Jaden Jordan
- Aug 3, 2019
- 4 min read

They're Watching (2016)

Updated: Aug 3, 2021

The Breakdown: A film crew for an HGTV style show are sent to rural Moldova, where the locals are old school, and more than a little superstitious.

Watch If: You want to inflict (and I do mean inflict.) something truly unique on your friends and didn't hate it the first time.

Not If: You enjoy pay off in your films.

SECONDARY FACTS

Overall Rating: 2.0

Length: 1:35

Language: English

REVIEW

THE QUICK AND DIRTY

This movie can not decide what kind of movie it is, and therefore fails at being all of them, despite some promising aspects.

PREMISE:3

The beggining of this movie possesses a fun simplicity that borders on novelty: an HGTV style found footage horror. Not only is this a quirky take on an otherwise done-to-hell sub-genre, but it also offers a reason why we're seeing this found footage, and a canon explanation of why the footage is professional quality. Films that go for the "bad foreign backwoods" story hook, as this one does, have a bad track record, tending to be tasteless and tacky, something which this film definitely devolves into the further it progresses. Unlike most tourist horrors though, this one exaggerates the true assholeish nature of its protagonists, not only towards each other, but towards the locals. All in all, it's an entertaining combination of amateurish and overused tropes. At least, the first part is.

ACTING:3

This Section Has Spoilers

The acting in They're Watching is... fine. It's fine. The writing is terrible, and in some scenes that certainly makes it difficult to parse out whether the true shit-factor lies in what they are saying, or how they are saying it. After (I'm sorry to say) re-watching this film a few times, I have decided that it is the writing, not the acting, that truly gives this one its cringe factor. The characters just aren't believable characters, which is fine. It is a horror-comedy, realistic characters is not a make or break facet. However, the clumsy, ham-fisted Afghanistan backstory shoved in no-lube style for seemingly no greater purpose than to make the good-guy character more intense is a make or break thing for me. But given what they had to work with, the actors did a great job. I genuinely hated their characters, so much so that their deaths held no emotional value (and similarly little payoff)for me.

VISUALS:1

This Section Has Spoilers

I recommend you skip this part if you have not yet seen the film. Now, I can get behind some cheese level special effects as fast as any horror fan. I love them, I really do. Bad CGI gives my life a flurry of masochistic fire that I can only akin to that moment when you stop being as sick as you were, but you're not quite better yet, so you just get to bask in the contrast. I like to bask in bad CGI, is the point. But you do not, I repeat, do NOT, give me almost an entire movie of semi-reasonable content and a decently tense and consistent film style, only to then take your crayons and shit on the entire parade. It's too dumb to be scary, too random to be funny, and just so far out of left field that there's little you can so except furrow your brow and blink a few times, repeating "oh no" to yourself with every messily spliced rung down the ladder of decisions that someone one this film made. I could have lived with lightening bolts. I could have lived with telekinesis. Hell, I could have lived with the copious amounts of fake blood, but no all of them, and not, for the love of god, with the frogs.

ATMOSPHERE:2

They're Watching establishes itself and its supposed trajectory early on. We get a bit of humor, but not too much, and the characters are revealed to lack the ability to make decent decisions or be nice to each other. So far so good. We get the idea of this small town and its superstitions and the locals anger levels, fast, and the film builds some great tension as it rolls down its strange, but not unpleasant hill. But there is a point, and I do mean a specific, single frame, where all of that is thrown out the window. Where every aspect of tension and intrigue is shattered, ever precedent set by the film is annihilated, and any pact that the filmmakers had made with the viewers is lost, never to be found again.

DELIVERY:1

Let's talk about tone. Because this movie has a serious tone issue. We are talking a Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame level tone problem. (I love hunchback, but it's true. Don't @ me.) The attempts to make both a decently serious horror comedy and a cult-classic style pulp film only have one result: it means They're Watching fails at being both. It's too weird for me to recommend it to most people as good, but too serious for me to recommend it to my more pulp-and-gore comrades. It just... exists. But maybe that isn't a bad thing. Yes, it's poor film making, but I've also seen this film more times than I would like to admit, for the sheer pleasure of watching peoples faces when that mad-scientist switch flips. There arn't many films that making onto my "Oh, You Gotta See This" list, (you know, those films that are really bad, but not in a serious way, so you just get this unrelenting need to share it with everyone you know so that they can suffer the same way you did.) In short, my friends, it's bad, but it's a fun bad. Go inflict it upon the ones you love.