Weiler (l) and Avalos (r): Men with a message

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before. A group of young people armed only with camcorders venture deep into the forest in search of a mythical beast that's responsible for some mysterious deaths. Brutal slaughter follows.

It's The Blair Witch Project, right? The low-budget movie that's so far taken $150 million worldwide, the first film to use the Internet for publicity, the first to use camcorders on the big screen? Wrong on all counts.

The film in question is called The Last Broadcast. It was made for $900 by two former film students, Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, and released in US theatres in 1997, nearly two years before Blair Witch.

"We started working on our film in 1996," says Avalos, a slight, balding and highly articulate man in his mid-thirties. "The idea was to make a movie for no money. The speed we did it was incredible. We had a script within six weeks and between November '96 and August '97 the movie was shot and edited."

Avalos and Weiler are in Tokyo to promote their film, which has been purchased by Sky's Pay Per View channel for screening in April. Back in America, the similarities between Blair Witch and The Last Broadcast have caused a furor on the independent film scene, with accusations and counter-accusations flying, particularly on the Internet.

Yet ironically, the earlier film owes much of its subsequent success to Blair Witch. After all, until Blair Witch came along, The Last Broadcast was just another little-seen indie movie made by a bunch of friends for fun. No distributor or network would touch it with a barge pole. Avalos and Weiler are aware of the irony, but that doesn't stop them being slightly resentful.

"Much as we would have preferred for there not to have been a Blair Witch," says Avalos, "its freakish success has actually made us quite a bit richer. Of all the things I'm unhappy about to do with Blair Witch, before that happened 95% of our audience believed our film to be true, which made it effective. Unfortunately, we've lost that forever. It's a shame that people didn't get to see our movie first."

Weiler - the taller, darker and quieter of the two - takes up the Blair Witch theme with practiced ease. "If anything is strikingly similar it would be the website," he says. "In 1996 we launched a website that presented our movie as if it were a real documentary; it had all the back story about characters in the film. Then two years later, the Blair Witch site launches. It is all but identical to the site we created in 1996 and becomes known as this marketing device that ignites that film."

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Blair Witch went on from its website to conquer the world, while The Last Broadcast did not. Why?

Avalos is the first to respond. "Well, after they had done this stuff, making a website that was effective and making a movie that was effective, they also had the added benefit of $15 million for marketing. So they had certain advantages. I don't begrudge them, but those are the reasons. I doubt that our movie would have done as well in theatres anyway, because ours is a bit more intellectual, and that can limit your audience. Horror is not what the film is about. The monster, the Jersey Devil, is a hook to get us into the woods, nothing more."

Avalos has a point. Whereas Blair Witch is an out-and-out horror film, The Last Broadcast has a message: That nothing on screen is what it appears to be. As media proliferate, the film says, so those in charge become more adept at manipulating what we see to suit their ends. In the end, you cannot trust anything. Not even the film itself.

"We saw an example of this in the US recently when Kennedy's plane went down," says Weiler. "You watch the news footage and it's just the ocean and then you hear someone comment on what happened. News sources are quoting other news sources. What we're shown and what we hear could be based on anything."

The two have fallen victim to a bit of media manipulation themselves. Unbeknownst to them, Sky, evidently hoping to recoup its investment in the film, has provided The Last Broadcast with a new Japanese title, The Jersey Devil Project.

Naturally, the two aren't pleased. "Nobody told us that they'd changed the name of the film until today," says Avalos. "We weren't very happy but we understand why they did it."

As Avalos and Weiler move on to bigger projects, ones with millions rather than hundreds of dollars attached, more significant compromises will have to be made. As The Last Broadcast says so eloquently, nothing in film can be taken for granted. Or trusted.

The Last Broadcast airs on Sky's Pay Per View channels from April 7-13, and costs JY1000. A video release will follow on April 19.