I loved "The Blair Witch Project" so when I started to hear shite around the campfire that it might have ripped off "The Last Broadcast", I decided to check out the latter for myself. What I found was that both films sport phony footage that passes itself off for the real deal, some of the plot conventions are similar (but handled quite differently) and yes, they both name a shady legend but that’s pretty much where the similarities begun and ended.

For starters, where "The Blair Witch Project" took us into the heat of the action by putting our silly asses in the characters' shoes, "The Last Broadcast" runs in the opposite direction and is presented in documentary format 98 percent of its running time (except for the crappy ending, more on that later). Now I must give props to the creators for making it all look somewhat genuine. Apart from the occasional lousy bit of acting, I bought that what I was seeing was a real documentary. Unfortunately, as a rule, I usually don’t really care for documentaries and had a hard time giving two shites about what was going down. The flick tosses all kinds of facts, fake testimonies and interviews our way while exploring every avenue to determine if the only survivor of the expedition is the culprit or not. And that’s it! That’s what we get for an hour and a freaking half. Hello??? Anybody home??? I thought this was a horror movie not “Unsolved fucking Mysteries”!!! At least if the film would’ve explored any of its characters at a satisfactory length, it could’ve been bearable, but alas that doesn’t happen either and in consequence, I felt totally detached from what I was witnessing. 

Now you would think that a flick dealing with the Jersey Devil might have a set of balls and address it, right? NO DICE! Where the BWP actually used its legend in its narrative, "The Last Broadcast" barely mentions the Jersey Devil, yet alone go into the possibilities that the beast might be the guilty party. There are no hints of the supernatural here and that really pissed me off. What’s the point of slapping a legend into the mix if you’re not going to do squat with it? COME ON! WORK WITH ME HERE! They could’ve been looking for Captain Crunch and it wouldn’t have made a damn difference to this movie’s storyline.

And then there’s the trivial and anti-climatic ending that wound up enraging me even further. For some odd reason, the filmmakers not only decided to give us a "left field" guilty party to the murders (I’m still dying to know what the motive was) but they also totally drop the documentary format they were working with and play the cap off like a real film instead. As I was witnessing the finale, I kept asking myself…who’s filming this??? How can they have this on tape, he/she is alone!!!! If you’re going to set up rules throughout your film, don’t break them in the end and think that it's clever! IT ISN’T! They sold the movie out with that finale and in the process, negated everything that preceded it. Once the credits rolled, I kept asking myself: why did I sit through this again? What was the point? I still don’t know.

If you stay with the end credits until the very end, you’ll read: "The story and characters depicted in this movie are entirely fictitious. But please don't tell anyone."

I guess I just told…darn it!

"The Last Broadcast" became the first feature-length motion picture to ever attain theatrical distribution without having been transferred to film. The movie was made on video for $900.