Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story

Did the creators of this movie just go, "We'll get permission to do a 'spinoff' of Marble Hornets, loosely 'borrow' their Slenderman-type villain's name and symbol, make a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-them references to the web series... and that way, we won't get too much crap for trying to make our own Slenderman found-footage move."

Because that plan totally backfired. This is not a Marble Hornets story. They totally screwed up how the Operator works, and with the exception of one tiny reference to the Alex Kralie character, this movie has nothing to do with Marble Hornets canon.

What would've been better is if they'd gotten Joe and Tim to write an actual Marble Hornets movie, and still kept Doug Jones as the Operator.

This is what is scary about this movie: its 90 minutes of annoying people screaming at each other. Every two minutes is a jump scare. This story is terrible. Slenderman has nothing to do at all in this movie. He just stands around. He isn't even most of the jump scares.

It isn't often you have so many lead characters that have nothing about them that you like.

Skips this one. It's too late for me. Save yourself.

I give this Film a 2, just because I'm a massive fan of the 'Mable Hornets' web series ~ So it gets the first point for that alone, and, I give the extra point for Doug Jones' involvement with it (He's one of Hollywood's most underrated Stars, IMO). But that's it.

This Movie bears none of the originality, nor sinister foreboding contained within the outstanding 'Marble Hornets' web series. It's just very standard, bland, mediocre horror fare, that focuses way too much on God-awful jump scares, and not enough on creating actual paranoia based fear and eerie tension like the brilliant 'Marble Hornets' series did by the Fleet-load.

And our Slender Man/Operator has been shrunk down to the size of a regular Guy, who looks like He's had a hankie thrown over His face, who's only shown in pathetic static little blips. What a waste of the aforementioned awesome Doug Jones. You'd think that a Feature-length Movie featuring 'Slender Man'/'The Operator' would create a much more substantial monster than the one delivered here.

When a 0 budget monster, in a web series, is infinitely more terrifying than the one served up in a Movie ~ You know that Movie has failed on all fronts.

Go marathon 'Marble Hornets' right from the 'Introduction' video, and see how this sh*t is meant to be done! (Best viewed at Night, curtains open, with very hot black Coffee)

I'll mention first that while I've heard of the Marble Hornets series, I went into this film with only a small notion of the slenderman mythos, as I've never watched any of the Marble Hornets videos. So this movie will be rated and reviewed as a standalone, from someone with no background in Marble Hornets.

"Always Watching" certainly didn't redefine the FF genre, although it at least had an excellent built-in explanation as to why the cameras continue to role even once things get bad. The editing, especially for the first 30 mins of the movie is pretty bad, as another person noted. That improved quite a bit in the second half of the movie IMO. I recognized all the leads, from one show or another, and they did well, though their characters weren't really fleshed out, and some of the dialogue was kinda lame. The premise was good, but the payoff wasn't really there. I see what they tried to do, they just didn't stick the landing..

Is this movie scary? Not really. You pretty much spend almost all of the movie looking the for the guy to show up lol. Maybe I missed him in a cpl scenes, but I thought he was kinda under-used... So much creep factor there, why not use it? But I was, admittedly, quite engaged with the movie throughout, and it gave my nerves a lil jolt from time to time.

I wish they had gotten more into why this stuff was going on, how it was going on, etc. All and all, I wouldn't pay much money to see it, I'm sure it will land on Netflix eventually. But if you like FF, or slenderman stuff, you may enjoy it.

The title of the review speaks for itself.

At this point the Found Film Footage genre is getting tired and old, only because these writers and directors aren't giving us anything we haven't seen already. They think that with the same scares, same annoying actors and same shaky camera with a whole new entity or monster will be a good idea. Wrong.

There was nothing interesting about this film, except they thought it was a good idea. The special effects seem cheesy, but something tells me that's what they were going for, but it didn't work even if that were the case. Once again the characters were unlikable and that seems to be a recurring theme since The Blair Witch Project.

You would think that a movie based upon the most popular creepypasta, Slenderman, would be a good thing. Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

The film seems it would be good to those of a younger age, which this film is not targeted with, with it's R rating. The film could have easily been a PG-13. It might be good for a watch if your high, but I wouldn't recommend it regardless.