THE ST. FRANCISVILLE EXPERIMENT Is it possible to have less than no shame? Any fool could've told you that The Blair Witch Project was a one-trick pony and any attempt to duplicate the formula was going to embarrassingly crash and burn. But it was only a matter of time before some twit tried. That twit's name is Dana Scanlan, who obviously knows how terrible this is because an actor (Paul Salamoff) is used to play the producer (under a different name) in the intro to this film, where he has the gall to say that "Everything you see is real". Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Four young people (a hot psychic, a hot ditzy blonde, and two N*Sync rejects, one of which can't stop grinning) agree to spend a night in a haunted house with somebody else's expensive-looking equipment and three video cameras. Things go bump in the night. Eek. A lot of people hated The Blair Witch Project (and I don't think it's much of a stretch to look into the future and see that people have already said "Whaddya mean? Blair Witch WAS a ripoff of [fill in your choice of The Last Broadcast or Cannibal Holocaust]), but you've got to give it this: it didn't have any False Scares By Cat (yowling, it jumps right at the camera). It didn't have any of the cast sneaking off into the night to try to scare the camera, whup, I mean the girl. It didn't have dropped cameras constantly landing (never breaking) in a perfect position to catch the action. "Everything you see is real." Yup. While it was virtually a foregone conclusion that this was going to suck, it didn't have to suck as bad as it did. One of the clever things about TBWP is that it had three people and two cameras of two different kinds: a black-and-white film camera, and a full-color video camera. This gave the shots personalities of their own, and helped out the first-person illusion. Here, there are three video cameras, all of which look the same, breaking that illusion. The psychic chick spends most of the film annoyingly telling the rest of the cast that they have to use the "white light" to protect themselves. She keeps hearing/seeing/smelling/feeling things we don't. Meanwhile, the ditzy girl spends the whole movie freaking out over goddamn EVERYTHING. She's cute, but she's not cute enough to get away with being this annoying. God help us, there's even a "hip", throwaway reference to The Blair Witch Project - and it doesn't mean ANYTHING! One guy just says, "Anyone see Blair Witch?" and we're already forty minutes into the movie. It took these idiots forty fucking minutes to figure out that they're in a Blair Witch ripoff! Finally, they find a pretty handy excuse to split up (they want to "cleanse" the house by doing all the different rooms simultaneously - yeah, like it's a four-room house) and then things get even more ridiculous. Much is made about how they're locked in this house for the night, but all the footage comes to an end when they really decide they want to leave, which of course suggests that they weren't really locked in. Title cards tell us what happened to them. These title cards forget some things which happened earlier in the film, like one guy having his hand seriously gimp-ified. You'd think that this would be a fairly significant element of the aftereffects of this "experiment". Yes, this movie sucks every bit as bad as you'd expect it to, maybe a little more. I liked the cute girl's oft-bared midriff, though. Pretty sad, when the best thing about a movie is one girl's midriff. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE