THE LAST BROADCAST
Worst ending ever?  Maybe.

  Whoa - over a quarter century without, and now I have two actual nightmares within about a month of each other.  Sure, this one was only about five seconds long and wasn't overtly menacing, but this isn't fun anymore.

Finally got me a membership at the 14th Street Rogers', don't know why I took so long.  That chain's a bit of a pain because depending on the store, you might have to start up a brand new membership for each store.  I was going to rent me a stack, but I decided on a "new" release, well, new to that store, I guess.

This is the movie that many people were accusing the makers of The Blair Witch Project of ripping off.  While I do admit that BWP is easily the most frightening movie I ever saw for the first time as an adult, it was kinda disheartening to hear that the movie I so admire would be such a blatant ripoff of another, even smaller-budgeted small-fry of a movie.  Watching this movie, I can see the point of these claims (I haven't heard what BWP's makers have to say about them), but rest easily assured that of the two, BWP was by far the more effective film, and even if we grant that it's a ripoff (which I don't think I quite would), it does what we should hope a good ripoff does: rip off things that for whatever reason didn't work in the first place, and make them work.

That's not to say that The Last Broadcast is a bad little movie, it isn't.  I was actually about to recommend it.  But it's got one of the most pathetic endings I've ever seen, the kind which really blows off at the knees any hope of any lingering effectiveness.  Other than that, we had a pretty good, though not great, creepy movie here.

TLB is basically a mockumentary, as a filmmaker (David Beard) explores the conviction of one young man for the murder of three others in the New Jersey woods.  The young man had been called upon by two hosts of a looooow-budget cable show called "Fact Or Fiction" to use his psychic powers to lead them to the "Jersey Devil" on live TV (and internet broadcast).  I have absolutely no idea if there is actually some Jersey Devil in New Jersey folklore, but it nevertheless brings to mind hysterical images of hockey players skulking through the woods.  Also along for the trip is "a soundman who has the ability to record sounds from other worlds" (huh?).  Only psychic-boy came out alive, and he was quickly convicted of murder thanks to evidence such as blood on his clothes and of course the videotape.  The filmmaker is not convinced of psychic-boy's guilt, and tries to establish the possibility of another perpetrator.

For all of its low budget, TLB is actually a lot flashier than BWP, using news broadcasts, interviews, sound FX, visual effects (where's that "morph" at the end I'd heard so much awful things about?) and narration to get its point across.  And moreso than with BWP, people could hardly be blamed for believing for most of its running length that this really happened, that this is a real documentary we're watching.  The documentary construction, however, erodes its effectiveness for those of us who know it's fiction, because it eats at any sense of urgency or tension that can be built.  By far, the best scenes are from the videotape footage (except for one guy's amusingly unconvincing, oft-repeated temper tantrum), but there's only about twenty minutes of it.  There are parts where I found myself a little creeped out, but to be honest, I had no idea why.  Getting to bed that night, I found myself haunted...by images from BWP, a movie I haven't seen in about eight months.

Another major problem I had here was the total lack of any look into the myth of the "Jersey Devil".  Like I said, I don't know if there is actually some creature like this in New Jersey folklore, and it would've been nice if the movie had bothered to let me know that, even just by saying that the creature came before the hockey team.  For most of the film, viewers might have a faint wonder if the Jersey Devil committed the murders, but it's not a very unsettling suspicion when all we can attach to it is its name.

Still, it was kind of spooky, just enough that I was going to recommend it.  Was.  Then that ending came along; on top of resolving the whodunnit in pretty silly, wholly ineffective fashion (a big roll of the eyes is called for), it committed a bizarre, illusion-smashing mistake: the movie actually stopped being a mockumentary and became outright narrative fiction.  I'm sure this seemed very clever to the filmmakers (Stefan Avalos & Lance Weiler) at the time; breaking the "rules" is all well and good in the pursuit of making a movie better.  But I'm not alone in saying this was one of the worst endings I've ever seen; I don't think I've ever even heard of someone who liked this ending.

Yep, if it weren't for that ending, I would've recommended this to you.  As it is, nope; proceed with caution.  I gah-ron-tee you'll want to throw your remote control at the TV by the time this movie's over.

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