The Watchers is what happens when a deeply stupid script full of people who barely act like people meet a pretty good eye for visuals. This movie is capital D dumb… poorly written and full of ADR to, I guess, tell the stupid audience what’s going on. Or rewrites.
The flick is about an American girl in Ireland who has to deliver a parrot (?!) by car and winds up lost in a spooky forest. She stumbles upon three other folk who lock her away with them in a weird house at night… because The Watchers want to watch them through a two-way mirror. There is no escape… allegedly.
Yeah, nobody acts like an actual human being. I’ve said recently that dumb people in horror movies doing dumb things is to be expected. But this flick isn’t that kind of dumb… it’s more the kind of dumb that thinks its smart and clever. Full of people talking and acting in ways no human would act or talk in these circumstances. Also the kind of movie where we get random exposition the characters shouldn’t know because the script was too stupid to tell us these things in a more natural way.
The film does look good though… it’s directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter and, while I didn’t find the movie remotely scary, at least it has a pretty good atmospheric look to it.
There are twists and turns as you might expect from a Shyamalan script… but most of them were either brain-dead obvious or things that left me thinking, “Yeah, I thought we already knew that?” Which was, of course, deeply unsatisfying being smarter than the characters and the script.
The creatures and what they want is uneven. The beasties are pretty generic but have a certain lanky creepiness… what they want and how they want it and where this random house with a two-way mirror comes from were all pretty unsatisfying and odd. It’s the kind of house that reveals its secrets when the script says so, not due to any intelligent moves from the characters.
Yeah, this is a bad film but gets a little extra credit for the imagery and some of the acting. Deeply stupid script sabotages everything though. It was dumb enough to keep me at arm’s length from anything else.
Score: 61