The Perfect Killing Machine

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. 

Koontz, Chucky, scarecrows, and homicidal maniacs.

WATCHERS (1988)

Author Dean Koontz is a big time dog lover, and his passionate appreciation for dogs is clear in his 1987 horror novel Watchers – which is widely considered, possibly even by the author himself, to be the best novel Koontz ever wrote. I haven’t read a lot of his books, but I have read a few, and Watchers is, by far, my favorite of those I have read. At the center of the story is a highly intelligent Golden Retriever named Einstein, who received his enhanced smarts through experiments conducted at a place called Banodyne Laboratories. When the lab goes up in flames, Einstein manages to escape from the building – but he’s not the only experimental creature to get loose. Banodyne has also created something called The Outsider, a hideous and vicious hybrid animal. The Outsider’s main goal in life is to destroy the dog, and it will kill anyone who crosses its path along the way. The cinematic potential of this story was so obvious, a film adaptation made its way out into the world just one year after Koontz’s novel was published. It was successful enough to spawn a handful of sequels – and yet, not one of the four Watchers movies is a direct adaptation of the book.

Directed by Jon Hess from a screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee, the first Watchers movie begins with the explosion at Banodyne Laboratories. A Golden Retriever escapes into the night and is pursued by a monstrous beast called the OXCOM, or the Outside Experimental Combat Mammal. A news report lets us know Banodyne conducted classified biological research for the National Security Organization and when an NSO agent named Johnson (Michael Ironside) is dispatched to track down the dog and the OXCOM before the situation gets out of hand, we learn that the experiments have caused these creatures to be telepathically linked and the OXCOM is expected to track down and kill the dog within 72 hours. The idea was that these animals could be used in battle: the dog could insinuate itself into the enemy’s camp, then twenty OXCOMs would be unleashed into the field, being drawn to the dog and killing the enemy in the process.

In the book, the dog ends up in the care of former military man named Travis Cornell, but the filmmakers were aiming to draw in younger viewers, so here Travis is a teenager played by young ‘80s superstar Corey Haim. He’s introduced while meeting his girlfriend Tracey (the mononymous Lala) for a barn rendezvous, but before they can have some premarital sex, they’re interrupted by the sound of someone entering the barn. Thinking it’s Tracey’s dad, Travis splits – finding that the dog is waiting for him in his truck and refuses to leave him. Tracey’s dad is in the barn, but so is the OXCOM. Pops is torn apart and the traumatized Tracey is taken away by the NSO.

The book Travis entered a relationship with a woman named Nora, but in this take on the story, Nora is the name of Travis’s mom, played by Barbara Williams. Nora isn’t pleased to see that Travis has brought a dog home with him, but she’s quickly won over by the dog’s displays of intelligence. Still, they call him Furface rather than Einstein. Although they’re curious about where the dog came from and Travis is concerned about Tracey (and suspicious of the NSO agents lurking around), they attempt to go on with their daily lives, with the OXCOM tracking the dog and killing multiple people, even terrorizing a group of bike-riding youths that includes Jason Priestley.

We’re not getting the story as envisioned by Koontz, but this version of it moves along at a good pace and includes plenty of action / suspense moments of the OXCOM scaring and attacking people. There are some displays of questionable filmmaking (like when we hear the audio of a dialogue scene between Travis and Nora over a shot of him walking to school; that’s pretty lame), but this all works well enough. The movie isn’t nearly as good as it could have been if it had been more faithful to the novel, but it’s a decent creature feature and I’d probably be a bigger fan if I didn’t have “what could have been” in my mind.

When they realize the danger they and Furface are in, Travis and Nora go on the run. Tracey comes back into the story, Johnson is revealed to be a homicidal maniac (“I’m the perfect killing machine; I’ve got no conscience.”), and it all builds up to an explosive climactic confrontation at a cabin in the woods, which is always a good setting for some crazy horror action. Watchers is a good time that I, as a fan of the book, have been too judgmental of over the years.

SCARECROWS (1988)

Writer/director William Wesley and co-writer Richard Jefferies didn’t waste any time on set-up when crafting their horror film Scarecrows. Audio of a radio news report catches us up on the information we need: five mercenaries – Corbin (Ted Vernon), Curry (Michael David Simms), Jack (Richard Vidan), Roxanne (Kristina Sanborn), and Bert (B.J. Turner) – have carried out a robbery of the Marine base Camp Pendleton that left multiple Marines dead and even more critically wounded, getting away with three and a half million dollars and escaped in a twin-engine cargo plane, taking pilot Al (David James Campbell), his teenage daughter Kellie (Victoria Christian), and their dog Dax hostage. It’s quick and simple, and also economical, because Wesley didn’t actually have to film any of that stuff.

The movie begins with the plane in flight, and within minutes Bert has turned against his fellow criminals, parachuting out of the plane and tossing a grenade at his former pals. They manage to toss the grenade out of the plane before it explodes (in a shot that confirms the low budget and the fact that not trying to film the Camp Pendleton robbery was a good choice), land the plane, and go searching for Bert and their cash.

Bert has landed on a farm in the middle of nowhere – and soon, the characters discover that the three men who used to live on this farm were Satanists, and their evil spirits now inhabit the scarecrows that stand on the property. Scarecrows that come alive, kill people, and turn them into the violent living dead.

The majority of film’s 83 minute running time follows the characters around the property as they realize the trouble they’ve wandered into and then fight for their lives. There are some dull stretches in here, because there’s a whole lot of time spent watching characters roam around in the dark – but when the killer scarecrow action kicks in, it’s pretty cool, and there are some nice gore effects on display.

So we get a short and simple movie with killer scarecrows in it, and that’s what I call a good way to spend 83 minutes.

CHUCKY SEASON THREE (2023 – 2024)

Don Mancini came up with the initial idea for the original Child’s Play and it’s truly impressive that, even though his script for the first movie underwent some substantial rewrites (particularly from director Tom Holland), Mancini had remained involved with the franchise ever since. He had written every one of the sequels, directed a couple of them, and served as showrunner on the TV series Chucky. Aside from the first movie (and its remake, which Mancini had nothing to do with), the entire Child’s Play / Chucky has been the vision of one person. This is practically unheard of... but there are times when I wish Mancini didn’t have quite as much creative control as he does. That there was someone looking over his shoulder and telling him to rein it in more often. This is because he tends to have some really bizarre, off-the-wall ideas. An example of this is when he went too far with the goofball meta humor in Seed of Chucky, the most poorly received entry in the franchise. He course corrected and got back to basics with the follow-up Curse of Chucky, then got weirder again with Cult of Chucky, and managed to blend the weirdness of Cult with a back-to-the-basics approach for the first season of the Chucky TV show. Then he went off-the-rails again with Chucky season 2, which was so strange, goofy, and cringe-inducing that it almost killed my enthusiasm for this franchise entirely.

But the show got a third season, and I watched it because I’m a completist. And Mancini disappointed me again.

Chucky season 3 is nuts, but it gets off to a promising start. Due the events of the second season, Chucky the killer doll is aging and dying – and “old Chucky” is an amusing sight. To reverse this, he will need to sacrifice six people to his voodoo deity Damballa in an evil location. That’s how Chucky ends up in the White House. Luckily for him, President James Collins (Devon Sawa, playing his fourth role on this show) has a young son who would like to have a doll like Chucky, especially since the kid is mourning the death of his younger brother. This allows Chucky to run around the place and start knocking people off. Meanwhile, his teenage enemies Jake Wheeler (Zackary Arthur), Devon Evans (Björgvin Arnarson), and Lexy Cross (Alyvia Alyn Lind) have figured out that Chucky is in the White House and has come to destroy him – which is fine with Chucky, because he intends to make them three of his sacrifices. Of course, the show also has to check in with Chucky’s bride Tiffany Valentine, who now inhabits the body of Jennifer Tilly and has been sent to Death Row, and Lexy’s nutty little sister Caroline (Carina London Battrick), who has joined forces with Chucky and Tiffany.

Before long, you have a dead President, Devon Sawa taking on a fifth role as the dead President’s body double, and Chucky getting his hands on the nuclear codes. It’s right around the time when Chucky launches nukes that the season started to lose me... and it was downhill from there, with supernatural shenanigans (turns out, the White House is haunted, and Chucky stirs up the spirits big time), a trip into the afterlife, and one of the worst cliffhanger endings ever devised. Mancini and his writing team managed to keep the season on its tracks for most of the episodes, but it all comes crashing down in the end. I’d like to know that the characters that are left in a bad situation will be able to get out of it, but I really don’t want to see the resolution of that cliffhanger play out on the screen. 

Mancini wanted to carry the show on for a fourth season, he even pitched his idea to the networks, but Syfy and USA decided to pull the plug after this one. It’s not surprising to me that they decided to call it quits. In fact, it’s surprising that they let season 3 happen after the mess that was season 2. This show was just too weird and goofy, straying too far from what the average viewers (and a lot of fans) want to see from their Chucky entertainment. The days of those early Child’s Play movies are, unfortunately, far behind us.

If any further Chucky movies are made, I’ll check them out and hope that Mancini will return to grounded attempts to make Chucky scary again instead of dragging the character through more over-the-top cartoon comedy scenarios. It’s time to course correct. Again.

NO ONE LIVES (2012)

I had so much fun watching director Ryuhei Kitamura’s zombie movie Versus at a 24-hour theatrical horror marathon in 2003, it guaranteed that I would always be interested in seeing the latest Kitamura movie. Even though he disappointed me with his Godzilla movie Godzilla: Final Wars, I have continued checking out the movie he has made – and one I had a good time watching, despite the fact that almost every character in the movie is repugnant, was the 2012 horror thriller No One Lives.

The story begins with Luke Evans and Laura Ramsey as a couple on a cross-country road trip, having mysterious conversations about some other woman that seems to have disrupted their relationship. The woman’s name is Betty, but we’ll never learn the name of the man. He’s known only as Driver. When they stop for the night and book a room in a motel, they cross paths with a group of violent criminals who see them as an “uppity rich” couple and take them hostage. Which turns out to be a huge mistake. First, Betty’s character kills herself with the knife that’s being held to her throat. Then, a young woman named Emma Ward (Adelaide Clemens) is found locked in the trunk of the couple’s car, and she’s recognized as the heiress that was abducted after fourteen of her friends were killed in a house party massacre. Driver abducted Emma. He committed that massacre. He’s a homicidal maniac, and these criminals have just gotten on his bad side.

Scripted by David Lawrence Cohen, No One Lives moves through its 87 minute running time at a fast pace, and the majority of the film follows Driver on his bloody mission of vengeance. Hoag (Lee Tergesen), his brother Ethan (Brodus Clay), his daughter Amber (Lindsey Shaw), his girlfriend Tamara (America Olivo), Amber’s boyfriend Denny (Beau Knapp), and their loose cannon associate Flynn (Derek Magyar), they’re all going to pay. Ethan dies first, and the Driver finds a way to wear the man’s mutilated corpse as a mask, which enables him to reach the group’s safe house when a couple of them think they’re bringing their fallen associate back home.

The situation with Emma assures us that the Driver is a total scumbag, but it’s still fun to watch him wreck the criminals with a variety of methods and weapons. With someone so evil as our protagonist, the film had to walk precarious path – if this wrapped up in the wrong way, I would have ended up hating the movie. But the script handles everything just right, as far as I’m concerned, which allows me to sit back and enjoy No One Lives as a bloody, violent good time.

HERETIC (2024)

From Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the writers of A Quiet Place, comes – as it was described by critic McKay Coppins – “a horror film about an atheist who won’t shut up.” And there are moments where watching the movie does feel like you’ve been shut in a room with a pompous atheist who thinks they’re blowing your mind with information that you’ve probably heard before, if you’ve ever done a deep dive examination of religions. That’s something I did when I was in my early twenties, so much of what was said in this movie seemed like old news to me – but the silver lining here is the fact that the babblemouth atheist in question here is a creepy middle-aged man named Mr. Reed, played with former rom-com mainstay Hugh Grant, who has said that he’s glad he aged into being able to play villains, as they’re much more interesting to bring to life than the leading characters in rom-coms.

Mr. Reed has trapped a pair of missionaries, Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes and Chloe East as Sister Paxton, in his home, and has set out to convince them that their religion is wrong. He gives them a choice between two doors: if they believe in God, they should enter one door, and if they no longer believe, they enter the either. But both doors lead to a dungeon where Mr. Reed will continue to test their faith – and the fact that he has manage to build such an elaborate subterranean world beneath his home is so impressive, it’s almost enough to make one think he was aided by a higher power.

Heretic is a wild and weird movie that I didn’t think was quite as clever as the filmmakers seemed to think it was, but it was an interesting horror flick with some disturbing moments and Hugh Grant proved that he’s capable of being an unnerving horror villain.