'80s Roulette: WATCHERS

Come for the crappy monster, stay to watch a dog outsmart Corey Haim

I have (almost) every single movie released in theaters in the ‘80s in the United States on a hard drive and once I week, I’m going to hit shuffle and review whatever film comes up first.

Welcome to ‘80s Roulette!

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DECEMBER 2, 1988

Watchers
Michael Ironside, Christopher Cary, Graeme Campbell, Dan O’Dowd, Lala Sloatman, Corey Haim, Dale Wilson, Blu Mankuma, Colleen Winston, Duncan Fraser, Barbara Williams, Lou Bollo, Jason Priestley, Matt Hill, Andrew Markey, Norman Browning, Ghislaine Crawford, Justine Crawford, Tony Lung, Keith Wardlow, Don S. Davis, Freda Perry, William Samples, Suzanne Ristic, Frank C. Turner, Phillip Wong, Sandy the Dog
cinematography by Richard Leiterman
music by Joel Goldsmith
screenplay by Bill Freed and Damian Lee
based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz
produced by Damian Lee and David Mitchell
directed by Jon Hess
Rated R
1 hr 31 mins

A research dog and a genetically-created monster escape from a lab and a teenage boy and his mother get caught up in the desperate search for them.

In high school, one of the shared secret languages I had with my friends was the discovery of new books or new authors. One of us would read something, and then if we liked it, we’d pass it along to the rest of the group, and then we would track down more work by that person or more examples of that genre, and little by little, we turned each other on to all kinds of writers and books, some great, some trashy, some high art, and some almost defiantly low.