives of the three missing students (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Mike Williams), local law officials, and very convincing professors of film, anthropology and folklore, as well as excerpts from local news and old documentary clips from Mystic Occurrences (a 1971 doc). Viewers will see Elie Kedward's (the purported witch) name on a ship's passenger list, see and hear (read Ken Burns style) letters from the 18th-century describing the atrocities attributed to Kedward (who had a penchant for drinking the blood of children), and see a mock (talk about wheels within wheels) re-enactment of child murderer Rustin Parr's interview on Death Row in the 1940s (Parr claimed he heard a woman's voice commanding him to kill). Every bit of it--the interviews, the "old" documentary footage, the story of the Blair Witch--is completely fictional. Still, I've reviewed thousands of documentaries in the past 15 years, and I can't honestly say that I would have suspected this was totally bogus had I not already known the truth. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but you may rest easy tonight because there is no Blair Witch. Sure to be quite popular, this budget priced "documentary" is highly recommended. (R. Pitman)