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MantisToboggan posted:since it's now the twentieth anniversary of those three students disappearing in Burktisville i never before realized how perfect it is that the movie takes place in 1994
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Oct 28, 2014 04:47
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Jonny Angel posted:Explain? i think of 1994 as being kind of a tipping point for independent cinema entering the mainstream (Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, etc.) so a movie where three generation Xers are basically murdered by independent cinema taking place in 1994 feels very appropriate
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Oct 28, 2014 16:00
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Book of Shadows is a gigantic loving mess but it's a weirdly compelling mess. It has car wreck value.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:49
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The main problem is that Shadow Of The Blair Witch is really obscure, but almost mandatory viewing to really sell the crucial point that 'real people died, and this is the movie they made about it.' i dunno if it's that obscure, it's on the Blair Witch Project DVD
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Oct 29, 2014 13:03
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Soylent Green posted:That's Curse of the Blair Witch, he's talking about the equivalent for BW2. ooooooh my mistake
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Oct 29, 2014 14:48
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weekly font posted:Apparently there was someone dressed in all white off to the side to scare them but they never caught it on camera. Here's a screenshot from the cutting room floor of what the Blair Witch might've looked like (hidden behind spoilers for scare factor) 
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Oct 29, 2014 18:55
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penismightier posted:Student films are usually shorts, they probably were set to just get a crappy twenty minutes of stories over footage of the woods. One of my favorite things about the film is just how lovely a director Heather is. She's undisciplined, rude, and clueless, just like a student filmmaker would be. A lot of Blair Witch's influences, from Loaded to Symbiopsychotaxiplasm to Cannibal Holocaust are all in their ways absurd horror movies about bad directing. one of my favorite bits in the movie is her line about how it shouldn't be possible to get lost in the woods in America because we've exhausted all our natural resources, because it's such a cluelessly naïve thing to come from a person who's going into the woods to shoot a movie. but unlike in 90% of other found footage movies, where these things come off as lazy idiot-plot decisions, in Blair Witch it comes off as genuine character creation. it's somewhat hard to appraise the quality of the acting because of the weird circumstances in which the movie was shot, but Heather gives a very strong performance.
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Nov 4, 2014 21:40
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penismightier posted:So SMG, as a found footage fan, (and everyone else for that matter) do you think any of the later ones are as good Blair Witch? No. certain segments in the V/H/S franchise come close, but i can't think of any post-99 FF movies as a whole that are as good.
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Nov 5, 2014 14:15
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penismightier posted:I lean closer to your POV than anyone else's, I think. Only Paranormal Activity has the same visceral power to me - maybe no coincidence that both don't show the monster ever. Cloverfield is up there too but I don't really see it as part of the same tradition, it has too much polish on it. Oh yeah, I always forget Paranormal Activity for some reason. Solid movie, although I think it definitely has more flaws than Blair Witch. I was actually just talking about it in the horror thread but really there are onlylike 3 or 4 found footage movies I like in their entirety and then a bunch I like in like 10 or 15 minute increments. I loving hate Cloverfield, though.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:16
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penismightier posted:They run into trouble editorially a lot, I think. Don't forget that between its premiere and release over an hour was cut from Blair Witch. If you rock that improvised style you have to be willing to make huge, huuuuge cuts. I think a lot of newer found footage movies underestimate that or don't shoot enough footage to be able to do the same, which leaves you with like 15 minutes of the same "let's take a tour of my house with my new camera" and "WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO" fight in every movie. Blair Witch blows past that poo poo in like 3 minutes, Paranormal in like 5, and Cloverfield wisely peppers it in the middle of the film. I never thought about the editorial aspect like that before but I basically agree with all of this. Which is in large part why I like the V/H/S movies, even when they're bad.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:31
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Hbomberguy posted:For me the first VHS is very good, in a way that lots of people might find annoying but I really enjoyed and got into. Little found-footage vignettes that offer cool commentary on common tropes and some very unsettling images that really got into my head. The one with the video-glasses actually made me need to sit down for a while. Safe Haven from part 2 is probably "better," but yeah for me Amateur Night (the video glasses one) is the highlight of the series.
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Nov 8, 2014 23:30
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The first half hour or so of V/H/S was an extremely powerful first-time viewing experience. Amateur Night and the first part of the wraparound really go all-in on the rape imagery and Second Honeymoon has its fair share of it too, which i won't even disagree with anyone who finds it hella problematic (although i think the people who say "V/H/S thinks all women are evil and will kill you," which i've heard on more than one occasion, are off base) but it really goes a long way towards making it genuinely unsettling almost to the degree of the first wave of horror-exploitation movies in the '70s. i'd often kinda half-joked that found footage movies could stand to look a bit more to amateur porno as an aesthetic touchstone, and V/H/S felt like the first one that really ran with that.
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Nov 9, 2014 00:20
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