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Review: Any groundswell of shoestring independent filmmaking spawned by the success of "The Blair Witch Project" may be squelched by Chris Smith's simultaneously hilarious and horrifying documentary, "American Movie."

A winner at last year's Sundance Film Festival and a runner-up for best documentary in the recent National Society of Film Critics vote, "American Movie" is a portrait of the artist as a not-so-young movie geek. Mark Borchardt, a 30-ish high school dropout who lives in Menomonee Falls, Wis., has been mad about movies ever since he was a teenager shooting Super-8 epics with titles like "The More the Scarier" (a friend shyly yet proudly confides, "I was in 'The More the Scarier III' ").

When Smith and his producer, Sarah Price, catch up with Borchardt, he is readying his magnum opus, an autobiographical feature called "Northwestern." Driving through the bleak winter countryside, the filmmaker, who's more Ed Wood than Orson Welles, repeats his mantra: "I can't fail anymore. I'm not going to drink and dream. I'm going to create and complete."

Well, maybe. When Borchardt realizes that he hasn't the resources (read: money, actors, equipment, crew) to start "Northwestern," he decides to raise funds by completing an earlier effort called "Coven," which he'll sell direct to video.

Borchardt's ability to talk the talk is one of the most frightening aspects of "American Movie," financed in part by Michael Stipe of Athens-based R.E.M. and his film partner Jim McKay. Sounding like he's the star student at UCLA's film school, Borchardt talks about "16 mm black-and-white reversals" and all that other tech-obsessed detail that film nerds focus on so often because they can't focus on anything like themselves or other people. Trying to shake some bucks out of his senile Uncle Bill, Borchardt explains that he'll market "Coven" by "bringing it down to 1/2-inch for multiple sales." Croaks Bill, "Multiple sales to who?"

Whether "American Movie" is celebrating Borchardt as an all-American dreamer or satirizing him as an all-American loser is never clear. Rather, the filmmakers give Borchardt enough rope and basically let him hang himself. A part-time groundskeeper at a cemetery who still lives with his mother (she's recruited for everything from director of photography to an on-screen bit dragging a corpse across a frozen swamp), Borchardt becomes less amusing — or even sympathetic — as the film progresses. Repeatedly banging an actor's head into a kitchen cabinet that refuses to shatter is funny; that's typical actor abuse. That this often obnoxious and always self-centered overgrown adolescent has three children isn't. His spending the night in a university editing room may be admirable. That his kids are sleeping there as well isn't.

Still, Smith never comments on Borchardt's choices. He just records them. And that's what makes "American Movie" as compulsively watchable as a train wreck in slow motion.

This is a funny, scary, ultimately thought-provoking character study of someone so out there and yet so emblematic of a certain type that a fictional version would pale by comparison. At the very least, Borchardt has a kind of can-do optimism, even if he so obviously can't do.

And let's look on the bright side. As one interviewee says, "Honestly, I thought he'd grow up to be a stalker or a serial killer."

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service