Watchers (1988)

1988
Directed by Jon Hess
Starring Corey Haim, Michael Ironside, Barbara Williams and Lala Sloatman

Folks, it's time to take a trip back to 1993 for some boring life and times of Jon Lickness.  One of my brother's friends borrowed us a tape containing the the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd flick The Great Outdoors...a favorite of mine from my very, very early childhood.  Little did I know that I would wind up watching the movie that was recorded BEFORE it a whole lot more.  Over the course of three months, I probably watched...um...Watchers a good 15 times.  Something about it just really connected with the fourth grade version of me.

I think what it was then was Corey Haim.  I hadn't seen that many horror flicks before this one, but, kiddie version of Haim's License to Drive costar Corey Feldman in Gremlins notwithstanding, this was the only one I'd seen where the main hero was (a) a dude, and (b) a pretty damn cool dude who shot guns and had a hot girlfriend.  Hell, I wanted to BE Corey Haim in this movie.  I'm fairly certian that I'm the only person in the history of the world who has ever uttered that sentence.

The flick starts in a top-secret government facility, where an explosion and fire sets two experimental animals free.  One is a cute golden retriever, the other is a large, beastly biped that we only see in shadows during these early segments who seems to be tracking the dog.  The dog is eventually able to outrun its pursuer and hide in a barn, where Travis Cornell (Haim) is busy attempting to mack it with his girlfriend Tracey (Lala Sloatman, who had gained a slight amount of traction at the time as a pop star and was dating Haim in real life).  One beast attack later and the dog is in Travis' possession, and this is where the flick gets far more interesting.

Travis discovers that the dog is extremely intelligent, able to understand English, communicate via typing (don't ask), and solve complex problems.  It seems that the dog (which Travis creatively names "Furface") is a kind of government weapon.  Meanwhile, an NSO Agent named Johnson (Michael Ironside, definitely one of the all-time greatest movie scumbags) has been assigned to track down the dog and keep the project under wraps. 

It isn't long before some deaths start piling up.  The animals were designed with a kind of internal tracking device, meaning that the beast (called an "OXCOM" in the film, standing for Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) is able to psychically follow the dog, and since the much smaller, much cuter animal received far more adulation and attention in their government home, the OXCOM decidedly hates the dog and pretty much anyone and anyplace that it has come into contact with.  This idea really is the story's ace, as the dog serves as a death sentence for anyone it comes across.  There are some admittedly suspenseful moments that take place as the game of cat-and-mouse goes underway, as three of Travis' buddies bite the dust (somewhat humorously, when it comes to the requisite "nonathletic" character's attempts to get away on his Huffy) in the woods and the fate of police officers and staff members at Travis' high school.  This stuff scared me as a kid, but for whatever reason, I just kept watching.  The Watcher.  [/tomatoes]

The B story in this film heavily involves Ironside, and his various shady dealings including keeping a sedated Tracey prisoner and outright murdering people who have seen too much.  I don't think that's too much of a spoiler; one look at this guy's face is pretty much all you need to know that he's EEEEVIL anyway.  It's here where the movie loses a little bit of steam.  Whenever the OXCOM and the dog aren't the main focus, we're privy to a bunch of characters who aren't particularly interesting.  Call it a necessary evil.  It might not have been the most logical thing in the world to have this movie be 90+ minutes of nonstop gigantic baboon murdering.  All of it builds to a big showdown at a cabin owned by Travis' late father where he gets to utilize a rifle and all sorts of Home Alone-style traps in an admittedly suspenseful finale where both the OXCOM and Ironside are present.

Anyway...this movie is based on a novel by Dean Koontz.  A novel, it should be said, that I took the plunge in reading many years after my 11-year-old binge-watching sessions.  And it...is...awesome.  It ranks right up there with anything that I've read by Stephen King, and in some respects might be even better, because I can't remember any King book (with the possible exception of Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone) that had lead characters as likable.  A lot of the criticism of this film seems to stem from the idea that it takes the concept of the book and essentially changes everything else, changing Travis from a 30-ish sympathetic widower to a cool teen and his love interest from an emotionally abused, attractive adult to Lala Sloatman.

Yeah, this movie is NOT as good as the novel.  And yeah, a critic who knows their movies will tell you that this flick is pretty bad, but I don't care.  Call it nostalgia glasses or just being a moron.  In my eyes, this concept really is something that is hard to screw up too badly.  Well, if sticking with the VERY rough outline of the novel, anyway, because one of the sequels of this film essentially rips off Predator and might be one of the suckiest suckfests that ever did suck.  This movie, though, has a cool hero, some solid kills, and a main villain in the OXCOM that freaked the holy hell out of me as a kid and still makes me occasionally think about it when I leave my house around 11:45 to go to work.  No joke.

*** out of ****.  Highly recommended if you can find it on the cheap, which is a tall task these days.