THE LAST BROADCAST (1998)
Blogtober Qualifications: Folklore, found footage, murders, a budget of $900
Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler were the hosts of a local cable access show in New Jersey, "Fact or Fiction." In December of 1995 they, along with sound man Rein Clackin and local psychic Jim Suerd, planned a live telecast from the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Ostensibly little more than a ratings stunt, the objective of the trip is to hunt down the notorious "Jersey Devil." Instead, only Jim Suerd is ever seen alive again.
The remnants of the bodies of two of the other men are soon found, and Suerd is summarily tried and convicted of their murder. But what really happened?
The Last Broadcast is a documentary by filmmaker David Leigh. With the help of previously unseen video footage, Leigh attempts to uncover the truth about what, if anything, the intrepid men actually discovered... and what let to their deaths.
*Spoiler warning just in case. If you don't want to know anything more, go watch the documentary
Good? Okay.*
Okay, so it's not actually a documentary, it's an independent film. It is, however, one of the very first films in the found footage genre. It predates The Blair Witch Project by almost a full year, and I'd be amazed if the former weren't at least a partial influence on the latter. But how is it?
Well, I'm actually really mixed on it. I'll talk about positives for now, though.
I've decided not to name any actors to preserve the mystique, but it's just as well. I won't be talking about anyone's acting or how well they do, since, honestly, the whole thing is pretty convincing. I went into it knowing full well that it was all staged, and yet I still felt myself buying into the presentation.
Everything is awkward and uncomfortable in a perfectly 90s way, and the voice of the narrator (David Leigh, the in-universe "filmmaker") is perfect for what they're trying to accomplish. It's the exact right type of monotone. The movie is, in a lot of ways, ahead of its time, almost predicting the existence of things like Making A Murderer.
So yeah, it had my complete attention, and I was really intrigued to see what the conclusion would be. With about fifteen minutes left to go, I had to pause the movie and go pick up my wife from the bus stop.
When I came back, everything had changed.
*MASSIVE ENDING SPOILER. SERIOUSLY, I'LL BE TALKING ABOUT THE ENDING IN DETAIL. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.*
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Okay, so in the last 10 minutes or so, the whole movie changes. All through the movie, we've been cutting back to this woman by the name of Michelle Monarch. She's a data retrieval specialist, and her job through the whole thing has been to clean up the footage that was lost. There's a lot of build-up over this one frame of the film that will show who (or what) the real killer is, and...
It turns out it's the narrator. David Leigh, the guy making the documentary, was the murderer, and this one frame of film shows a clear view of his face. We then completely stop the found footage approach and change to a (more or less) traditional filming method, showing David killing Michelle and driving her body out to the Pine Barrens to bury it. This is interspersed with scenes of him filming himself for the documentary, scenes we had seen earlier in the movie, but now we're seeing them from a third-person perspective, and we can see the true, sinister goings-on.
This is so stupid.
Now, I'm not necessarily against the twist itself, although it is extremely contrived. My problem is more in the execution. I don't care how great your twist is (though again, this one isn't). If you have to completely change everything about how your movie is presented just to feature the twist don't do it! If you're such a great filmmaker/storyteller, come up with a better way to show off the twist. There are so many ways it could have been done that didn't completely sacrifice the documentary nature of the movie.
So essentially what we have is 75 minutes or so of a really engaging faux-documentary, followed by 15 minutes of a poorly-shot movie, just because the filmmakers thought it would be a clever twist. It doesn't work. Put it in a different context. Imagine that you're making a movie, and, for stylistic reasons, you film in in black and white. Then, in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, when some big reveal is made, you switched it to color for no reason except that the twist is happening you guys! Ironically, you could make an argument that the sudden colorization represents the truth being seen clearly for the first time. And you would, because you're an indie filmmaker and you think you're clever.
And I think that's the biggest problem here, because I get the feeling like the filmmakers were trying to make a statement, something along the lines of "you can't trust the media" or "you can't trust technology," or both. It's clear they felt you can't trust something, but the message falls flat. So, in actuality, instead of a stupid ending because that's all they could think of, you have a stupid ending in the interest of cynical, paranoid fearmongering.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should blindly trust anything, a certain degree of skepticism is required to get by in the modern age. But this is just silly. I know it's 1998 and the internet was still kind of new, but the level to which they vilify it is just ridiculous. Five years after this movie came out, I would meet the woman who would become my wife, online. Sure, ours isn't exactly a standard case, but imagine how different (and how much unhappier) my life would be if I had seen this movie and listened to it.
All that having been said, I feel like the movie is still worth seeing, bad ending and all. Up to the point where the style changes, it's an engaging mystery tale, and I could honestly see myself watching it again, up to that point.
In the interest of being fair, the scene in which David kills Michelle by asphyxiation is extremely uncomfortable, and I was worried she was actually dying. That's some pretty effective work right there.
It's just too bad they had to break the movie to show it.
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*SPOILERS END HERE*
Tomorrow we hop back to the 1940s for some old-school Universal monster fun. Unfortunately, it isn't one of the classics. We'll see how that goes.
Until next time!
Current interests:
Listening - Elton John: Greatest Hits 1970-2002
Playing - Banjo-Kazooie (1998)
Reading - B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Exorcist (2016)
Watching - Thunderbirds Are Go! (2015)
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