The Last Broadcast (1998)

Finally! After all these years, there now exists an all-region Blu-ray of the cult horror flick The Last Broadcast, a film which is generally considered one the very earliest found footage horror films. Coming out just before The Blair Witch Project would hit the silver screen and wow audiences worldwide, The Last Broadcast is more of a mockumentary than a found footage film, but is notable for technically beating its far more popular contemporary to the punch... iiif you just pretend Cannibal Holocaust doesn't exist, that is. 

Anyway, this film follows the exploits of a couple of goofballs shooting a public access show, hungry for attention. After an anonymous internet user suggests they do a show on the mythical Jersey Devil, our two leads hire a few more tagalongs to help them produce a live broadcast on location from the Jersey Pine Barrens in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the beast. 

Here what we know: the group made it to their destination, and they successfully managed to get a broadcast up and running for a bit. Only thing is, they were never heard from again. Well, except for one of them, Jim Suerd, who despite little evidence, is almost immediately convicted for the three murders once their bodies are found mangled in the snow; everyone besides their leader, Steven Avkast, but investigators did find an awful lot of his blood spilled around the place, so presumably, he's among the dead as well. 

Did Jim Suerd really kill his three peers out in the woods? What happened to Steven Avkast's body? Could there really be a such thing as the Jersey Devil? Here to answer these questions and more: amateur documentary filmmaker David Leigh, baby. With his detective skills and intimate knowledge of the case, all shall be revealed before credits roll. 

Unlike The Blair Witch Project, which could easily trick someone who didn't know much about the film industry and/or laws regarding selling tickets to see a snuff film, The Last Broadcast is much more difficult to suspend your disbelief for. The very serious presentation combined with the absurdly amateurish content being analyzed here with so much gravity is inherently comedic, and the cheap look isn't all on purpose. Fake news clips generally look pretty rough, and faked documents look even worse, with their misspellings, awful formatting, and cheap, aliased fonts. And then there's the found footage itself, which gives off more of a web series vibe ala Everyman HYBRID than anything comparable to the naturalistic and chilling The Blair Witch Project. But then you have the cheap homebrew tape destruction effects. And the uneven performances from just about everyone, both in interviews and during the discovered tapes. Worst of all, it feels like ninety percent of the film is just that: talking heads stuttering, sputtering, er'ing and um'ing, repeating themselves, losing their train of thought, you name it. Some more of the found footage material would have been nice, is all I'm saying. More horror, and tension; less of this awkward filler.

Still, I can't help but find the whole thing quite lovable. It feels like what Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 could have been if it hadn't ended up being simultaneously a soapbox for director Joe Berlinger's and the studio's play-thing once they locked Berlinger out of the editing room.  It does build a compelling mystery, despite its limitations, and there are some very subtle creepy moments here; it's just that many of them don't reveal themselves properly until you've seen the film once already. This is thanks to the film's absolutely bonkers ending, one of the more shocking and memorable endings to any horror film I've seen in a while. It has the potential to feel like something pulled out of someone's ass, but if you go back and pay close attention, the signs are definitely there. And while it doesn't answer every question that the plot ended up raising, it strikes the right balance I think. It leaves you with something to chew on for a while after watching, and I can certainly appreciate that. It's a really great twist, if not something I would necessarily call 'fair play.' The way the film's 'realistic' style disappears in these final scenes suggests the ending was supposed to be so jarring and absurd as to immediately dispel the illusion for anyone who hadn't yet figured out that what they were watching wasn't a real documentary. I find this playing around with the format pretty interesting, even if I can understand why some would find it all rather hard to stomach, especially considering that once the mockumentary framework is taken away, things just end up looking like a TV movie.

Still, while this is nowhere near as influential, convincing, or as frightening as some of the films that would follow in its wake, there's still plenty of room at the table for its amateur charms and shocking twist ending. So while this is not a film for everyone, I can heartily recommend it to anyone with an hour and a half to spare and a love of DIY filmmaking. And a love of twists that are so outrageous that they come back around to being brilliant.