Y2KRAP
Why Battlefield Earth, Blair Witch 2 and all those Mars movies make 2000 a year to forget.
      by Sarah Kendzior

It didn't really hit me until The St. Francisville Experiment. Granted, there had been warning signs -- Supernova, Scream 3, Mission to Mars -- but for me to reach the conclusions I have, I really must be brought to new lows. As 11th Hour readers know, when it comes to horror movies, my taste tends to be, shall we say, "generous" (or, as some say, "bad" -- see reviews of End of Days, Deep Blue Sea, The 13th Warrior, etc). I've got a tolerance for crap floored by a lifetime of movies bearing the phrase "Part 3" or even "Part 6" in their title; I worship Starship Troopers; I dig stuff that explodes and just last weekend I cheered for Pacey every step of the way in The Skulls. Like any proponent of the People's and Corporate Champion, I heartily embrace the casting of The Rock in The Mummy 2. As you may have concluded, by the standards of the general public, I am not exactly a picky girl.

"Whoa! Like, all of these new movies blow!"

But even I have my limits.

After enduring an advance screening of The St. Francisville Experiment, I honestly believe I will never again feel so great a degree of repugnance over a cinematic product. An unabashed ripoff of The Blair Witch Project in structure and premise, The St. Francisville Experiment, which opens this September, is simply the most shameless, heartless and ineptly created film that I've ever seen. Now this in itself isn't so bad -- well, alright, it is, but it really isn't so surprising, right? After all, these kind of blatant yet "coincidental" ripoffs happen all the time. Even Blair itself was stolen largely from a 1998 independent film called The Last Broadcast. Theft is Hollywood, even in if 1999 it seemed to have been drowned out, at least slightly, by those strange beasts of imagination, talent and innovation.

But I'll get to that later.

The thing is, I can handle a bad movie. If it's an honestly bad, endearingly pathetic movie like The Skulls or End of Days, I can enjoy it, even come to love it, and may well buy it on video on the day of its arrival. (But don't tell anyone that.) What I can't accept is, well, this:

"The St. Francisville Experiment is their footage, their story. A ghost hunt captured on film by the real participants, The St. Francisville Experiment continues the cinema revolution, the democratization of the filmmaking process, and, unlike all other supernatural thrillers and horror films to date, takes viewers on a ride they have never before experienced, because this time it's real!"

Press notes are a strange thing. In my experience, you can generally tell if a movie is going to blow by the sheer amount of enthusiasm contained within the opening pages. The quality of a movie tends to exist at an inverse ratio to the exuberance expressed for the project; the opening page of The Matrix notes, for example, give a mere plot synopsis. And the greatest leap of faith my notes for Pitch Black make is the insinuation, "Are you afraid of the dark? You will be." Fair enough. My theory is again proven with St. Francisville, whose production notes contain the most joyous, gleeful praise I've ever seen leveled at a movie that was not an Episode 1 review from TheForce.net.

I know that the idea here is to promote moviemaking, not truth. I get that I'm supposed to take these things about as seriously as an infomercial or a Presidential oath, but... still. "Unlike all other supernatural thrillers and horror films to date" -- that is quite a claim. Unlike them how, being that the plot is exactly like another movie? (A movie with a very specific formula, at that.) And this "democratization of the filmmaking process" -- really, what does that mean? That any asshole can pick up a camera and make a movie (which they can) and that, now, a studio will buy it (which, with the exception of Jan de Bont and Joel Schumacher, really didn't happen that often) and we should hail it as a positive revolution? I'm all for the democratization of the media -- most 21-year-olds with editor-in-chief positions tend to feel that way -- but there's a difference between populism and the perpetuation of rampant idiocy. Or at least I used to think so.

Jar Jar: A necessary evil.

In 1999, there were two great forces which affected how movies were conceived, not only in the scifi/horror world but in the entertainment industry overall. The first force was, of course, The Force, otherwise known as Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace. The second force was The Blair Witch Project, the Little Independent That Could (suck, some say), and together these films performed a valuable service to the genre industry. They allowed the really good movies to get through.

As Obi-Wan would have likely said had he met Lord Acton (which is, I guess, rather unlikely), "Lucas corrupts, and absolute Lucas corrupts absolutely." But in an already corrupt industry, Absolute Lucas is a positive thing. It doesn't take a Jedi Council member to figure out just how damn good the Star Wars dictatorship was for the movie business. When that opening date for Episode 1 was announced, Hollywood had two reactions: defeat and denial. Both of these turned out to be wise. Defeat -- the acknowledgement that, no matter how slick, cool and trendy your movie is, it will never top some guy with horns and a double-bladed lightsaber, so might as well pack it in now -- likely led to the utterly bizarre Being John Malkovich and unconventional Sixth Sense given studio release. Denial -- the thought that maybe, just maybe, your movie will be as cool as Star Wars... nah -- likely led to The Matrix, which was about a zillion times cooler than Star Wars, and an Oscar winner to boot. It would seem that The Matrix would be an obvious box office success, but I'll never forget seeing superslick producer Joel Silver, at an early screening of the film, express his worry over the impending release of The Phantom Menace. Darth Lucas scared everyone, but it really turned out well for us plebeian freaks at the Cantina. What a cool year.

"But it was fun when we were ripping them off!"

The other major force, albeit to a much lesser degree, was The Blair Witch Project. On the surface, this film would seem about as different from Phantom Menace as possible (although Heather and Jar Jar share the dubious distinction of being two of the most loathed characters in film history), but these are two of a kind. It was all about marketing. Blair Witch proved that the little guy had a chance. Granted, it was not the independent, heartfelt masterwork some proclaimed it to be (in retrospect, filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez come off more as some 21st-century P.T. Barnum), but if this movie could make it into wide release and break $100 million, well... it seemed that maybe studios wouldn't condescend to their audiences quite so much. They knew we wanted to see something different, that we were open to new ideas and unconventional styles. This was particularly true in the areas of sci fi and horror, which enjoyed a renaissance in terms of both popularity and quality, and, with Blair, Phantom Menace, Sixth Sense, Matrix, Sleepy Hollow and others, seemed to dominate the year as a whole.

All of which brings me to my question -- now where the hell did The St. Francisville Experiment come from? And after this incredible, landmark year, how is it that nearly every genre film of the year 2000 looks so... bad? Where did we -- or they, really, since we're the hapless victims here -- go so very, very wrong?

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