SYNOPSICS
Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (2015) is a English movie. James Moran has directed this movie. Alexandra Breckenridge,Chris Marquette,Jake McDorman,Doug Jones are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2015. Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (2015) is considered one of the best Horror movie in India and around the world.
On the hunt for an intriguing news story, a small-town news team follows a crew inspecting repossessed houses. Inside a particularly strange house, the news team discovers a box of video tapes inside a locked closet. Sensing a story, they decide to take them back to their studio. From the tapes, they learn that the family who had lived in the house was not pushed out by the banks, but fled the house in fear for their lives. Trying to decode the story, the crew keeps seeing a faceless figure dressed in a dark suit appear in the footage that causes the videotape to scramble. Their fear mounts when this figure, The Operator as he is deemed, starts to appear in their real lives, standing quietly and always watching them. Tortured and terrorized, the three crew members must track down the mystery of The Operator before it's too late.
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Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (2015) Reviews
Slendy' "The Operator" got down-sized. :P
I give this Film a 2, just because I'm a massive fan of the 'Mable Hornets' web series ~ So it gets the first point for that alone, and, I give the extra point for Doug Jones' involvement with it (He's one of Hollywood's most underrated Stars, IMO). But that's it. This Movie bears none of the originality, nor sinister foreboding contained within the outstanding 'Marble Hornets' web series. It's just very standard, bland, mediocre horror fare, that focuses way too much on God-awful jump scares, and not enough on creating actual paranoia based fear and eerie tension like the brilliant 'Marble Hornets' series did by the Fleet-load. And our Slender Man/Operator has been shrunk down to the size of a regular Guy, who looks like He's had a hankie thrown over His face, who's only shown in pathetic static little blips. What a waste of the aforementioned awesome Doug Jones. You'd think that a Feature-length Movie featuring 'Slender Man'/'The Operator' would create a much more substantial monster than the one delivered here. When a 0 budget monster, in a web series, is infinitely more terrifying than the one served up in a Movie ~ You know that Movie has failed on all fronts. Go marathon 'Marble Hornets' right from the 'Introduction' video, and see how this sh*t is meant to be done! (Best viewed at Night, curtains open, with very hot black Coffee)
Yet Another Found Film Footage With Nothing New
The title of the review speaks for itself. At this point the Found Film Footage genre is getting tired and old, only because these writers and directors aren't giving us anything we haven't seen already. They think that with the same scares, same annoying actors and same shaky camera with a whole new entity or monster will be a good idea. Wrong. There was nothing interesting about this film, except they thought it was a good idea. The special effects seem cheesy, but something tells me that's what they were going for, but it didn't work even if that were the case. Once again the characters were unlikable and that seems to be a recurring theme since The Blair Witch Project. You would think that a movie based upon the most popular creepypasta, Slenderman, would be a good thing. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. The film seems it would be good to those of a younger age, which this film is not targeted with, with it's R rating. The film could have easily been a PG-13. It might be good for a watch if your high, but I wouldn't recommend it regardless.
An average found footage movie that series fans will be all the more disappointed by.
I'm a huge fan of the Marble Hornets YouTube series. A little background for those who might not be familiar with it: Marble Hornets is a project by a group of film school friends, collectively known as THAC (Troy Has a Camera), that chronicles the disappearance of Alex Kralie and his friend Jay's attempt to find him. They are pursued by the Slenderman-like entity known as The Operator. This film, Always Watching, was not made by the THAC team but rather by a writer and director who have previous credits in more recent, mainstream horror. It does supposedly take place in the same world as the MH series. Anyone who isn't familiar with the series might like this film a lot more than I did. You certainly don't have to be to watch the movie, it stands on it's own. But even then you might be rolling your eyes at the same found-footage clichés the film falls back on. If you've seen other FF movies, aside from a few unique spins here and there, you've seen it all before. It doesn't do anything particularly well, but it's not terribly bad either. It really just reeks of mediocrity. The film follows a group of reporters who are doing a story on house foreclosure. When they stumble upon a box of tapes in a mysteriously furnished but abandoned house, they discover that the family had been stalked and tormented by The Operator, played by the famous Doug Jones. I'm absolutely mystified as to why Jones was involved in this project, because the director absolutely wasted his talent. I consider Doug a king in horror, he's an amazing creature actor that totally could have killed it as The Operator, but the director just decides to reduce him to standing and teleporting, and an occasional flick of the wrist. Doug does a great job with what he's given, but seeing how he's a perfect fit for a Slenderman character, I'm almost angry they didn't use him more. Wasted potential. The other actors actually do very well considering this isn't a huge-budget Hollywood flick. Their characters, however, aren't as compelling. The writer definitely tried to give them some emotion and character, and it shows, but ultimately it never really goes anywhere and you're just waiting around for them to die. Seeing as the Marble Hornets series characters are fantastically written, I would expect more. The movie isn't terribly scary. It has some tense moments, a few good jump scares, but it really loses it's steam about halfway through when it starts getting boring and repetitive. Fans of the series will be thoroughly disappointed with the general direction of the movie. I'm not sure if the director and writer were fans of the show before they made the movie, one would assume and hope, but they really miss the mark and fail to see what makes the series so special. The film was focused too much on action and scares and not about building atmosphere and a good mystery. It's a 90 minute movie, so I understand not having too much time to do that, but they could have made an effort considering it's supposed to be tied to the series. The biggest mistake they made was The Operator itself. They simply made too many changes from the series to how it acts. In the series, The Operator's motives and goals remain incredibly unclear. It never seems to want to kill or harm the characters, but rather torment them and drive them insane. It's never really implied that any of the characters are under control of the Operator at any point in the series. In the movie, however, it's made incredibly clear that all The Operator wants to do is possess and kill the characters after "marking" them. (Which is another pointless and stupid addition to the mythos, separating it further from the series. Why add that in? There was never any branding of the (x) symbol in the series.) Why he made these changes to the mythos mystifies me, because this is supposedly set in the same universe as the series. Watching it alongside the series, however, would be difficult due to the large amount of differences in how The Operator acts. To me, it seems like the writer or director wanted to make a Slenderman fan film, but wanted it to gain a little more attention and traction, so he got THAC (they were supposedly consulted) and Doug involved but then went off on his own and did his own thing. I think MH deserves a bit better from a feature length "Hollywood" film. The only redeeming parts to fans of the series will be the callouts to it. There are two distinct references to Marble Hornets that fans will be grinning at, these saved the movie from being a complete disaster to me. From a found footage standpoint, this isn't the worst I've ever seen. It follows most of the same conventions of every other small- budget FF movie. But fans of the series will be sorely let down.
Made me jump a few times
I want to start off by saying I watch a TON of horror movies, a new horror movie each night. I also never watched the "Marble Hornet" series on YouTube therefore I thought this movie was a lot of fun to watch. I never get scared in horror movies but this movie did make me jump a few times, which is rare these days (possibly watching this late at night helped as well). The director has produced a lot of other great horror movies so he knows what he's doing. The director also said this movie was in reference to slender man, I thought the idea was new and fresh. There aren't many slender man movies. As far as the first person shooting I thought it was well done. I don't think this movie deserves so many bad reviews. If you like horror movies and you're looking for a good movie to sit back and watch I really recommend this one.
Nothing New, But Not Terrible
Always Watching is another addition to the preponderance of found footage movies within the horror genre. I was getting tired of this gimmick a good number of years ago, but it obviously isn't going anywhere...and when it works it actually does end up leading to some worthwhile movies. This one is a bit of a loose take on the internet-created Slenderman trope, arguably the first entirely crowd sourced urban legend. The antagonist is referred to as The Operator rather than Slenderman, though the parallels are transparent. In this movie the antagonist only shows up on camera and a news crew working on a story about a family that disappeared happens across home videos that they are scouring for any information regarding the disappearance. The cameraman begins experiencing some encounters that have him (and his coworkers) questioning his sanity and he begins taking his video camera with him everywhere he goes. Though the human naked eye doesn't seem to he capable of seeing The Operator, the camera man's dog seems to see it just fine. I won't bother with drawing any correlations between this movie and the Marble Hornets' short films, because there isn't really a whole hell of a lot that actually connects them beyond the use of the name The Operator in place of Slenderman. There isn't anything new or really inspired in this movie to set it apart from other found footage titles, though it does have some good tense moments and a few decent jump scares. If you're looking for a creepier, more unnerving Slenderman experience, I would recommend playing the video game Slender: The Arrival, which has both a better atmosphere and more effective jump scares (in addition to being interactive, which is quite a bit more immersive). The movie isn't horrible, and the acting is pretty good for the sort of low budget found footage movie it is...so it isn't a waste of time to watch. But if you are looking for something that might be actually scary or really interesting I would recommend waiting for the upcoming CreepyPasta movie directed by Clive Barker. I suspect that his treatment of the Slenderman story will be be far superior.