07/20/06 The Watcher In The Woods

The Watcher In The Woods (1980), directed by John Hough

watched w/ Leslie; DVD rental (Blockbuster) @ home

You would think by the title of this film that I was continuing a dark streak of potential family travel hazards, with edge-of-your-seat scares and gruesome tales of murder. Well, this one is sooooooo tame in comparison to "The Hills Have Eyes" it's not even funny...well, actually it is quite funny if you look at under an MST3K microscope. I think upon renting this Disney feature in the store, I was getting it confused with another that I recall from my childhood to be a potentially good scary/mysterious film called "Escape To Witch Mountain." As loveable and harmless as most Disney fare can be, they can also dive off the deep end into a hazy abyss of attempted occult chills...sometimes providing a scare for the little ones, but even here I would think the kids would not be impressed. What we have is another idyllic American family who decide to move to a baronial English manor (bad idea for a fun time) in order to escape the trappings of hub-bub city life. Upon arriving to the estate, they encounter the matronly Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis) who years ago lost her daughter in a bizarre and mysterious way. If the little old lady in the shed wasn't scary enough, the two young girls of the family (Jan and Ellie) begin to hear voices and see images coming from the dense wooded area surrounding the haunted house. With some youthful curiosities, the two girls explore the reasons for these ghostly messages to be appearing to them. What is found out is that Mrs. Aylwood's daughter had disappeared as a teenager when performing a strange ritual with friends in the woods during a solar eclipse decades before, and she is now supernaturally trying to communicate to the young girls. What is first dismissed by the parents as adolescent imaginations (they never believe the kids man!), soon is realized to be a psychic force so powerful it threatens the safety of the family and the home they have moved into. The effects, acting and storyline are so unbelievably cheesy, that it draws you in out of sheer youthful curiosity (much like the stupid girls who don't know when to back away). I won't ruin the dramatic ending of reenacting the bizarre ritual, but the only saving grace to the scenes are the DVD's choices of alternate endings. If you ever do stumble across this one in the woods, you have to check out the alternate sci-fi ending with the director's commentary. Hough (who also directed "Escape To Witch Mountain") begins to explain his ideas of the ritual teleporting one of the young girls into this extra-terrestrial spacecraft to save the missing daughter, who's been preserved in time, and battle evil aliens to bring her back to reality...uh, that seemed to be a bit too dark for Disney's tastes...but what a hilarious alternate ending! Especially if you sit through the whole film, this other ending is completely out-of-context, but so worth it. Ah, Disney and the paranormal.

2 out of 5 stars