The Bogus Witch Project (2000)

 

Directors: Victor Kargan ("The Bogus Witch Project"); Steve Agee, Sammy Primero and Kelly Aluise ("The Griffith Witch Segment"); Susan Johnson ("The Willie Witch Project"); Alex Mebane ("The Blair Underwood Project"); Mark Mower ("The Bel Air Witch Project"); Alec Tuckman ("The Watts Bitch Project")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #229

 

This is your brain on ham...and scallops...

From Trimark Picture, The Bogus Witch Project is a reminder that, rather than just jumping to Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), The Blair Witch Project's legacy immediately after its success also included many parodies. The Simpsons parodied it in a Treehouse of Horrors episode, there was Da Hip Hop Witch (2000), a low budget film starring Eminem in a tiny role, even The Tony Blair Witch Project (2000), an incredibly obscure film which hit the IMDB bottom list. Stamped to a specific time as much as you could get, with its late nineties techno music, this is a compilation of micro budget Blair Witch parodies interspliced with interlinking footage called "The Woods", a first person gliding through the woods as weird things happen, such as past a bounder in the wilderness and a child's crossing.

This for many is going to be one of the worse things they have seen, or an extreme struggle, a poignant reminder of how Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick's film, when it was released in 1999, became such a huge pop cultural item that in such little time its sequel came a year later as well as a whole swath of parodies. Sadly, beginning with The Watts Bitch Project, you realise too how this is from decades ago and from a very different period, immediately sounding dreadful as it follows a group of young white filmmakers go to Watts in southern Los Angeles. It is not as bad as the precise could be, but black stereotypes abound even if there are a lot of African American actors willing to be in this, and the short immediately sets up how many of the parodies are lame. Ultra low budget, that this is among many have to blur out iconography, here part of a Laundromat's sigh, the building one the cast keep returning to lost, these films are based on recognition of the original and there is a morbid fascination which what is replicated. Here it is finding shoes on mass hung everywhere rather than stick bundles, or how it awkwardly tries to replicate the original narrative of an evil witch in a problematic way by parodying it through a primarily African-American community with stereotypes referred for jokes. One or two good jokes appear - bringing a 1993 map of Los Angeles, which is useless after the 1994 earthquake changed the environment, or the reference to the use of 16mm film in the original film being replaced by something brining a film projector - but not enough to get around a lot of this, as the many here, going for cheap jokes, this one baiting race as a joke too.

This template runs throughout - the films obsess over the scene of actress Heather Donahue crying in the film, usually the joke about snot coming from someone's nose or milking it, and there are many jokes of someone farting in the camping tent or the famous final images being merely someone going urinating up a wall. Bogus' biggest aspect, that these are all parodies of one film recreating and lampooning it's narrative bears, does really get into the curious idea of seeing the source (Blair Witch) being dissected down through its replications. As much as the first viewing of this was one I suffered through, it is fascinating seeing the shorts replicating similar jokes in a variety of ways as the facsimiles also stand out in their differences together too. This is effectively pre-YouTube in nature, where once you distributed parodies by alternative methods.

The Griffith Park Project imagines if this follows a Heather stand-in called Kelly Conroy whom would easily be distracted by butterflies at first, taking anything as a clue of a witch, but is also an obnoxious adult brat with a chalkboard screaming voice. Good on Kelly Aluise for being game for this, as a co-director and the female lead, but the short is a failure for me. Throughout, and honestly with bad taste to it, a lot of the jokes are about making parodies of the female main lead of Blair Witch, with this at least softened knowing the main actress is on-board to knowing make this character, as she makes things up in a flight of whimsy at first or is deluded, picking up a random stick in the middle of a park in daytime and believing its symbolic, and becoming obnoxious when she does not get her own way to her two male followers. The Blair Underwood Project, based around the titular L.A. Law. actor, is a second parody based around out-of-work actors, here bumbling around a park in random and pointless scenarios. Meeting two random orange sellers debating films, or learning one of the cameramen has a hairy chest the shape of Texas. Again, and here this is pertinent, it does discomfort the joke has to be the sole female character being obnoxious and hateable, considering Heather Donahue as her namesake in The Blair Witch Project was a sympathetic figure clinging onto her documentary when doomed. Here the Heather stand-in is a swearing egotist in a narrative of trying to find Blair Underwood to give him a script. It is not funny, least because, even repeating the farting in a camping tent joke, there is no comic timing or creativeness here in the improvisation, regardless of the scrappy micro-budget look.

Having had to see The Bogus Witch Project more than once, which in hindsight is idiotic on my part even if there is one rewarding bright spot, the segments were less painful, but this is definitely one of those releases to be lost in time and most would gladly damn to that fate. In between The Griffith Park Project and The Blair Underwood Project you have the one selling point in terms of a star, Pauly Shore's Bogus Witch Project. Pauly Shore never translated over to the United Kingdom, my knowledge of him entirely because the animated series Futurama made an entire episode running gag about how Bio-Dome (1996), the film he became notorious for, became a legacy title in that world's narrative. Shore, if you look into him, is to be sympathised with - he suddenly became a bankable figure from a role in Encino Man (1992), getting leading films in the nineties, but Bio Dome to be a butt of joke and Shore getting the dishonourable award from the Golden Raspberries of Worst New Star of the Decade for the 1990s¹. This segment however does no favours, starting with Shore parodying Heather's crying scene, a really obnoxious barrage of jokes set within a darkened cinema. Some jokes are funny - the concession stand sells twig bungles (from the original film) with butter, and the actress they hire, a traditionally attractive blonde woman, cannot speak because the film cannot afford her speaking lines. Moments like that, throughout this entire compilation, do show some wit, but they are drowned out in obvious and unfunny material screamed out at a tone deaf rate. The target, the original 1999 film, never is really prodded in a really salient way, the obvious jokes hit and many missed. An entire segment on Shore being stuck in a camping tent, causing it to thrash about violently, as in one moment would have been significantly funnier as anti-humour.

The Bel Air Witch Project is not great either, when the one beer I had revisiting this compilation did not work. The wonder of standard digital cameras, as someone fond of no-budget cinema, does not help with another egotistical Heather stand-in, also called Heather, in another vague McGuffin of a Witch figure never really there for anything for the jokes to pad out. Struggling through the Bel Air star map, I find is strange to consider how many of these were shot in Los Angeles, as this one tragically ropes in Brande Roderick, a Playboy Playmate who looks uncomfortable doing the parody. Considering she was a prominent star in Baywatch in this same year, in one of its many seasons, this is a get that is definitely squandered. The problem with a parody is that, as the Bel Air Witch Project says itself, damning itself among many bad spoofs, is that you have to get the reference and/or actually be funny, and the surface level is missed entirely.

It says a lot that, before we get to the last segment dear readers, I need to talk about The Woods, the interconnecting tissue which is its own elaborate, scattershot beast that is not really a Blair Witch parody but a lot of random tangents, including in other horror genres and especially Scream franchise parodies. There are so many of these moments it is saner just to list them in two paragraphs as non sequiturs, barely covering how many there are but those which stood out. Zombie meeting, bigfoot executive. A legitimately funny, in a proto-2010s anti humour sketch, fake advertisement for Ted McKensey, an insurance lawyer who helps people sue for demonic miscarriages, UFO anal probing and werewolf attacks, with the added charm the actor is clearly not giving a great acting performance in the damndest but adding to the segment unintentionally in its weirdness.

"This is your brain on ham...", as referred to in the opening quotation, part of the scattershot nature of just parodying an anti-drug advert just because. A reoccurring home shopping network, again one of the funnier gags, of a woman selling a cursed twig doll or at the end a jacket with hood combo made from human flesh. Stephen Hawkins as a slasher killer in a trailer, which is one of the moments this comes from the un-pc era if tame. Then there is Horror Storytellers, another reoccurring gag, of horror villains reminiscing on their pasts; the costumes, due to copyright and budget, look terrible, but Jason Voorhees sounding like an old Southern female belle recounting her murder sprees, or the kid from Children of the Corn as a deranged man-child are suitably strange. There are quite a few, some not really funny ("America's Scariest Home Videos"), a lot reminders that in the late nineties, when horror cinema was in a strange transitional state, Scream (1996) was also a huge cultural touch stone and huge for parody, for all the gags here. It does not make up for how ramshackle this entire project is, but The Woods did help sooth through so much of the misfires the footage was meant to pad the running time through.

But, in the brightest moment, one funny if imperfect parody comes at the end called The Willie Witch Project. Explicitly about three black filmmakers, with an African-American cast, and a female director Susan Johnson, this gets the tone right as, finding out the Blair Witch Project was a success, one entrepreneuring man decides to film a documentary in the woods about the Willie Witch, only for one interviewee to accused them of just wanting to go into the woods to get high, and a religious preacher to try to get them to donate money to their church. It adds another fascinating bow as the Heather stand-in is a man named Eugene. He is a very flamboyant stereotype of a gay man, introduced doing a woman's hair, and one unfortunate use of homophobic dialogue is used later on, but he turns into an absolute magnet of charisma, especially when he points out white people are stupid enough to go in haunted woods and, at the moment things get weird, he rightly wants to get out of there quickly. Aptly too as, in lieu to parodying the Blair Witch characters finding ominous twigs outside their tent, he immediately wants to leave when, unlike all the dumb stand-ins in previous segments with dog turds or food, this gets an inspired joke with white tub socks being left outside theirs giving everyone the heebie-jeebies.

Whilst not perfect, if The Bogus Witch Project has to be preserved for future children, or for anyone one reading this to see, it is for The Willies Witch Project, originally a short film released a year before but included here a year later. It is not a masterpiece, it is not great, but as a micro-budget parody of an already low budget film, even having to blur out a t-shirt insignia, this works. Someone goes at this parody from a different direction, explicitly three black characters, where the project is literally a tower block in the middle of nowhere, where the flamboyant gay character whilst a bit tasteless is actually likable and, barring one line of dialogue, none of the humour is mean. Even the farting in the camping tent joke works better because of the performers' charisma². No one dies, which is not a spoiler, nor that the characters make money whilst one poor bastard is left stuck in the woods lost, because actually watching the segment shows someone finding funnier ways to parody The Blair Witch Project with good jest, even with the characters being clever enough to left a sign telling helping them to not get lost only for it to fail.

So much of The Bogus Witch Project is some of the worst material I have seen, but its power to hurt faded and thankfully, even here there is some success. Fittingly, whilst a few women worked in the project, including a co-director, the one directed entirely by herself by a female filmmaker herself hit the target perfectly, which makes this overlong review of a forgotten film have a great ending at least. As part of the strange pop culture history of The Blair Witch Project, which few probably knew of, even here there is gold to be found in so much misjudged, a reason to sit through and end up with this ridiculously long review from a mangled mass of confusion notes.

 

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1) Perversely, the Golden Raspberries in 1999 nominated The Blair Witch Project among the worst pictures (which was won by Wild Wild West (1999)), and did give Heather Donahue the Worst Actress Award. To be un-civilised about this, rather than agree to disagree, this was frankly a dick move from an awards group who get a lot of opposition for their bandwagon riding and considering The Blair Witch Project became a horror classic in the future years.

2) Thomas Miles, who played Eugene, and John Eddins as the intrepid documentarian John, are also working to the current day prolifically, so that in itself is a good thing too.