10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

10. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

There were cheapass found footage horror movies long before The Blair Witch Project, of course - the notorious Cannibal Holocaust immediately springs to mind.

However, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's no-budget superhit created a tsunami of imitators, some actually rather good, some DTV-terrible. As far as its influence goes, the film’s place in cinema history is inarguable.

Here’s the thing, though - take away the hype, the legacy and that innovative immersive marketing campaign, and The Blair Witch Project is not a good or even entertaining movie. For about seventy minutes, very little happens while the camera focuses - because it has no choice - on the only three actors in it.

Actually, the camera barely even does that. The found footage conceit and the dodgy production concept mean that we’re treated to some of the hammiest improvised acting ever seen - only out of shot, off-frame or out of focus, which is what happens when you get three inexperienced actors to shoot your movie themselves.

In fairness to Sanchez and Myrick, their canny marketing transformed this bug into a feature… but perhaps it would have been better as a taut, nail-biting thirty-minute short. We’ll never know, because the whole thing clocks in at a turgid eighty-one minutes of nothing at all, shot and cut like cr*p.