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| COVER GALLERY |
| Film vitals |
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· Year: 1980
· Directors: John Hough, Vincent McEveety (uncredited)
· Writers: Brian Clemens, Rosemary Anne Sisson, Harry Spalding, Florence Engel Randall (book)
· Cast: Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson
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| Series info |
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· From the book by Florence Engel Randall.
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Amazon.com
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| Synopsis |
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A teenage girl is haunted by images of a person who strangely resembles her, then finds out that she is the key to solving a decades-old mystery.
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RATING
Out of 100 |
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45
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| 2.5 -ATMOSPHERE |
| 0.0 -GORE |
| 0.75 -HUMOR |
| 1.0 -SCARES |
| 2.0 -TENSION |
The Watcher in the Woods starts as a well-paced and relatively unsettling ghost story. And then the aliens attack. Or so the special effects made it seem; granted, the story goes in directions a viewer might not expect it to go, but its dips into TV-grade special effects and overacting diminish the atmosphere and come close to dumping the movie into silliness. After the aforementioned effective beginning, the progression of the story story doesn't help, either; perhaps it's because the movie's narrative jumps around so much that the characters make leaps of logic outside the bounds of normal thought; the characters in a movie have to follow its plot, so it's scatterbrained, they have to compensate. Watcher inhabits the strange realm of John Hough's other Disney movies Escape to Witch Mountain and Return from Witch Mountain in that it possesses a false sort of complexity that appeals to children but fails to keep adults interested.
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RATING
Out of 100 |
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60
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| 3.0 -ATMOSPHERE |
| 0.0 -GORE |
| 1.0 -HUMOR |
| 2.0 -SCARES |
| 4.0 -TENSION |
This is an average quality film for Disney, one of their children's pot-boiler genres, but there is something about it that puts it outside the ordinary. The aspect that most horrified me concerned not the action within the film so much, but future ramifications for the characters after the ending of the film. I am afraid this next part will be something of a spoiler.
[Highlight the area below to reveal the spoilers.]
The resolution looks like a typical Disney happy ending, but the returned daughter of Bette Davis' character is still the same as when she disappeared all those years earlier. Imagine, if you will, that you are a child playing make-believe with your friends, and suddenly you find that thirty years have gone by -- for everyone but you.
Your friends are now middle-aged, married, and parents of children older than you are. Your beautiful young mother has become an embittered old woman, and the entire world has become a science fiction fantasyland compared to the world you remember... but thirty years later you are still a thirteen-year-old child, and an anachronism. You have travelled, in effect, into the future, and you can never get back into your own time. That has haunted and chilled me since the first time I saw the film.
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