BlairWitchProject Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Despite having previously established my feelings about this weekend's Quarantine, I must confess a new willingness to give it a fair shot later tonight. Regardless, this week's Cinematical Seven is all about first-person horror movies, with a couple of oh-so-subjective stipulations:

• We're leaving The Blair Witch Project (1999) out of this. It might not have been the first of these movies, but it was undeniably the most successful and influential. There are only seven slots here, and I feel like everyone has already made clear whether they find this scary or just stupid (I fall in the former grouping, though I say this having not seen the flick since my teens). If you still feel the need to take BWP to task, comment away.
• Also omitted will be The Last Broadcast (1998), which drew mild controversy at the time of its release for its similarity to Blair Witch. I'm only not writing about it because the copy of it sitting just over on my shelf here has remained unwatched. My bad.
• The previous film by the guys behind Quarantine is The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), which -- being in the hands of the Weinsteins -- has not yet seen the light of day beyond a couple of festivals. Having not attended any of said festivals myself, I'll just sit here and guess that it'll get dumped to DVD (probably under the Dimension Extreme label), and not any earlier than next year at that.

Now, on with the list...

Continuing along with our pre-coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, above is the trailer for The Objective; directed by Daniel Myrick (co-director of The Blair Witch Project). This one has a very strange vibe to it; it's set in Afghanistan three days after 9/11 and it revolves around a group of Special-Ops soldiers and one reporter on a mission for Al Qaeda weapons when they "find themselves lost in a Middle Eastern 'Bermuda Triangle' of Ancient Evil," so says the synopsis on YouTube. From the looks of the trailer, it has a Predator meets Blair Witch Project in Afghanistan feel -- which, honestly, is pretty damn cool. Karina over at Spout says, "... it looks like Myrick has dropped the shaky-cam, subjects-as-spectactors-as-hunted faux-documentary thing in favor of stable cameras and polished HD." No snot or motion sickness? We're SO there!

For more on The Objective, check out the film's official Tribeca Fest page.

As usual, I'm late in the game as far as new releases are concerned. I haven't yet seen Transformers -- actually I had almost planned on skipping it. And so, therefore, I didn't see the new teaser trailer for 'Cloverfield', the super secret J.J. Abrams-produced disaster pic. I also missed the trailer while it was available on YouTube. Finally, I caught the thing on another site, which I won't name because it probably won't be there after I write this anyway. Besides, the videotaped copy of the teaser I saw was so bad that I'm not sure I'm any better off than I was before seeing it. Since I never understand viral marketing, I'm not even going to attempt to follow this, but since Erik already summarized it, I thankfully don't need to. Instead, I'm playing it easy and just reading what The Hollywood Reporter has to tell us about the movie.

First off, I now understand that this is a monster movie set in New York City and it is only through the eyes of a small group of friends. Also we now have official word on the cast, who were hired under such secrecy that neither they nor their agents ever saw a script before signing on. The actors are mostly unknowns with short resumes, including Michael Stahl-David (NBC's The Black Donnellys), Odet Jasmin, Mike Vogel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake)and Lizzie Caplan (Mean Girls). THR also clears up what I just saw in the trailer, since I couldn't tell what was going on. Of course, our own Scott Weinberg gave us that info last week. So, if you don't want to see Transformers, but are curious, here are the contents of the teaser. Scott calls it The Blair Witch Project meets the Godzilla remake, while THR calls it Armageddon meets The Blair Witch Project. I didn't like any of those movies, but as a big fan of Abrams' television and movie work, I'm really excited about Cloverfield, or whatever it will actually be called. The movie, written by Drew Goddard and directed by Matt Reeves arrives in theaters in January.

I know it's probably considered "corny" to still be a big fan of The Blair Witch Project, but I don't care: I still think it's a pretty excellent horror film. Definitely not a flick with a lot of "replay value," but it's a pretty effective little micro-budget chiller anyway. I couldn't care less about the old marketing campaign or the "shaky cam" presentation; the movie just works for me. Having said that, I'm also of the opinion that the sequel (Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2) was a certifiable junk-pile that actually made me want to kick someone.

So I don't exactly know how to feel about BWP co-director Daniel Myrick's plans for a new prequel. The property is now a Lionsgate asset, which means they'd have to want another Blair Witch flick, but Mr. Myrick does have some ideas in mind. Here's what he told Bloody-Disgusting.com from the set of his Believers: "Well, our idea for the prequel isn't realizing any manifestation of the witch itself, it just delves into the mythology of the witch itself. How the legend got started, and arguably whether it was true or not ... I think it's important to always maintain that ambiguity, whether the legend is a supernatural force in the woods, or if it is all in people's minds. I think most boogeymen are just that, a little bit of both."

It doesn't look like Lionsgate is really interested in mounting a Blair Witch prequel, but hey, they release a whole lot of direct-to-video garbage, so maybe a small investment on Myrick's idea isn't such a rotten idea. (It couldn't be worse than Book of Shadows. Seriously.) The other BWP co-director, Eduardo Sanchez, recently helmed a flick called Altered that's presently sitting on the DVD shelves.

For better or worse, I have had some experience in the "ultra-low budget" filmmaking world. So, it has fallen to me to create this particular list of the seven best films of that class. Before I go on, let us first define what exactly qualifies a film as "ultra-low budget." If we were to follow the Screen Actors Guild definitions for these things, then "low budget" films have a budget of less that $2.5 million, all the way down to $625,000. Really, I don't think that's exactly right for our purposes here. We're really talking about "ultra-low budget" films -- not "low budget" -- so how do we define the category? Some might consider a film "ultra-low budget" if its made in Des Monies by a teenager and some friends with a video camera and a credit card. That's certainly one way to look at it, but I feel that definition might limit us a little too much.

For our purposes, I'm going to consider films made for a million dollars or less to be "ultra-low budget." That way, we can have a much larger set of films from which to choose. By Hollywood standards, where the average "studio" movie costs over $60 million, a film made for a million dollars or less really should be considered "ultra-low budget." Heck, the catering budget of the average studio film is probably more than the total budgets of the films on this list. You know those big stars, they really love to eat. Anyway, moving on. Here is my list of the best "ultra low-budget" films -- in order of release. Enjoy.


THX 1138 (1971) -- George Lucas' first feature foray into sci-fi -- a genre that would, in a few short years, make him one of the most famous and successful filmmakers of all time. It's a rather dark and depressing tale of survival and forbidden love in a dystopian future city, with the lives of the city's inhabitants being closely regulated and medicated and with love and procreation strictly controlled and monitored by the state. The film, which is a more elaborate and elongated version of a Lucas' short film Electronic Labyrinth 1138 4EB, was shot in and around San Francisco and became notable for its use of the new, state-of-the-art BART system to help depict the city of the future.

Also notable is Lucas' use of students and military personnel -- who were learning filmmaking from Lucas at the time -- as crew and extras, and the elaborate use of sound and sound effects which would become a Lucas mainstay going forward. It's also notable that the actors, including Robert Duvall, had to shave their heads to better depict Lucas' vision of a future nearly devoid of hope. Finally, I really love the smoothly polished killer police robots -- a great contrast to Lucas' depiction of robots in subsequent films like Star Wars.

I wasn't even aware that the rights to Terminator 2: Judgment Day were owned by Lionsgate Films, but as of today the film is available on iTunes. Yes, that is right, Lionsgate titles are now offered through Apple's download store, almost six months after the studio had originally thought they would be. Back in September, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer announced to investors the deal to release movies through iTunes -- one of the first leaks that iTunes would definitely sell movies, in fact. But then a few weeks later Apple's movie store opened with no Lionsgate titles included, and no word on when they would be available.

I have a feeling that Lionsgate was finally clear to deal with Apple once Wal-Mart announced its own movie download service. Now iTunes has about 400 movies, which is still a lot less than Wal-Mart's 1,000. Some of the additions today include Total Recall, The Blair Witch Project, Dirty Dancing and Monster's Ball (which I bet is great for watching on public transportation). Hopefully, we'll hear from other studios soon. Next, likely, will be an announcement from 20th Century Fox since it was once thought it would be the first non-Disney studio to sign on.