The movie Roger Ebert said “no force on Earth could compel me” to watch a second time
Just because you really like a movie, it doesn’t mean you have to watch it again, or even want to. Some films are best watched once, and once only, and as far as Roger Ebert was concerned, there was nothing that could convince him to return for a second viewing.
Since he made his living as a critic, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures that Ebert never wanted to see again. The difference is that in all of those cases, they were abominations against the good name of cinema that ended up on the receiving end of scathing reviews. Nobody needs to see a shite movie twice, but the one he vowed he wouldn’t lay eyes upon again was given the highest mark.
If it was a zero-star flick, then you could understand why he’d avoid it at all costs. However, this was a four-star feature, but not even the maximum amount of Ebert-approved celestial bodies was enough to convince him that it was something he was ready, willing, and able to subject himself to twice.
In his defence, the Pulitzer Prize winner wasn’t the only high-profile literary figure who felt that way. Stephen King, the master of the macabre with hundreds of millions of book sales to his name and dozens upon dozens of film and television adaptations based on his work, couldn’t even make it all the way to the end of The Blair Witch Project without abandoning ship.
As for Ebert, he shared his thoughts when judging another, and much lesser, film. Since he couldn’t avoid it when the craze was at bursting point, seeing as his job was to watch every major new release, the critic had no choice but to have a gander at 2012’s V/H/S, the first instalment in the horror anthology series.
He gave it a solitary star, and because found footage was all the rage, he couldn’t help but compare it to the cultural phenomenon that started it all. “No force on Earth could compel me to go back and see it again,” he wrote. “It had an effective sense of accumulating horror. I liked it at the time.”
“Since then, I’ve grown weary of the genre it inspired, the found footage horror film,” Ebert continued. “In this genre, we are given low-quality home video footage, usually underlit, lacking in pacing, and intentionally hard to comprehend.” Well, he hit a fair few nails on the head there.
Whereas he found Paranormal Activity to be the “best subsequent example” of the post-Blair Witch boom, V/H/S was found footage “at its least compelling.” The former was even more profitable than Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s game-changer, but mileage varies on whether it’s any good, depending on how won over anyone is by fuck all happening for 99% of the movie.
The current generation might fail to comprehend why The Blair Witch Project was such a big deal that terrified so many people, but, not to sound like an old bastard, you had to be there. Ebert was there, too, and once was enough.
