Watchers 3 (1994)
I have to apologize to the fans of the Watchers series. I didn't see the first two before viewing Watchers 3. I acquired this film along with a bunch of other random sci-fi VHS tapes some time ago and thought "Why not? Let’s not wait for the first two masterpieces to find themselves on my doorstep; let’s just dig in!"
From my research, I pieced together that the first and second pictures deal with regular people encountering a couple of escaped top-secret experiments. Einstein is a super-intelligent golden retriever constantly pursued by a hideous bipedal creature known as OXCOM (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal). The monster is never actually after the dog, but rather anyone it touches. You befriend an adorable canine and next thing you know, your guts are strewn all over the place!
The film begins with the OXCOM (or as it’s known in this movie, “The Outsider”) being unleashed by the evil corporation that spawned it in a South American Jungle. Commander Ferguson (Wings Hauser, reprising his role from the second movie) and his team of commandos (including Gregory Scott Cummins, Daryl Keith Roach, John Linton, Lolita Ronalds) are sent to investigate. They don't know the mission is little more than a field test for the creature and Einstein!
Some time ago I watched DNA, a crappy knock-off of Predator and I had a good laugh at its expense. That film looks like the most original piece of fiction ever conceived next to Watchers 3. It’s got the bipedal monster that sees through bizarre heat vision and sneaks up on a team of soldiers, kills without mercy, and takes trophies from them, the action is set in a South American jungle, the team befriends a local who serves as their guide, we get a sequence where everyone panics and begins blasting at the jungle hoping to kill their stalker, then we get it again. We even have a climax where the hero has to build make-shift traps to take down the much stronger opponent… complete with the swinging log and the explosive arrows! If you host double-feature movie nights for our friends, you’ve got to track a VHS or DVD of this film and show it back-to-back with Predator, you’ll have a blast.
This is a bad film, but it's enjoyable. Seeing Ferguson have several conversations with a super-intelligent golden retriever that can write (if he holds a stick in his mouth), read, and pass our hero his gun when he drops it is hilarious. I just wish there were two or three dogs instead of just the one so I could call it “Predator Buddies”. Ain’t no rule a dog can’t be in a Schwarzenegger ripoff!
Aside from the uncanny resemblance to the 1987 action classic, you’ll be amused by several other aspects of the story. A kid sidekick accompanies the commandos. He’s completely useless, has no lines, and could have been dropped entirely to no detriment at all, but then we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of being “introduced to” Ider Cifuentes Martin, who as far as I can tell has never acted again. Another noteworthy aspect is the monster. It looks awful. It’s like a cross between Charlene Sinclair and beef jerky. That doesn’t stop it from tearing people limb from limb though! Quite the feat considering it’s got some of the worst monster vision I’ve ever seen.
I don’t even understand the name of this movie. Who are The Watchers? I assumed it was the monster and the dog, but that doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I’ll find out because to this direct-to-video picture’s credit, I enjoyed - probably not the way it was meant to - but enough to check out the first two movies. At barely an hour and 20 minutes long (excluding the credits), it's a fun bad movie. (On VHS, November 16, 2015)
