Watchers III

Watchers III (1994) is a movie I recently watched on YouTube. The storyline follows a group of convicts sent into the jungles of South America to retrieve an escaped science experiment. A golden retriever happens to be running through the same jungle that appears to be willing to help them...

This movie is directed by Jeremy Stanford (Trantasia) and stars Wings Hauser (Rubber), Gregory Scott Cummins (Cliffhanger), Daryl Keith Roach (Crocodile Dundee: Los Angeles), Frank Novak (Watchmen) and Christian Meier (Terminal).

The storyline and execution for this movie felt like a Predator ripoff...plus a dog. The opening kill in the jungle was fun; but unfortunately, probably the best part of the movie. The creature in this looks terrible and I'm surprised they put it on the cover of the film (they must have thought it looked good). Most of the horror scenes were a poorly executed man in costume sequence with limited gore but some good blood splatter here and there.

Overall, this is bad and not really worth your time. I would score this a 2/10 and recommend skipping it.

There are few movie series more repetitive than Watchers, however this third entry in a franchise nobody asked for actually takes the closest stab at originality you're going to find under the Watchers banner.

When I say originality, I mean for the series, because there ain't nothing original about Watchers III. This is as cookie cutter a Predator ripoff as you're ever likely to find.

The plot concerns a military officer named Ferguson (Wings Hauser) currently wasting his days away in military prison. He's offered the chance to lead a team of convicts on a top secret mission into the a Peruvian jungle to find out why they've lost contact with a base there. Of course this is a smokescreen, and horror's most mediocre double act Einstein the super intelligent Golden Retriever and the Outsider, his psychic-bonded mutant monster brother are loose in the jungle and the reason all previous personnel are dead. It isn't long before the team have adopted Einstein and are battling for survival against the Outsider.

Now, in addition to not being EXACTLY the same plot as the other 3 movies in the series, you may also have picked up that this also boasts a series first in the form of a degree of continuity. A soldier named Ferguson in trouble with his superiors was the leading character in the previous instalment, and while it's never explicitly stated, he also references a history with the dynamic duo of dog and devil. There's also plenty of stock footage, but this is Roger Corman, that doesn't inherently imply continuity.

What's interesting though is that despite this, he doesn't seem remotely perturbed by the fact the Outsider has completely altered in appearance. In the previous movie it was a largely bald but for patches of hair thing with a vaguely reptilian head that was so badly designed I don't know how to describe it. Here it's an entirely hairless, kind of crusty, exoskeleton looking thing with a massive, triangular crest at the back of its head. It reminds me of a mixture of the thing from The Fly II, the crustacean from Deepstar Six & something Screamin' Mad George came up for in the Guyver movies. It does honestly look better than what you see on the cover, but still far from good, which makes the decision to keep showing it in daylight all the more questionable.

I suppose it's to try keep things exciting, because it is an otherwise entirely bland affair, ticking every box on the way to genetic Predator-ripoff heaven. Diversely presented but one dimensional soldiers it's impossible to like, corrupt officials, shooting into the rainforest while shouting, it's all here.

Wings Hauser gets a good rep online in B-Movie circles, and while I've never been a huge fan (ok to be fair I've only seen a handful of movies he's in) he's...workable here. Which is just as well cause he's the best of an utterly contemptible bunch. It is a bit of a stretch to think he's meant to be the same character as Marc Singer played, although he is a fellow Beastmaster series alumni so I'll permit it.

As I said with the previous entry, I feel like if you're looking up Watchers III you probably already have a rough idea if you're gonna like it, and while it's certainly nothing resembling good, I've also seen much worse. You could probably cobble together quite a compendium of bad low budget horror movies set in the jungle made in the early to mid 90s, and this will slot perfectly in there.

Sent to prison on trumped up charges, an American Army officer named "Paul Ferguson" (Wings Hauser) is given a chance to receive a full pardon if he agrees to undertake a top-secret assignment. Essentially, a genetically engineered monster known as "the Outsider" (Carlos Gonzales) has gone on a killing spree in the jungles of South America and a squad of convicts are sent in to engage the creature. What they don't know is that they are nothing more than dispensable test subjects sent in to gauge the ability of the government's creation. Fortunately for them, a genetically enhanced Labrador retriever is also in this vicinity and it knows the Outsider better than anybody. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film is basically a low-budget clone of the movie "Predator" but with a few items incorporated from "Watchers" and "Watchers II" to preserve its integrity. Unfortunately, the melding of "Predator" and "Watchers" doesn't really work nearly as well as it should due in large part to the low budget and poor acting overall. Even so, I didn't think it was terribly bad and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

Horror novelist Dean R. Koontz has expressed unhappiness about several cinematic adaptations of his novels (like with HIDEAWAY). Though I haven't heard what he thinks of what Roger Corman did with WATCHERS, I think it's pretty safe to assume that he's appalled, especially since Corman has used the rights to the novel to make several awful movies, including this one. Where to begin? Well, even though the end credits reveal this was filmed in South America, it sure doesn't look spectacular. The various jungle locations look bland and all alike. The story is pretty slow, with not that much jungle action and gore for the first half of the movie. When we *do* see the monster, it's a shockingly bad creation - just imagine the monsters you have seen in 1950s Corman movies, and you'll have a good idea as to how this unconvincing creation looks like. I guess some of the gore effects aren't bad, and it's always good to see Wings Hauser, but the movie ends up being overall a bad and boring imitation of PREDATOR. With PREDATOR freely available for rent or purchase, there's no reason to see this third-rate imitation.

Yet another attempt to remake Dean Koontz's novel into a feature length film is yet another failure. This so called sequel adds some elements of Predator into another tired entry lacking in decent special effects and suspense. This time around a group of soldiers fall prey to a monster that is linked to a super intelligent dog and kills off everyone in its way.

Rated R; Violence.