Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story

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.

I'll mention first that while I've heard of the Marble Hornets series, I went into this film with only a small notion of the slenderman mythos, as I've never watched any of the Marble Hornets videos. So this movie will be rated and reviewed as a standalone, from someone with no background in Marble Hornets.

"Always Watching" certainly didn't redefine the FF genre, although it at least had an excellent built-in explanation as to why the cameras continue to role even once things get bad. The editing, especially for the first 30 mins of the movie is pretty bad, as another person noted. That improved quite a bit in the second half of the movie IMO. I recognized all the leads, from one show or another, and they did well, though their characters weren't really fleshed out, and some of the dialogue was kinda lame. The premise was good, but the payoff wasn't really there. I see what they tried to do, they just didn't stick the landing..

Is this movie scary? Not really. You pretty much spend almost all of the movie looking the for the guy to show up lol. Maybe I missed him in a cpl scenes, but I thought he was kinda under-used... So much creep factor there, why not use it? But I was, admittedly, quite engaged with the movie throughout, and it gave my nerves a lil jolt from time to time.

I wish they had gotten more into why this stuff was going on, how it was going on, etc. All and all, I wouldn't pay much money to see it, I'm sure it will land on Netflix eventually. But if you like FF, or slenderman stuff, you may enjoy it.

So I ran across two movies that seemed pretty similar; this and The Levenger Tapes. They're both found footage and I decided to go with this one first, after reading some reviews and seeing this also had a YouTube series, I figured it would be the better of the two. After watching them both, I highly recommend the Levenger Tapes over this. I found this pretty boring and started falling asleep at the end. This just didn't add anything new to the found footage genre. The whole "evil entity only visible through a camera" has already been done, so nothing exciting here. There's not really anything in particular that makes the movie awful, but nothing makes it entertaining either. Just overall boring with a played out premise.

Thus film just failed on all levels. Had some creepy scenes but they failed with me because i was so annoyed by the stupid characters and how they reacted to situations. Wasted my time thats for sure.

Apparently "Marble Hornets" the long-feature film is based on a series that can only be seen on You Tube. Personally I didn't know this series existed… No wait, let me rephrase that, personally I didn't even know there existed series that can only be seen on You Tube! Anyways, the series revolves on a fictional character referred to as Slender Man – although for legal reasons here re-baptized into 'The Operator' – who is a type of boogeyman-for-the-cyber-generation and appears in sinister internet videos rather than underneath your bed. The bad news, however, is that "Marble Hornets" is also one of those dreadful Found-Footage horror movies, which means that the hand-held camera-work is horrendous (and, no, it's not adding any atmosphere or suspense), the characters are underdeveloped and over- the-top hysterical most of the time and that the film ends suddenly and abrupt without any type of proper explanation. Sara and Milo are a not-so professional duo of news reporters, sharing a brief but uncomfortably awkward love history, are following around a team of evictors for a human-interest documentary. They enter a rather nice and well-decorated middle-class family house where the residents cleared rushed out of unforeseen and in a hurry. They stumble upon a pile of family videos and discover that the father became gradually paranoid – and righteously so – because he always spotted a sinister figure observing his family from a distance. This perpetrator can only be seen through the lens of a camera and pretty soon he's also stalking Sara, Milo and their obnoxious supervisor Charlie. If you disregard the connection with the Internet series, "Marble Hornets: The Operator" is an incredibly mundane and forgettable movie. The only remotely interesting added value in the script is the unhealthy relationship between the lead protagonists. For example, Sara and Charlie learn about the existence of The Operator when they stumble upon Milo's private videos in which he's stalking Sara. Both the appearance and the background story of The Operator aren't very interesting or scary, and he honestly doesn't do a whole lot apart from discretely standing in the background. If there ever was a movie that is suitable for Found-Footage fanatics only, it must be this one.