When looking into this movie, the three phrases that really jump out at me were “mockumentary”, “murder”, and “Jersey Devil”. Kind of hard to screw that equation up, isn’t it? Well, The reason you might not have ever heard of this movie was because the year after this was made, a little movie called “The Blair Witch Project” was released. Blair Witch really showed a lot of people how entertaining a mockumentary can be, even when based on a fake urban legend. Despite Last Broadcast being made before Blair Witch, it didn’t get released until after Blair Witch, who at that point had already taken the movie industry by storm. Not saying that Last Broadcast was as good as Blair Witch, but it never really got the chance at success it could have had.

The supposed psycho freako…looking like a psycho freako.

The movie opens with the exposition of our “filmmaker” discussing the murders of three people who were in search of the Jersey Devil for a cable access show. The person accused of the crime, at the time of the “documentary”, had been jailed and mysteriously died of unknown causes, but there were a few doubts about the case. The “filmmaker” made it his goal to explore the facts of the case as well as do research on his own. We find out that the suspect was a magician who loved the internet, and somehow that was reason enough for people to think he committed these crimes. He left no footprints, one body was never discovered, and you keep hoping something supernatural happened, but they never show it. The filmmaker receives a mysterious videotape that is very damaged, so he sets out to have it restored. Upon restoration, we find out that the filmmaker is the actual killer, so he kills the woman doing the restoration, and the movie ends.

The victims, who deserved to die if you asked me.

I am surprised they don’t show this film in “How To Completely Fuck Up Your Film In Five Minutes 101” at film school. Everything was going well, and was pretty entertaining, but the ending completely demolished all of that. Even had the DVD been broken and I just never saw those scenes, it would have been pretty entertaining. I found it to be more similar to films like Death of a President or The Poughkeepsie Tapes, in the fact that sometimes you feel like you’re actually watching a program on A&E. Those kinds of mockumentaries are much more believable than Blair Witch was, but it was terrifying for different reasons. So the fact that this film got compared to Blair Witch almost makes that film seem worse, because of how terrible the ending fucked it all up. The amount of plot holes and unanswered questions, merely for the sake of having a twist ending, reflected poorly on everyone involved. Were the ending just cut off, I would have given this film half a moon, or even three quarters, but nope, you fucked up, filmmakers.

Wolfman Moon Scale