We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
WATCHERS II (1990)
A straight-to-video follow-up to the 1987 Dean Koontz adaptation Watchers (which did receive a theatrical release), Watchers II clearly took a step down in the budget department, but it has always been my favorite entry in the Watchers film franchise because it’s the one that comes closest to the source material. Sure, the screenplay by John Brancato and Michael Ferris is still far off from Koontz’s novel, but it comes closer than the other three movies. The same basic set-up is always in place: a lab has conducted classified experiments for the government that has resulted in an ultra-smart Golden Retriever and a monstrous beast that is telepathically connected to the dog and driven to kill it. Something goes wrong, the dog and the monster both escape into the night, and the dog finds people who are willing to put their lives at risk to protect it from its monster nemesis.
Directed by Thierry Notz, Watchers II starts off by giving us a look at the workings of Project Aesop at the Anodyne lab, where pet psychologist Barbara White (Tracy Scoggins) is trying and, from the looks of it, failing to turn a Golden Retriever named Einstein into a doggy genius. Locked away in another room is a monstrous creature called the Outsider – and when this monster kills a pair of NSA agents who came snooping around, Dr. Steve Maleno (Jonathan Farwell) learns that his project is getting shut down and all experimental subjects are to be destroyed. So he hires some activists to bust into the lab and release the animals.
Einstein runs off into the night and crosses paths with Marine Paul Ferguson (The Beastmaster himself, Marc Singer), who’s supposed to be going to jail for punching a superior officer. Instead, the Outsider kills the MPs that are escorting him and he escapes with Einstein. This is one of those elements that brings Watcher II closer to the book, because in Koontz’s story the dog called Einstein ended up in the care of a former military man, a character the first movie (which called the dog Furface) turned into a high school student.
After making a pit stop at the home of his ex Sarah (Irene Miracle of Puppet Master), inadvertently putting her in the crosshairs of the Outsider (and since this was a Roger Corman production, it’s no surprise that she’s in the bathtub when the Outsider comes busting into her house), Paul hits the road with Einstein and quickly learns that he is, despite the way he was behaving around Barbara, highly intelligent. So intelligent that he can type on a computer keyboard with a pencil in his mouth and even finds a way to get Paul to contact Barbara so they can meet up with her. During their time together, Barbara learns the dark secrets Anodyne was keeping from her about Project Aesop – and they have to run or fight for their lives against the Outsider.
It all builds up to a pretty cool – and surprisingly touching - climactic confrontation between our heroes and the Outsider, who’s brought to life with the same monster costume that was used in the films The Terror Within, The Terror Within II, and Crystal Force.
Watchers is a decent creature feature, but Watchers II was a step up, and when it comes to this series of movies, this sequel is as good as it gets.
THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE (2021)
There are Halloween slashers, about escaped mental patients or convicts claiming victims in small town neighborhoods or on college campuses. There are Friday the 13th slashers where the action takes place out in the wilderness, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre slashers where characters wander into the wrong part of the backwoods. There also Scream slashers, where someone is knocking off members of a group of friends and the killer is revealed to be someone close to them. Now, Scream wasn’t the first slasher to take that sort of “whodunit” approach, we even had them back in the early ‘80s with the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Graduation Day, but somehow every movie that has taken that approach since Scream has managed to come off like a Scream clone. Which is the case with director Patrick Brice’s There’s Someone Inside Your House, which was scripted by Henry Gayden and based on a novel by Stephanie Perkins.
Produced by genre heavyweights James Wan and Shawn Levy, There’s Someone Inside Your House was released through the Netflix streaming service back in 2021. It stars Sydney Park as high school student Makani, who has moved to the farm community of Osborne, Nebraska to live with her grandmother, leaving a dark secret behind her in her former home state, Hawaii. She’s not the only Osborne high school student with a secret they don’t want to get out. Most of these kids do – and not only is someone exposing their secrets, they’re also murdering them while wearing masks designed to look like each of their individual victims, an interesting idea that doesn’t entirely come across every time.
The girl who recorded a racist and homophobic podcast, dead. The jock who beat up a gay classmate, dead. The kid with a drug problem, dead. You get the idea. Makani is nearly killed for her dark secret, but it’s clear from the start that she’s our final girl, so the killer isn’t able to knock her off so easily.
Although it could be written off as a Scream clone, it still holds up as an interesting slasher in its own right, with a darker edge than expected. You might see the twist coming a mile away, but there are some nice kills and suspenseful sequences along the way. While I didn’t find it to be particularly memorable, it’s good for a viewing or two.
TRUE HAUNTING SEASON ONE (2025)
Earlier this month, Netflix dropped the first season of a show called True Haunting, produced by James Wan – and while I’m not generally interested in “true haunting” shows, especially not ones that just follow ghost hunters as they stumble around in the darkness, I decided to give this one a shot because it’s Halloween month. I ended up being very glad I did, as I found all five episodes of the season to be thoroughly engrossing – and, thankfully, there were no ghost hunters stumbling in the dark!
The show is built around interviews with people who claim to have been terrifying haunting situations, with the talking head interviews being intercut with dramatizations of some of the moments these people experienced. Of the five episodes, three of them are dedicated to something that happened in the dorms at Genesee college in New York – and I found this story to be especially fascinating. This one could have easily sustained a full “haunted dorm” feature film, minus the interviews, fully dramatized.
The last two episodes bounce us over to Utah for a more typical haunted house story that has some creepy moments and some unnerving ideas, but didn’t provide enough of the answers I was looking for. The reason for the haunting in Genesee was covered very well, but I wanted more details about the reason for the Utah haunting, which is linked back to a man who apparently murdered several of his children and drove his wife to suicide. Give me the full details! Who was he and how many kids did he kill? The show doesn’t have those answers.
Anyway, True Haunting tells two interesting stories of hauntings, and while I found the first to be more unique and satisfying, I would like to see the show continue because I want to hear more stories and to see them presented in this way.
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