The Last Broadcast

The Last Broadcast is a 1998 horror film, directed and written by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler. The film is presented as documentary about the crew of a public-access cable TV show, Fact or Fiction, who went into the woods in rural New Jersey to search for the Jersey Devil, and all but one of whom are killed. While the surviving crew member - Jim Seurd - was convicted for the murder, the film sets out to prove his evidence.

The film is notable for predating The Blair Witch Project for heavy use of found footaage in a horror movie setting, for being made on a budget of only $900 using 90s home computer technology and for almost every character being The Danza.

Tropes used in The Last Broadcast include:

• Apocalyptic Log: The footage shot by the Fact or Fiction crew includes their deaths.
• Don't Go in The Woods: Especially on the urging of an untraceable IRC message.
• The Ending Changes Everything: It looks like the point of the Mockumentary is to prove Suerd's innocence, but really the real killer just couldn't take his perfect murders being put down as the work of a random psycho.
• Enhance Button: Deconstructed as it takes a data retrieval expert hundreds of hours to piece together the final frame of heavily damaged film revealing the killer to be the Mockumentary's narrator, James Leigh
• Everybody Dies: James Seurd, the one member of the Fact or Fiction crew to make it back from the trip commits suicide in prison.
• Gainax Ending: The sudden shift from Mockumentary to traditional film-making.
• The Jersey Devil: Serves as the motivation for the trip into the woods.
• Mockumentary: A deadly serious example
• Never Found the Body: Fact or Fiction host Steven Avkast.
• New Media Are Evil: Debated within the movie, with the more sympathetic characters coming out against it.
• Rewatch Bonus: Suffice to say that watching this movie a second time - when you know the outcome - makes much of the story far more interesting.
• Show Within a Show: Fact or Fiction
• Unreliable Narrator: James Leigh