Customer Reviews

The Last Broadcast

5 star:		(54)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(35)

 

 

i absolutely loved this movie! it was a true masterpiece. the acting wasnt, (at all times), greatly convincing, but the story was awesome! i thought the ending was a unique way to end this movie. from the previous reviews, it seems like many people were upset with the ending, but i thought that was an origional direction to go in, although it did kill a little bit of the intrigue of the mystery. i would call this more a mystery, rather than a horror. but overall this was nicely done, especially for the money spent, and limited access to many abilities that higher budget movies have access to. that forced the movie to be very origional, and nicely thought out. bottom line is that the blair witch had literally NO PLOT, and was a disaster, as far as movies go. the blair witch didnt have the ability that this movie had, to capture your interest. this movie remindes me of a typical episode of "unsolved mysteries", up until the very end, where the movie- effect takes over. this movie im sure, will have a cult following. of course this is only my opinion, though. and no, i am not one of the movie makers' mothers, or something...once again, excellent movie!

The Last Broadcast is a welcome addition to the new "intellegent" trend in fright movies. Like the Blair Witch movie, it relies more on plot and suggestion than on blood and gore. But an accurate comparison between these two films must include the obsevation that it is more of a combination of the sci-fi special "Curse of the Blair Witch" and the actual Blair Witch movie itself. Indeed, after viewing The Last Brodcast, it is hard to believe that the Blair Witch team did not see this earlier version of (basically) the same type of subject matter. That is not to say that it is nessesarily bad to get your inspiration from another film, since both of these films take from other movies as well. Some that come to mind are "Night of the Living Dead", "The Exorcist" And "Evil Dead", movies that also incorporated relatively small budgets, unknown stars, and compared to other films in the genre, little gore. And so, I will give "The Last Broadcast" a thumbs up, and remind the viewer to remember the small amount of cash it was made for and the tremendous amount of effort and imagination that went into making it. It will take it's spot with my other favorite scary movies(right next to Blair Witch, hee hee). I look forward to more films made with such enthusiasm. One final warning: "The Last Broadcast" has slightly more blood and violence than the Blair Witch movie, which should please those of you who thought there was not enough in Blair Witch.

A bunch of media doofuses trek into remote woods in search of an old and horrific local legend - and are never seen alive again. By now, "Last Broadcast" will go down (for those few who've seen and remember it) as that other mock-documentary project about the supernatural. I wanted to give this flick a chance given how I've seen "Blair Witch", and not only does "Broadcast" fail by comparison, but fails to escape comparison - painfully ironic given that "Broadcast" is actually the older of the two movies.

WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT: "Broadcast" is a (wholly fictitious) documentary about the 1995 murders of several men who ran a local cable-access show called "Fact or Fiction". When ratings sag, Steve Avkast, Rein Clackin & Locus Wheeler decide to devote a show to the mysterious "Jersey Devil". With the "help" of a local magician and (alleged) psychic named Jim Suerd, our trio make a winter's journey deep into the remote "Pine Barrens". While there, they have their cameras and internet access - they're connected to the outside world, but not protected by it. Only Suerd will emerge alive from the Barrens - luckless, he will be convicted of the brutal murders of two of the others. No body is found of Avkast, precluding feckless prosecutors from pursuing a triple bill against Suerd. (Avkast's hat and gobs of his blood leave little doubt of his fate.) Lacking a confession, prosecutors seal Suerd's fate with his blood spattered clothes, but largely on the strength of preserved video footage showing him as randomly violent and (most importantly) the guy leading the group deeper into the barrens. The documentary begins after Suerd's mysterious death in prison - where he was to serve consecutive life sentences. When the documentarian receives battered remains of an additional video tape - the actual final broadcast of the "Final Broadcast" crew - producer David Leigh switches gears. Reconstructed footage critically undermines the timeline advanced by prosecutors at Suerd's trial, forcing Leigh to rethink the events leading up to the horrific multiple murders of the Pine Barrens, and the very meaning of such legends as "The Jersey Devil" in the modern digital age. (The flick was released in '98, based on events occurring in '95.)

WHAT GOES WRONG: overshadowed by "Blair Witch", "Broadcast" actually derives its inspiration from two other movies - but naming them would spoil the ending (which the producers obviously consider a real twist). "Blair" and "Broadcast" have similar sounding premises but each takes a different turn - one that informs the superiority of "Blair". While "Blair" just gave us the raw footage of 2 films (the documentary that Donahue was shooting AND the DAT she shot documenting her journey), "Final" is structured like a documentary itself - it's the single-minded product of Leigh's vision, complete with his voice-overs and his perspective. "Final" lacks that sense of natural transition from reasoned observation to mad desperation that we enjoyed in "Blair" as our heroes realized that they had become trapped in their own project. "Final" has Leigh directing us as much as his film - telling us what we were to think, what direction to pursue, what to expect. The story has some chills, but mostly that's undermined by its slickness - it looks produced rather than nurtured, with some computer graphics, and actors who bring admirable vigor to their characters without escaping the thin dossiers created for them. (Suerd is a laughable, if harmless idiot who thinks he really is a magician; Avkast, half the visible face of "Fact or Fiction" is a self-important hack desperate to save his stupid show, even though cable access slots are supposed to be given on a first-come basis; Wheeler & Clackin are just a couple of loudmouths who mercilessly ridicule anybody who takes their show seriously.) "Blair" excelled in its ability to show the nuanced changes suffered by its characters, but there's no nuance here.

If anything, "Broadcast" probably enjoyed, rather than suffered exposure to "Blair", offering an alternative to anybody turned off by the latter film's shameless promotion (vindicated by "Book of Shadows") or otherwise made into a "Blair Hater". Unlike "Blair" which relied on a steady stream of shocks, "Broadcast" leads up to a twist ending, one which requires suspension of our disbelief, and shamelessly relies on our reflexive skepticism of the media (and just about everybody else). Fans of this movie must think that if it's less popular than "Blair", it must be more worthwhile than that movie, more of a thinking-man's version of that movie, even though it doesn't evince any more thinking of its own.

What got me about this film and what really worked for me was that I went into it not knowing about it being a movie. I thought this was a true-blue documentary about murders I didn't know about. Furthermore, the 'actors' in the movie gave no sense to me that they were reading off of a script or knew before hand what they were about to say. In fact, the lack of standard acting techniques worked wonders, and gave this film a better sense of being real. After watching the whole movie, I went back and watched again to see what I had missed about this movie. Going through it again, I could see obvious signs I had missed before that this was fiction and not real (newspaper clippings for example). And, seeing how I was so easily lulled into believing this was real, I really truely found respect in what the creators were talking about how media perception affects popular opinion. In fact, it's ironic that this movie talks about the same thing that happened to many people later on who believed this movie's controversial counterpart, The Blair Witch Project, was real. Either way, it IS a low-budget movie and one that has real merit and a good format for what it cost. The directors should be praised that they were able to do so much with so little and make a convincing and, well 'cool' movie that makes a good point about modern technology.

This movie was an incredible disappointment. After reading numerous reviews portraying this movie to be considerably better than Blair Witch Project, I was quite excited. The Last Broadcast turned out to be nothing more than a low-grade psychological thriller. The makers of Blair Witch Project clearly took notes and improved this entire documentary concept by actually injecting an element on the supernatural. Not only did The Last Broadcast fail to deliver any chills or creepy moments, but it gave virtually no historical background to the story of the Jersey Devil. Furthermore, at no point in the movie was there ever a slice of information which eluded to anything other than human foul play.

I feel bad even mentioning The Blair Witch Project in my review, because its an insult to compare the two. Hell, it doesnt even compare to Blair Witch 2. I gave this movie 2 stars merely for the fact that its an indie film.

This film started out interstingly dull...but as it proceeded, the slow building creepiness got under my skin. I couldn't stop watching. You can see alot of where The Blair Witch Project got it's ideas. Some of the scenes and lines are almost identical. Where The Blair Witch ended in a high pitch terror that made me afraid of the woods for months, The Last Broadcast created a more subtle, more "real" creepiness about the media, and, just who killers just might be..........

The twist at the end is filmed different from the rest of the movie and that does take something away...but the underlying creepiness is there until the end. I hightly recccomend this low budget wonder.

The Last Broadcast (Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, 1998)

The Last Broadcast would probably have slipped into obscurity were it not widely considered the film that inspired The Blair Witch Project. Like the erroneous comparisons that remain between The Sixth Sense and The Others, the two films share surface similarities, but the mechanisms that drive each are different. Unfortunately, like The Others (one of the best films of 2001), The Last Broadcast universally suffers in comparison on the surface level, but has much more working beneath the surface. Once again, my hypothesis that subtlety is wasted on the masses rears its ugly head.

The Last Broadcast is a documentary being put together by David Leigh (David Beard, last seen in Strange Brew, who also narrated Avalos and Weiler's "The True Legend of the Jersey Devil") about the 1996 Jersey Devil Murders, in which two hosts of a bad local cable show, Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler (played by Avalos and Weiler), hire two South Jersey locals, soundman Rein Clackin (Rein Clabbers) and guide/psychic Jim Suerd (Jim Seward; you can see where they went with the names, yes?) to take them into the Jersey Pine Barrens in search of the legendary Jersey Devil. Suerd emerges from the Pine Barrens a few days later alone; Wheeler and Clackin's bodies are soon recovered, while Avkast's remains are only large sprays of blood on the snow. Filmaker Leigh is convinced of Suerd's innocence, and sets out making The Last Broadcast to prove this.

Okay, you see the parallels with the Blair Witch Project. A fictional tale (though the legend of the Jersey Devil really does exist, unlike that of the Blair Witch) being presented in a mockumentary, with lots of supposedly live candid footage. Somehow, though, I missed all the stuff in BWP about the aftermath, and how it led to the making of the film-outside-the-film. That alone should still film-to-film comparisons (though piece-to-piece are still warranted), not that it ever does. In order to appreciate The Last Broadcast for what it is, it must be taken on its own merits.

And it does have many merits. If you tuned in halfway through, you'd believe you were watching Forensic Files on CourtTV rather than a mystery film. The documentary atmosphere here is spot-on. In the latter half of the film, when Leigh hires a professional film restorer (Michelle Pulaski) to reconstruct a destroyed videocassette, there were times when _I_ thought I was watching Forensic Files (and I knew I was watching a mystery film). It's all quite wonderfully constructed (and perhaps better compared to the hour-long Blair Witch Project documentary special that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel before the film's release; it has a whole lot more in common with the latter half of The Last Broadcast than BWP ever did).

Where the film may go wrong, though, is in the last ten minutes. The jury's still out on this. I've read reviews both praising and criticizing the ending, though far more of the latter. I waffle between thinking it destroys the tone of the film and puts a decent ironic cap on it; I think the main problem is that it feels like it should have been a piece of a different film. But it is a piece of a different effective, very eerie film.

Enjoyable on many levels. Even if you didn't like the Blair Witch Project, don't let the comparisons put you off; this is worth seeing. ****

What a peculiar film. There are a lot of good ideas here, both in the story and the execution, but the final product seems awkward. For one thing, there are long periods where you can almost see the filmmakers struggling mightily to stretch the story to approximately "feature length" - just shy of 90 minutes. I'm sure they sought to build suspense with their slow pacing, but they ended up retreading the same ground too many times. This is a horror movie which presents itself as a documentary. Alas, even if it were true, it would be a rather badly organized documentary. I hate to be hypercritical, (because I've dabbled with some video editing myself) but I think that the film would be greatly improved if it were trimmed to a 20-30 minute "60 minutes" style news segment. With faster pacing and a more well-organized narrative, I believe this story could be quite chilling and compelling.

The film makes extensive use of "candid interviews" of characters involved with the deaths at the heart of the story. This becomes tiresome by the end; the narration smoothly introduces the characters and explains their involvement -- and then the characters haltingly introduce themselves and explain their involvement a second time. Toward the end, when suspense is supposed to be building, these nonchalant segments disrupt the mood. Furthermore, with few exceptions, most of the participants seem entirely too jolly, considering they are supposed to be discussing the murders of several people they knew well.

The ending is jarring, not only because it is horriffic and unexpected, but because it breaks the documentary format and ventures briefly into the more traditional '3rd person omniscient' perspective. This effectively removes any doubts as to whether the film is a "real" documentary (I can't really explain more without giving it all away).

I can't fault the filmmakers for effort or enthusiasm, but this film plays like a very rough "first cut".

This film creeped me out much more that Blair Witch Project. I watched BWP and my thoughts were, "What's the big deal?" (I also have a review of BWP here as well). "The Last Broadcast" takes a little while to get into, after the character set-ups, police interviews about Jim Seward, etc. but then it gets more interesting when they begin to show the "actual" documentary video of the guys going into the Pine Barrens. The scare factor increases in the last 20 minutes of the film when the video technician puts together the pieces of ravaged video that shows up mysteriously after the murders, which may shed more light on what happened that night in the Pine Barrens. The twist ending of this film is very strange and quite unexpected, so for this I consider "The Last Broadcast" much more satisfying than BWP. Another thing I appreciated about this film when compared to BWP was the fact they could make this film without all the profanities so prominent in BWP. If you liked Blair Witch Project, you'll probably like "The Last Broadcast" even better, but if you didn't care for BWP, you probably WILL like "The Last Broadcast"- it's a creepier and better-made film and I think it will get it's due as a cult classic in years to come.

I read an article about this film in late 1997 in VideomakerMagazine. I was interested in seeing it, but was not able to untilits release on video. I rented it, and I must say... BRAVO! Iwatched it a few times, and showed it to a few friends and family. They all loved it. Being a screenwriter/filmmaker myself, I found the plot to be very interesting. ... Now remember this is a "documentary". Some people with "disturbed" minds (Such as the Seward character) act strangely, as though they are trying to act that way. Some disturbed people can seem as though they are bad actors...even in real life. It was a great movie, and I highly recommend it. I still can't tell if I like the Blair Witch better or not. I liked them both... each with their own unique characteristics and styles.