The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

Admirable film.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

a music box as axis of a horror who reminds old Gothic stories. Bettle Davis in impeccable role. a family in a strange place, in middle of traces of past. a film who impress for atmosphere and for the sparkles of old fashion instruments to define tension and fear and slices of a past incident who explains a strange form of survive. not extraordinary but useful for discover another side of Disney and admire its mark in a different form. short, a decent horror. useful for teenager, who are, maybe, its basic target but, in same measure , interesting for adults for remind the force of magic of memories preserved by ordinary objects. a film about strange events and obscure explanations. and that could be enough. for entertainment. for the flavor of 1980 cinema. for precise art to do a not bad story.

I rented this movie last night mainly based on all of the 9 and 10-star reviews on IMDb. Seriously guys, I'm starting to lose faith in the movie-reviewing public! The positive reviews all use the same clichés: (a) it's aged really well, (b) the acting is great, (c) the scenes with the girl in the mirror are really creepy, even by today's standards.Umm... no. (a) It hasn't aged well. It looks awful, the special effects are below par even for it's time considering it's Disney (it was the year after Star Wars and Jaws...), the plot is very sparse and very linear. (b) The acting is wooden at beast. The supporting cast are awful, David McCallum is underused, Bette Davis looks bored, and she was right: Lynn-Holly Johnson *is* a lousy actress. (c) The scenes with the girl in the mirror are tame - it's an ordinary girl, looking all 'fuzzy' and 'ethereal'. If the people who think this is frightening ever sit down to watch Ringu or the Woman in Black, they'll probably die of fright.But the most dire thing about this movie is the plot and its conclusion. It starts out a bit like Poltergeist or Amityville, but then becomes so repetitive and simplistic that it's just boring. In those movies, you have one parent who's a sceptic, one who's worried about the kids, and the kids themselves who're possessed. In this feature, one parent is never present, and one is completely oblivious to the danger her kids are in until she sees the possession for herself, at which point she does an immediate u-turn and tries to get outta dodge. No tension or character development whatsoever.There is no real logic as to how our heroine, Jan, actually works out that the hauntings aren't caused by a ghost, but by an interdimensional being. Then there's no logic as to why she messes up trying to send said being home - by putting herself in the same position as the victim all those years ago, then surely she's destined for the same fate? Sure enough, she is - she's *that* stupid.The saving graces of this film are that it's short, and the musical score is good. Unless you're desperate to relive the dubious side of 80s cinema, however, I'd give this one a miss.

i saw this only once when i was a kid. i vaguely remembered it, all i remember is a girl with a blindfold and a church. so many years later, my mom saw this on DVD and picked it up, thinking we might enjoy it. we had recently seen "something wicked this way comes", another movie i vaguely remembered as a child, which was really scary and excellent film, especially for Disney, and was very dark, and we thought "watcher" would be in the same vein as "wicked", since they were only made a few years apart. but it was definitely not. it was far worse! the ending with the "alien" thing or whatever, and some explanation of an "aternate reality" totally killed it for me. holly Lynn Johnson, though definitely a cutie, was REALLY bad acting. like, annoyingly bad. the story seemed to take forever to pick up, i didn't understand. Davis was not very good either. nothing stood out. i was especially disappointed that it wasn't a "ghost story" in the end, but some kinda scifi plot with switching the bodies back and forth because of some kind of weird chant the kids did in the chapel. didn't get it at all, and it got WAY too scifi. i thought the whole time it would be something supernatural. just lame. something wicked this way comes which came out a few years later was FAR Superior, genuinely scary, great acting, and just all around a better film from Disney studios.

"A Gothic horror film without the horror," is how my beloved "Psychotronic Encyclopedia" describes the 1980 Disney offering "The Watcher in the Woods," and although that accusation does have a ring of truth, an entertaining time can certainly still be had here. In the film, an American family comprised of two young daughters and their folks rents out an impressive mansion in the British countryside, and the two girls soon realize that some strange presence is attempting to make contact with them. Could it be the ghost of Karen Aylwood, who had vanished from the mansion almost 30 years before? An interesting setup, but the film, great as it may be to look at, is, sadly, a mixed bag at best. Lynn-Holly Johnson, who I'd only seen previously as a bratty Olympic hopeful in the 1981 Bond outing "For Your Eyes Only," is quite good in the lead as the older, detectivelike daughter, almost coming off like a Hayley Mills for a new generation. Playing her parents, the great Carroll Baker and former U.N.C.L.E. agent David McCallum are given too little to do in smaller roles, while the most formidable actress of Hollywood's Golden Age, Bette Davis, playing Mrs. Aylwood, the mysterious owner of the imposing pile, fails somehow to convince as a British matron. Perhaps worst of all, the film's ending is a rushed and incoherent mess that never adequately explains away all the assorted mishegas that had come before. (The picture's two previously filmed--and scrapped--endings, included as extras on this DVD, show that the usually dependable screenwriter Brian Clemens had no small run of difficulties in wrapping this story up!) Still, the picture somehow manages to please, mainly due to Johnson's sweet portrayal and some fabulous cinematography. (How great this film must have looked on the big screen!) And with that Disney imprimatur, need I even mention that this is one horror flick eminently suitable for watching with the kiddies? Indeed, they'll probably wind up liking it even more than Mom and Pops!