Rushed out to catch a ride on that crazy Blair Witch Project mania, the soundalike-titled The St. Francisville Experiment places four young people overnight in a haunted mansion in the Louisiana town of St. Francisville: a team leader with a poor haircut, a film student with limited vocabulary skills, a busty history major and a dog-faced psychic with front teeth the size of Chiclets.
According to the found-footage film’s prologue, St. Francisville is home to more haunted houses than anywhere in America, and everything we are about to see is real. Oh, bullshit.
So that you don’t think it’s a total rip-off of Blair Witch, a few subtle differences exist:
1) There are four people instead of three.
2) Instead of a creepy basement, there’s a creepy attic.
3) Nobody says “fuck.”
Like Blair Witch, it has few shocks placed between near-excruciating stretches of shot-on-video footage. Unfortunately, its shocks are most tame: Ooh, a chandelier fell! Yikes, the chair moved! Eew, there’s a bug in my sandwich!
The finale is even more ridiculous (not to mention all the proof you need this is faked): Oh, no, the door shut! Yuck, live rats! Help, I’m trapped in a piece of carpet that’s fallen through the floor, just like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit! Directed by Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision), this Experiment may be better than sitting through Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, but a failure is a failure. —Rod Lott