It Waits - Movie Review
What do you get when you take a legendary writer / producer who watched a double feature of Jeepers Creepers and Predator and decides to make a mash-up?
One of the worst movies I’ve ever sat through.
Let’s discuss.
It Waits is a dumpster fire—I mean creature feature horror film brought to us by legendary writer / producer Stephen J. Cannell. It centers Danny St. Clair (Seriously?), played by the beautiful Cerina Vincent. Danny is a park ranger with a dark secret that’s also being hunter by a dark monster in the dark.
I’ve gotta be honest. I didn’t even know the characters names until the credits rolled. There’s no plot.
I normally take notes when I watch movies for review, but this isn’t a normal situation. As Leslie and I got into the film we noticed right away that something was wrong. That something was everything. The only notes I took during the film are as follows:
It Waits - This blows. This movie feels like a rejected FreeForm TV movie.
I don’t have anything positive to say. So, to keep from devolving into a miasma of expletives I’ll just give my complaints in bullet points.
The dialogue is two steps down from a Lifetime original movie. I almost lost my mind when I saw in the credits that three writers worked on this script. THREE people said, “Yeah, this is cool. Kids will dig it.”
The acting is a step below Tori Spelling. No offense to Tori, but her main talent in life was having a father named Aaron Spelling. Every actor’s delivery is stunted and sluggish. Facial expressions are set in stone. Cerina Vincent’s performance was laughable. Whether she was crying, screaming, laughing, or performing in the sex scene… her face and vocal delivery doesn’t change. With how many terrible acting performances happen in the film, she floats to the top.
The film takes itself too seriously. This could have been a fun, so bad it’s good film, but the filmmakers decided to take a severe turn. The film tries to generate sympathy for the lead character by having a flashback to a night out drinking with her friend and her parrot (WTF) and they act like it’s fucking normal for someone to take a parrot in a giant cage out clubbing. This is just one example of how much of a farce this is.
The Parrot. This stupid parrot has more lines than any character in the film. At one point, the lead character tells one of the other terrible characters that Gray Parrots have a brain similar to a four year old, so you can have actual conversations with it. No, that is a flat-out lie. This Parrot is dubbed by an actor and throws out comic relief and shade like he’s the parrot from Aladdin.
The monster. Well, we knew what the monster looked like, because it’s on the flipping promotional material. For the first half of the film, you see through the monster’s eyes and see a brief glimpse of it. Too bad any suspense this would have caused is ruined by the creature being in full detail on the movie poster and the streaming thumbnails. Oh also, the monster is terrible. Awful CGI, half-assed partial application, and nonsensical lore lead to the monster being a joke. Yes, it dismembers people, but then it also stages bodies like a serial killer. It’s a wild animal and then its a genius level psychopath. The lore is revealed by a random character that appears near the end of the film who drops a bunch of vocab words describing that the creature is an emotional vampire that’s also a manifestation of depression, and because it’s a transgender man, it’s weak. I’m not even kidding. It is said that the monster used to be a woman which is it’s weakness. I am not transgender, but I have many connections to the transgender community from my time doing research for my book EDEN. I have friends who are trans. I was so offended by this point, I almost shut off the film. Why put that in there?
I can’t keep going.
Don’t watch this movie. Don’t put a cent in the filmmakers pocket. They don’t deserve it.
