Watchers (1988) – WTF Happened to This Adaptation?

While I still have some fun classic sci fi stories to address coming up, I wanted to break off and take a look as well as give props to one of the more prolific yet slept-on horror authors to get adaptations. Stephen King is the all-time number 1 but there are others in the 20th century that could at least eat at the same table as him. For the younger generation, that certainly means R.L. Stine has entered the conversation and maybe we will get to an adaptation video about his recent Fear Street collection but the guy I’m thinking of is a little different. Dean Koontz is often derogatorily referred to as a poor man’s Stephen King but he has sold and made millions while having plenty of his works turned into films. While The Funhouse from Tobe Hooper will certainly be discussed at some point as I had no clue it was based on a Dean Koontz novel and we all know that Ben Affleck is the bomb in Phantoms, today I want to look at a forgotten adaptation that somehow turned into a forgotten series of films. Get your Scrabble boards ready as we find out what happened to Watchers.

The Movie

Dean Koontz was already a solid name in the literary world by the time the late 80s rolled around. Well, he had, and he hadn’t at this point. Koontz wrote under a number of pseudonyms so while his books were fairly popular, his name hadn’t quite gotten there. 1987’s novel Watchers though seemed to skyrocket him into prominence. He had a couple of movies made before this with Demon Seed starring Julie Christie and the previously mentioned Funhouse directed by Tobe Hooper, but a couple of factors led to Watchers being greenlit. First was the book being a massive success for the author and second was the ridiculous star power of Corey Haim. Haim had made two successful horror films over the previous three years with another adaptation for 1985’s Silver Bullet and 1987’s The Lost Boys. The movie was picked up by Coralco pictures for production and would be distributed by Universal. Shot on location in Vancouver British Colombia in a little over 5 weeks’ time, it would eventually become the most expensive American movie to use the Canadian tax shelter laws, though I can’t find a budget for the life of me.

One of the producers on the film was Roger Corman and while this movie did not do well critically, with Leonard Maltin famously calling it awful and giving it a generous 1 and a half stars out of 4, nor commercially with it making just over 940k at the box office, Corman was able to get 3 direct to video sequels made which I’m sure made that man money. The original script was started by eventual Oscar winner Paul Haggis, but a writer’s strike forced him to halt the process. A Canadian producer named Damian Lee took over and when Haggis read the script, he took his name off and I don’t entirely blame the dude. He did keep his WGA pseudonym Bill Freed on it though. Damian Lee has a longer than expected resume but not all for the better. He will forever be known as the writer and director of Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe starring Jesse Ventura, and if you haven’t seen that one yet then pause the video and watch it now before finishing up here. You can thank me later.

The director ended up being Jon Hess who also gave us Excessive Force written by and starring Thomas Ian Griffith and a supporting cast too good for the final product and the entertaining dumpster fire that is Alligator II. The cast includes Corey Haim, who I actually met while managing a Blockbuster in Huntington Beach, California, Michael Ironside, Duncan Fraser, Blu Mankuma, Barbara Williams, and a young Jason Priestley who is simply credited as “Boy on Bike”. Mankuma is in over 200 projects as a reliable character actor, Fraser you may recognize from Needful Things, and Barbara Williams has had a steady career for almost 40 years. Ironside, as he often does, steals the show here as a psychopathic member of the company involved in the main story. His credits are massive and cover nearly every genre imaginable including video games and animated voice over but, in this video, I’ll give shoutouts to Visiting Hours and Highlander II. One other crew member of note is the score was done by Joel Goldsmith who is the son of Oscar winning composer Jerry Goldsmith.

The movie was released on December 2nd, 1988, to the previously mentioned dismal results but found life with sequels in 1990, 1994, and 1998. Sadly, at the time of this writing, it’s hard to come by both streaming and physical media but all 4 movies are available for free on YouTube with sub-par visual quality.

The Book

Dean Koontz was born in July of 1945 in Pennsylvania and like many creative types dealt with issues at home. In this case it was an abusive alcoholic father that would end up influencing his writing. He went to Shippensburg University where he won a fiction award in his senior year and also married his high school sweetheart whom he is still with nearly 60 years later in one of the nice stories regarding famous folks. While he was a high school teacher in the mid-60s he decided to mess around and become an author with his first book, StarQuest, published in 1968. He would go on to write over a dozen sci fi novels but transfer to horror and thrillers in the 1970s. He would begin using multiple pseudonyms as he was told it’s the best way to get all his creativity out while getting new readers but not alienating his existing audience.

1980 would bring a breakthrough novel in Whispers. While he had a couple other books hit over a million copies sold, this was the first one under his real name. Later in the decade he would see his first best-selling hardcover novel which is a big deal for authors and would give him financial stability that he was missing. Just a year after Strangers, he would release Watchers which was another solid hit and is often seen as his most popular work. It also showed his love of dogs as you can tell with one of the main characters and that love would spill into millions in charitable donations towards canines. He continues to write and remains a popular author in the horror genre while living in Orange County, California where many of his stories take place. This book was recommended to me by my dad who also recommended it to my oldest son years later as I’m sure many fans of the book have done generationally.

What is the Same?

Watchers sees a hyper intelligent dog find its way to a human named Travis after escaping a laboratory. The dog is found to be genius level for a dog and can communicate so he is named Einstein. There was another creature that escaped the lab that is hunting for Einstein and ends up taking people’s eyes when it kills them. It has the base features of a baboon but has the claws and mouth enhanced for increased ferocity. Nora, who is connected to Travis, ends up helping with both protecting Einstein but also fighting off the creature while other characters like Lem are on the hunt for both Einstein and the other creature with some of them being good and others out for their own means. A final stand with makeshift weapons happens in the woods area of a forest town where the villain hunting them and the other creature are both killed by Travis. Einstein is hurt while fighting the other creature, but he survives and stays with Travis and Nora.

What is Different?

The preceding section covers a ton including the beginning, middle, end, and most of the main characters but all of it is thrown into a blender to move things around to give it the reputation of “loosely based” on the source novel. That is very accurate as apart from the most basic outline, the two stories tell nearly completely different tales. Starting with the characters we have movie Travis as a young rebellious guy played by Haim and in the book, Travis is a 36-year-old former Delta Force soldier who is alone after fearing he is cursed with everyone close to him dying. Nora, who is the mom in the movie (which hilariously the same actress would play a love interest for Haim in a later film) but Nora in the book is a hermit woman who then ventures out and runs into Travis. Lem in the book is an NSA agent who is looking for Einstein and the Outsider but is turned into a different movie character while Lem more or less becomes Vince who is an assassin in the novel.

Both escaped creatures have a lot more depth in the novel with Einstein ending up surviving an illness and having puppies with a mate at the end of the story while the Outsider, or OXCOM has a lot more tragedy to its core. It takes the eyes of those it kills because it knows it is ugly to look at and feels shame. It is also violently jealous of Einstein, which is why it wants to hunt it. Nuances like these give the book more heart and at over 600 pages, make it difficult to put everything on screen in a typical 90ish minute movie. Einstein communicates a lot differently in the book too with him using a scrabble board to “talk” while that scenario is made of light reference with Travis and the dog playing scrabble together near the end of the movie.

The assassin Vince in the book, who Michael Ironside plays a version of here with a different character’s name, thinks that every person he kills gives him more power and inches him towards immortality while also looking to sell the super intelligent dog. Ironside tells other characters and the audience near the end of the movie that he is a secret third experiment. A killer made with no remorse. Other things left out entirely due to character role changers are Nora having a stalker and her aunt being crazy and emotionally abusive as well as her and Travis ending up together and even becoming pregnant. Theres a whole group of underground scientists that are there to expose what was being worked on, but they too are excised from the screen version.

Legacy

While the film spawned 3 sequels and should have worked with its cast and source material as well as being in the right time frame for the ingredients to gel, it falls flat. The movie is a long watch at only 86 minutes even with unhinged Michael Ironside and some fun gore effects. I’m sure it has a ton of fans out there, but it is rightfully forgotten to time. I’d still love to see a big box set Blu-ray release for the sake of preservation but the book is far superior and will be recommended much more often as one of horrors best writers best entries. Watchers could have been fun but instead drops the ball while the book still mostly holds up even with some stale caricatures and scenarios that we’ve seen before. The choice between which Watchers to watch is an easy one and you should keep the film version as an Outsider.

A couple of the previous episodes of WTF Happened to This Adaptation? can be seen below. To see the other shows we have to offer, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!

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