Delayed Reaction: The Last Broadcast

Premise: A horror mockumentary about the mysterious deaths of the hosts of a local public access show.

I'm going to give you a peek behind the curtain for a moment. This is my third time fully writing this damn reaction. My computer has crashed on me two days in a row before I could save this. It's a shame. I really like what I said the first couple times. They were lengthy posts. I'm tired of talking about this movie now. OK, now that I've got my complaining out of the way, here I go.

It must suck to be the guys who made The Last Broadcast. This found footage style movie actually predated The Blair Witch Project by a year. In terms of quality, aspects of the filmmaking are even better than Blair Witch. This movie made only 1/11000th of what Blair Witch made at the box office though, and it's only remembered by people who really dig into horror movies. I feel like it's Oz and Blair Witch is The Sopranos. Oz came first. It really started HBO's fateful shift to prestige dramas, but it was messy and made mistakes. The Sopranos was able to build off what Oz did and became a bonafide hit and cultural touchstone.

This movie is ahead of the curve on a lot of things though. It's technically a mockumentary about found footage, which is almost skipping a step. It's playing with the same idea that Butterfly Kisses does 20 years later; like they were commenting on the found footage genre before it even existed. It's also surprisingly technology-centered. I only sort of remember 1998, but the idea of doing a live internet broadcast and carrying on web chats from the middle of a remote forest sounds like wizardry at that time. I get how someone as advanced as Sandra Bullock in The Net could do that, but some shmucks with a public access show? The possibilities in the internet age really are endless.

Other than some small concerns like not knowing how to convincingly dress a set to look authentic, the biggest issue with the movie is the ending. And that's hard to blame them for. This was a new genre, so they couldn't know the rules yet. They broke the cardinal rule of found footage though: always maintain the format. If it's a found footage movie, it should be found footage the whole time. Instead, The Last Broadcast switches to a third person camera after its big reveal, and it lands with a thud. Suddenly, the movie looks 100x cheaper and is less compelling. And, from a perspective two decades later, it just looks lazy. Like the filmmakers couldn't figure out how to do the twist with found footage, so they just dropped it. This took me out of the movie so much.

A mostly good run with a bad ending is still a pretty good movie in my book though, and this is a nice bit of forgotten horror history too.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend