Watchers Reborn

I know they're not great, but I have enjoyed all four of the Watchers movies to some extent, each film piling on the hokey B-movie silliness and delivering some reasonable gore. Following in the footsteps of Corey Haim (the first film), Marc Singer (Watchers II) and Wings Hauser (Watchers III), Watchers Reborn sees Mark Hamill as L. A. police detective Murphy, who encounters Einstein the intelligent Golden Retriever, who is being tracked by a savage beast called the Outsider, dog and monster created in a laboratory by the government to act as a search and destroy team. Lisa Wilcox plays Grace, the scientist who created the super-smart dog and monster combo, and who reveals the truth about the experiment to Murphy.

After the very daft Predator-inspired jungle shenanigans of Watchers III, Watchers Reborn returns to the formula of the first two films, with Grace and Murphy on the run from both the Outsider and the government agents who will stop at nothing to keep the experiment a secret. Director John Carl Buechler (predominantly a special make-up FX artist) keeps up a reasonable pace, Hamill and Wilcox are decent enough, and Buechler's creature effects are craptabulous but fun, the monster looking like a man in a fancy dress shop gorilla costume wearing a rubber werewolf mask.

5/10 - follow the oranges!!!

Believe it or not, I have now seen all four of the Roger Corman-produced WATCHERS films. The best of the series was the mediocre WATCHERS 2, though as mediocre as it was, it looks like a masterpiece compared to this fourth entry. Things don't start well with the first few minutes seemingly consisting of stock footage, and things just get worse from that point on. Mark Hamill (who was one of the producers - did he really think this project was worthy?) looks and sounds very tired, like he had been sleeping in an alley for a week before coming onto the set. Actually, Hamill isn't really to blame, because the screenplay has various plot points and plot turns you have seen in the previous WATCHERS movies. There isn't really anything new here, which will make you wonder why Corman decided to do the same old things once again, especially since it looks like he had less money to spend than in the previous films. Even if you were involved in the production of the movie, there's no compelling reason to watch these end results.

I feel The Watchers-Reborn is a very well acted movie. Mark Hamill isn't a kid anymore. He grew up and did a fine piece of acting. It is a bit graphic in places and not well suited for younger viewers but the story-line is interesting and well written. Follows Dean Koonz's book far more than the first Watchers. See this film but don't expect to see Luke Skywalker!

A terrible movie here, folks. First of all, it's hard to review this film objectively. I REALLY enjoyed the book (one of my favourite Dean Koontz novels), and I'm way too much of a Mark Hamill fan (regardless of what everybody tells me). But this was a uniquely weak film. I've mentioned before that films with the potential for good/greatness are much more disappointing than those that were empty from the beginning. This is, what, the tenth attempt to make Koontz's "Watchers" into a movie, and again, somebody somewhere screwed up. I mean, what is the problem with this book? I can't tell you, except that even after several other tries, this one is particularly bad. The acting was sub-par, the violence hokey and unnecessary, the special effects laughable, and the editing was as bad as a sixth-grader with two VCRs. There were a couple of moments when I thought, "Wait a minute, maybe this won't suck," which made it all the worse when it did. "Nightmare on Elm Street 4 & 5"'s Lisa Wilcox wasn't spectacularly awful, just awful. The pathetic-but-didn't-have-to-be monster was never scary, and often so poorly done that I longed for another Ewok movie. I guess the once-great Mark Hamill should stick with cartoon voice-overs.

I loved the book too, and yes it's not exactly a blockbuster level of quality but it's workable. The story has been refactored for frugality but the basics are still there.

The dog hits his marks and plays along, it's nice to have Hamill roll out the drama in something serious and Lisa Wilcox makes a sincere effort at the cheesecake part. The outsider is cheesy but let's face it, to create the outsider the way that Koontz wrote it you'd need $10 million worth of CGI and it would still look fake.

If you haven't read the book in a while you can enjoy the memory. This does have an oddly dated feel to it, but then it is nine years old.