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Last
Broadcast, The (1999)
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The Last Broadcast will be best remembered as a weird and much appreciated film on the underground circuit as well as for the unsuccessful lawsuit that its creators tried to slap onto the team behind the phenomenally successful The Blair Witch Project. The claim was that the makers of Blair Witch stole their idea without giving due credit and that the similarities between the two movies were clearly more then just coincidental. It is true that what is immediately most striking about this feature is its uncanny likeness to the far more famous Blair Witch Project. In fact the film is virtually identical in plot and technique for most of the way until the end when the two movies go very different ways. The plot revolves around the mysterious disappearance of three out of four people who had gone on a trip to the Jersey Forests in order to discover what lay behind the legend of the Jersey Devil and make a live cable and Internet broadcast of the event. The movie begins very promisingly with a chilling phone call from the sole survivor of the trip made to the police reporting his three companions as missing persons. The survivor, a self proclaimed psychic named Jim Suerd is accused and eventually convicted of the murder of the three men who had accompanied him on the ill fated trip to discover the Jersey Devil. One of the interesting features of the film is how "new technology" the Internet is painted as being "evil" and bringing out the worst sleeping demons in otherwise normal human beings. The film is shot in a manner very similar to The Blair Witch Project with fuzzy, handheld camerawork being the order of the day. The story is at least as intriguing as The Blair Witch story for a lot of the time but then just when the tension needed to be taken to a crescendo, the film completely runs out of ideas and ends in a manner which is far from satisfying, though clearly many people feel the same way about the Blair Witch ending. The film has a very amateurish feel to it and has virtually no production values. The student cast actually does a decent job, though the Jim character tries so obviously to be "weird". The Last Broadcast didn't enjoy even an iota of the mega-success that the Blair Witch Project generated last summer. It is also quite shocking that two movies in released within months of each other should tackle such a strikingly similar subject. It is also not much of a surprise that a court case followed. For those of you looking for another dose of Blair Witch, you need look no further then The Last Broadcast. It is a perfect replica for most of the way, though whether The Jersey Demon delivers the goods as well as the Blair Witch certainly did, is a very debatable issue indeed.
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