This film's backstory is notoriously entertaining. The floundering Disney film division, still overseen by the late Walt's son-in-law Ron Miller, desperately wanted to make a movie that didn't look like it was made in 1955.......
They boldly stepped up to the plate with "The Watcher In The Woods", a moody, made-in-Britain mixture of mystery, ghost story and finally some incomprehensible science fiction......
That last inserted element, the sci-fi, ultimately proved the undoing of the film and Disney's high hopes for it......
Apparently, (and we're taking our best stab at describing this) the film's pivotal mystery....what happened to vanished young girl......was due to her accidentally swapping places with an otherwordly, interdimensional creature. This alien being, stuck in the English countryside, prowls around the woods in point-of-view shots, shooting occasional random laser beams.
For the film's big finale, in which girl and creature switch back to their proper places, Disney deployed its special effects artists to dazzle the audience with depictions of the creature, a large semi-reptilian thing with a pterodactyl wingspan, as well as its bizarre home base, or planet or dimension or wherever the hell it hung out originally.
Disney shot several versions of this sequence, none of which seemed to make the film any more coherent. (You can watch them all on the DVD) What's worse......and keep in mind this is long, long before CGI, the Disney special effects technicians' rendering of the alien was surprisingly slipshod and sloppy.......it looked a paper and plaster concoction you'd see on a float in a Halloween parade. Ed Wood Jr. would have approved.
Discarding all these special effects, Disney settled for letting the film hopelessly try to explain its convoluted mythology to an audience through snippets of dialogue from its grimacing, panic stricken actors. This did not work.
The reaction? An enormous, collective "huh?" from audiences who first laid eyes on it. In addition to the plot confusion, the film's scary sequences proved way too much for toddlers carted along by their parents. (The Disney marketing department, which in those days was probably more chaotic than the Trump White House, cautioned parents to go see the film themselves before taking the kiddies......to which a million parents duly muttered, ".....yeh, right...")
There's a ray of sunshine in all this......especially for those of us, like the BQ, who made a living as a buyer of movies for video stores. "The Watcher In The Woods" enjoyed a successful, resurrected life as a favorite of pre-teen and teen girls for their slumber party viewing.
Far be it from us to function as the Minister Of Culture, we loaded up stores with plenty of copies.......the girls loved all the mild scares in the film and we loved the return-on-investment from the rentals. Win-win all around.......for all we know, the slumber party gangs may have watched the movie enough times to figure out what went on in the ending.....(the VHS tapes did not include any of those deleted creature scenes)
We'll not go hard on "Watcher".......it's actually not a badly put together little thriller, briskly scripted and directed, respectively, by Brian Clemens and John Hough, two veterans of Hammer films and the glorious "Avengers" TV show. Throw in Bette Davis for extra creepiness and you still have a highly watchable film, even with all its well documented flaws.
From our interdimensional seaside lair, we'll shoot out 2 & 1/2 laser beams (**1/2).....would have gone for a full 3 if they'd left in one of those funky creature scenes....
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