Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 11, 2006 and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
A movie called It Waits that marks as much time as this one does is kinda asking for it. The premise is more than serviceable: forest ranger Danny (Cerina Vincent), working alone (save for visits from co-worker/wannabe boyfriend Justin, played by Dominic Zamprogna) in a remote fire tower, begins to suspect there’s something nasty lurking in the surrounding woods, and is soon fending off attacks by the marauding monster. What could have been an exercise in unrelenting tension, however, is developed via a familiar succession of growling point-of-view shots, made-ya-jump cat, bat and bird scares and the predictable deaths of hapless supporting characters.
It Waits was produced (with Michael J. Dubelko) and rewritten (from an original script by Richard Christian Matheson and Thomas Szollosi) by television veteran Stephen J. Cannell, and indeed the narrative is gummed up with TV-ish stuff like a Tragic Incident in the Heroine’s Past, Danny’s tentative romance with Justin and, God help us, her talking parrot. The little squawker is helpful for Danny to explain her motivations and emotions to, and to deliver would-be comic dialogue like (when Justin visits) “Rape alert, lock up your daughters!” and, more than once, “This sucks!” Come to think of it, a movie full of lines like that and “The whole deal is just dumb and stupid” and “OK, this is getting more than a little bit tiresome” is kinda asking for it too.
When the movie runs out of story at about the hour mark, a Native American professor (Eric Schweig) is abruptly introduced to deliver mouthfuls of time-consuming exposition that attempt to tie together the monster’s rampage, ancient Indian legends and the “negative energy” Danny carries thanks to that Tragic Incident. The attempts to add meaning to Danny’s terrorization remain superficial at best, and if it doesn’t all make sense, well, even the professor helpfully admits that “This demon is riddled with contradictions.” That all of this goes down painlessly and even occasionally generates minor tension and excitement is a credit to Vincent’s sympathetic presence even when she’s reciting hokey dialogue, Steven R. Monroe’s pacey if sometimes overwrought direction, attractive location photography by Masters of Horror’s Jon Joffin and a nifty man-in-a-suit monster supervised by Tony Gardner. The beast’s physical presence is especially impressive once you learn (via the extras on Anchor Bay’s DVD) that only its top half was always shot live, the rest completed via CGI.
The scenery looks great and the night scenes properly spooky in the disc’s 1.77:1 transfer, and the 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks are equally topnotch. A making-of featurette called Blood on the Pines opens with Cannell relating an intriguing Native American myth that inspired him on this project—too bad it’s never referenced in the actual feature—before giving way to a mix of on-set footage and the cast and crew heaping praise on each other—and the parrot. Some of the behind-the-scenes material is fun, particularly where the creation of Gardner’s monster and Ryan Nicholson’s gore FX are concerned; particularly amusing is the discussion of a flesh wound worn by Vincent that came to be known as “the leg-gina.”
An audio commentary by Monroe and Vincent is raining anecdotes—literally. The weather during the shoot was consistently wet, it made things cold for the actors, it forced scenes to be delayed and picked up later, and we hear about it all in endless detail. There is some good discussion of the technical facets, the fact that certain locations weren’t as remote as they look (one was next door to a nudist colony!) and Vincent’s character—though the latter ends at the half-hour mark when the actress leaves the taping for a callback. And without specifically mentioning Jeepers Creepers, Monroe also takes a swipe at that film (to which his bears more than a few similarities) in the course of remarking on how “thought-out” this movie’s creature exposition is. But where that subject is concerned, It Waits proves that too much thought can be a dangerous thing.
