Now that we've had the buzz and the backlash, it seems that an unbiased appraisal of The Blair Witch Project is called for. Called for or not, such an appraisal will not be coming from me. The fact of the matter is that three weeks and three viewings have failed to deflate the throbbing boner I have for this movie. Such being the case, I've decided to leave the cool-eyed analysis to the cool-eyed analysts and instead lay out some of the reasons for my enthusiasm.

1. The story kicks ass. I love a good "lost in the woods" story. I love a good "creepy things going down in the woods" story. A good "lost in the woods in which creepy things are going down" story, then, is stoke city for me.

2. The way the story is told kicks ass. First you get the documentary footage that puts you on more or less the same page as the three kids, then you get taken into the woods with them. While the cameras roll, you see and hear basically the same things the kids do. You are denied the comfort of an objective perspective on the action, instead experiencing it firsthand. As the story progresses, you have your supply of rational explanations and reasons for hope gradually stripped away, while the number of grim possibilities gets ever larger. With each passing night, the freaky goings-on intensify, building up to a climax that positively drips with awfulness. I've talked with people who thought the movie only "got good" in the last half-hour or so, and that it still sucked because "they never showed anything." My response to that is as follows: the "good parts" of the last 30 minutes would not have had any real impact without the groundwork laid by the preceding 60, and to show the witch or whatever for a single second would have eliminated one of the coolest effects that the movie achieves - namely, the lingering willies brought on by never seeing the monster. Once you see the monster - even if the monster is scarier looking than expected - the situation gets less scary because you know what you're dealing with.

3. The characterization kicks ass. I've worked on a few student film projects in my day, and the three main personality types involved in such endeavors (director, artist and craftsman) could not have been more realistically represented.

4. The way the movie was made kicks ass. I love how these guys just ignored convention and told their story in the most effective way possible given their resources. Instead of playing it safe (write a script, get actors to memorize the lines, hire cameramen to shoot the actors as they exchange their memorized lines, and so on), they tried something new. Instead of stringing together a bunch of rehearsed scenes, they did what they could to make the story really happen. The people that the story was happening to recorded it as it was happening, with little or no knowledge of what would happen next (in the interest of ensuring the most authentic possible reactions). While this technique wouldn't work for every film, it was perfect for this one.

5. The ending kicks total ass. In the last fifteen seconds, I went from dread (of seeing Mike's disemboweled body) to relief (at seeing that Mike had not been disemboweled), to bewilderment (wondering why Mike wasn't responding), to flat out full-body goosebumps (as the time bomb planted early in the film suddenly went off), to feeling an awful tingle in the back of my neck, like I was anticipating the drop of a guillotine blade (while waiting for Heather to get nailed). Heather gets nailed, and the movie just ends. A brutally effective conclusion to an altogether merciless piece of filmmaking.