Watchers III Reviews

More a tenuous remake of WATCHERS than an actual sequel, this Roger Corman production takes the story line in a different--but very derivative--direction. At the Leavenworth military prison, jailed Delta Force veteran Ferguson (Wings Hauser) is offered a full pardon, reassignment, and back pay if he accepts a covert military mission into Central America. He agrees, and helicopters into the jungle with fellow military convicts Benetti (Gregory Scott Cummins), Nat (Daryl Roach), and MacCready (John K. Linton), along with pilot/guide Gomez (Lolita Ronalds). There they discover, not the American base they had been instructed to investigate, but a camp full of massacred Central American soldiers. They also encounter a young boy (Ider Cifuentes Martin), the sole human survivor of the carnage; a golden retriever with super-intelligence (it spells out "DANGER" in the ground with a stick); and a humanoid monster that kills MacCready. What the soldiers don't realize at first is that their movements are being tracked by US military intelligence via satellite. But Ferguson soon recognizes the dog as Einstein, part of a government experiment he'd once worked on called Project Aesop; it was his defection from the project that led to his imprisonment. Einstein has been trained to infiltrate enemy camps and serve as a living homing beacon for the monster, and Ferguson realizes that he and the others are being used as a field test. They plot to kill the beast, but it dispatches Gomez, Nat, and then Benetti, just as he reaches the helicopter in an escape attempt. Reaching the chopper himself, Ferguson finds (with Einstein's help) that it's been wired to explode should he try to take off. He uses the bomb as part of a trap that destroys the creature, then sets off with the boy and Einstein toward freedom. Bestselling author Dean Koontz, on whose 1987 novel Watchers all three films are based, sued New Horizons over the significant use of his name in III's promotional materials, and it's easy to see why. Aside from the basic story of the linked dog and monster, the movie bears little resemblance to Koontz's novel. What it does resemble is PREDATOR, with its jungle setting and soldiers-vs.-alien plot. There's also a setup lifted from THE DIRTY DOZEN, not to mention a touch of ALIENS in the character of the youthful survivor of the early massacre. And despite the backstory of Ferguson's previous involvement with Project Aesop, there's no real connection between this movie and the previous WATCHERS films, which themselves bore no relationship to each other beyond the same general plot. Given the redundancy of the whole enterprise, it's doubtful that even first-rate filmmakers could bring much excitement to WATCHERS III. Jeremy Stanford directs competently for the most part, but has trouble with the infrequent big-scale action; during the opening massacre, the soldiers seem to be aiming their weapons at each other and the trees rather than the attacking monster. Juan Duran's cinematography does create some effective night atmosphere during the opening reels, though most of the action is disappointingly staged in broad daylight. The actors go through the motions, neither condescending to nor elevating the material, and if some of Hauser's histrionics are dubious, they're at least more convincing than the monster, which looks like a walking pile of melted latex. (Graphic violence, profanity.)