The Tony Blair Witch Project (2000), by Michael A. Martinez

Since 2009, I've made about a dozen horror movies of various lengths (about thirty minutes to an hour). Some of them are easy for me to appreciate--others are rather embarrassing. Some are neither, or a fusion of both. Apparently there are some bootlegs of them floating around, and I've even found a few reviews, for movies both nostalgic and cringe-worthy. Right now I'm working on something kind of serious (as serious as I get anyway), which will hopefully avoid the blush-worthy category and be legitimately entertaining. I raise this point so that I can talk about my fourth movie, which I called Bigfoot Resurrection. Unlike my past three movies, this one involved quite a few levels of collaboration with people who weren't my immediate family members. I turned to my friends, and together with three people plus my brother and my dad, we made our Sasquatch epic. It was one of those fusion movies, both glorious and shitty. There are a lot of "gags" in it, and some weird tangents. The acting is mercurial. There was no script, except for the fact that we knew he had to have a scene where Bigfoot disembowels me and hangs me with my own intestines.

I can say, despite my mixed thoughts about it, that Bigfoot Resurrection has higher production values that The Tony Blair Witch Project. And, at face value, the latter film is much more meta than the former. And that is why the latter film is so cool to me.

The Tony Blair Witch Project is infamous by way of its placement on the IMDB Bottom 100. I don't entirely know how it ended up there, as I have never located any sort of release for the film. No home video, no theaters, no filmfests. I don't even know how I have my copy--it's an .avi file that just happens to be on my computer, and has been on it for years. CREEPYPASTERS TAKE NOTE. I sincerely doubt that so many people have seen the movie. All the same, I hope a lot of people have seen it. And I hope someone knows something about the production. If you do, please talk to me about it. How was this made, and what happened after?

So basically, Tony Blair and a bunch of other British personages, including film critic Alexander Walker, go to West Virginia in search of the titular Tony Blair Witch. They are played by a bunch of West Virginians wearing masks made of printed-out JPEGs of the faces of these people. The noble Prime Minister also pisses off a bunch of mall employees who may be either awkward friends or terrified/enraged strangers. In any case it is striking, in a slightly squirmy way. They also make fun of Americans basically all the time, calling them faggots 'n' whatnot. This goes on for quite awhile--it is, in fact, most of the movie. In the woods, they stumble across an abandoned town, which they smash the windows of. This also makes up a sizable chunk of the film. However, the magic truly begins when they are set upon by a gang of hicks. Suddenly, a whirlwind of amazing images and noises arise! Dicks are cut off! People vomit lime Jell-O! Slow-mo appears for some reason! As does the soundtrack from Nightmare City! And finally, in a tearful confession to the camera mirroring that of the main girl from Blair Witch, Tony Blair declares the resurrection of the monarchy and the re-implementation of droit du seigneur. Throughout the entire thing the characters insert factoids about 1980s British culture, as if this was made for a class. A class where the teacher was fine with property damage, underage drinking, castration, and Umberto Lenzi references.

That would be the WORLD'S KOOLEST TEACHER.

I mentioned that this movie is meta. Well, at multiple points in the movie, several potential outtakes are shown in the movie. Outtakes that show the actors making fun of their "characters," while speaking in American accents. These scenes are part of the story, and as such, these characters are actually bizarre American hipsters who mock both their own culture and that of Britain. They also have a psychotic dedication to their satire, implying something of a nihilistic outlook on life and death. It doesn't matter that your friends are getting killed by hillbillies in the woods. It's for art, bruh. That makes them even more over the top than a lot of other found footage entities, including the relatively dumb Blair Witch kids and the disgusting assholes of another movie this film rips off, Cannibal Holocaust. Which brings me to my next point...

Obnoxious or not, it is kind of neat that a bunch of high school seniors decided that the movies they needed to rip off included, yes, the then-super relevant Blair Witch Project, but also Cannibal Holocaust and not one but TWO Lenzi films, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox. (I'm guessing that's where the dick-cutting is from, though it's not like Holocaust is unlikely to have schlong-slicing in some cut of it or another.) It's sort of a last hurrah to a kind of exploitation movies from decades past. The early 21st Century was a transition period in horror spoofs. The Scary Movie franchise marched on and on into increasingly lazy and cheap things like A Haunted House 2. I know some people who liked that stuff at the start of the '00s, but rarely have I met anyone who will support a lot of the stuff that makes it to theaters these days. Perhaps their source material is flagging too and that's the problem, though nostalgia does paint one's glasses rose, as my mother's cousin's late brother-in-law Herbert used to say. I don't have much of an opinion on the found footage craze (it's kind of an easy target), but in the density of it, Tony Blair Witch is more relevant than ever. It is a found footage spoof not only of the granddaddy of the 21st Century found footage piece, but of at least one of the great-granddaddies of the genre in general. One that, by the merit of its own ambition, is actually rather funny and charming.

Yes, it will probably take a couple views to enjoy this movie. Teenage boys are still annoying even here. But there is muted creativity and great fun all around, even without intestine-gallows. I watch it every British election season. (That's a lie. But I have started watching it a couple times a year. Which is more than I can say of a lot of my own movies.)