No. 0: It was awful, excruciatingly bad, I can’t believe I paid to watch this crap.
I could never take this film seriously.
“How would we have, like, just… made a campsite in the middle of three piles of rocks, just by coincidence?” - Heather
“You’re right. No human being would stack books like this” - Dr. Peter Venkman
i loved this movie. some people don’t like psychological thrillers, i get it – but i found it definitely chilling. my husband was working in that area of maryland at the time, and he brought me back a t-shirt from burkittsville. i still have it, somewhere.
I thought it was brilliant. It might have lost its spark of originality in 2015, now that we’ve had a glut of found-footage thrillers, but they took a simple idea and did terrific things with it. I’d never think a little ball of dirt and teeth or a guy standing in the corner of a basement would scare the bejeezus out of me, but it worked.
When I watched it, I was about to take off with a friend on a 5-day-long retreat. We ate hot dogs from the theater, and quickly got sick. I couldn’t look up at the screen for more than a few seconds at a time or I’d get really queasy, so I didn’t actually see most of the movie.
Partway through the movie, she got up and vomited into a trash can. I did not. I was ill for most of the retreat and she wasn’t.
Later I bought the movie on VHS from a discount bin. I never even got around to unwrapping the plastic from it.
I really liked the idea of the film and I’m glad something a little unusual was so successful. But I couldn’t watch the scenes that weren’t shot on the (16mm?) B&W film without feeling like I was going to throw up. Can’t do shaky camera at the cinema. That’s why I didn’t go and see Cloverfield when that came out.
Cloverfield was a little bit rough – I had to look away a few times, but not constantly. Though a lack of food poisoning probably helped there.
I hadn’t planned to see Cloverfield, but went out to dinner with my spouse and we wound up running into my boss at the restaurant and he had extra tickets.
That’s why I didn’t see either of these in the theater. In fact, I still haven’t seen either of these, though I mean to do so, some day. I keep forgetting.
The list of facts explain a lot. For instance, there was no real script, which is why almost all the dialogue consists of the same three lines, over and over:
“What the fuck?”
“Josh!”
“I’m so scared.”
My experience of the movie, and what I’ve heard a lot of other people say, is that the first time I watched it, I was constantly tense, expecting something to happen, but on a second viewing, I just kept laughing, because I knew nothing was ever going to happen.
Biggest ripoff ever.
Why on Earth did you watch it twice?
The regional director of Loews Cineplex Entertainment estimated that, on average, one person per screening got sick and asked for a refund.
Damn, I wish 16-years-ago me knew that was possible. I ended up walking out not long after they entered the house.
I’d happily watch it twice, or many times. It’s a stone cold classic.
I always forget that it’s not cool to like popular movies, though. Drat!
It was cheap and largely improvised and doesn’t make any actual sense, I know, but when I first hired it on DVD I watched it three times over. It got into my head that weekend.
I worked for me for some reason.
I loved that it made so much money on such a small budget. I hated the influence it had. It even jumped genres to ruin Europa Report.
That’s what I kept asking myself.
I’m convinced the degree to which this film scared the hell out of people comes down to 2 things:
- How personally familiar you are with spending time in a rural/woodland setting, away from human habitation (doubly so if you’ve spent a lot of time in the woods at night)…
- How active your imagination is (i.e. how well and readily it fills in the gaps).
I saw it in the theater shortly after it came out, and that was one of the most terrifying nights of my life. Never watched it again.
Conversely, when I first saw it, I thought it was ok, but nowhere near as great as the hype. Decided to give it another shot at the dollar theatre (I miss those) and appreciated it a bit more, thought it was pretty good. A few years later, I got it from the library, by which time it moved up to very good. A few more years later, watched it for a film class, and decided that, although not without flaws, it’s reasonably great. I figure I need to give it two or three more viewings before I decide it’s the greatest movie of all time and space.
Everyone complaining about it? I want you to sit down and mull over this very important fact: The guys who made it watched nineteen hours of it and trimmed it down to 90 minutes.
Nineteen hours. How horrifying is that? Nine-teen. Bless their hearts.
