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Very well executed

A lot of fun.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This has got to be one of the scariest Disney films I've ever seen. I saw this as a kid and found it very unnerving and ghosty. I couldn't follow the storyline as a kid, as I felt too afraid to watch it really. I watched it just tonight as an adult and the film gave me a few jumps and chills. It's a very gorgeously made gothic fairytale about a family who stay in an old mansion in the English countryside. The father is British but his wife and children are Americans. Bette Davies plays a scary lady who owns the house and she comes across as a sinister witch at first but soon you understand that she's always been a grieving mother. Her daughter Karen disappeared decades earlier while playing a game with her friends. Now those friends have all grown up and the solar eclipse is coming, so it's time to see what happens to unlock the mystery and find answers. The camera shots of the swirling woods and trees, the wind, flashing lights, breaking glass, phantoms, whispering voices, all makes a very disturbing and enchanting spooky story.

. . . to the Bette Davis from OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934), and returning home after 60 minutes to a Mom who's morphed into the Bette Davis of HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964). This is exactly what happens to Katherine Levy in this little-known horror movie released in the late 1900s. Though Ms. Levy's character has spent the intervening three decades (identical to the time span between BONDAGE and HUSH) sequestered in some sort of suspended animation under the nose of a nine-foot dragonfly orbiting earth in an UFO (at least in Alternate Ending #2), The Earth Has NOT Stood Still. Nearly half a century of chain-smoked coffin nails has reduced Bette's version of "Mom Aylwood" into a saggy baggy caricature of her former Sadomasochistic BONDAGE self. Any of the actors Betty Dissed in the 1930s who survived long enough to view THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS surely enjoyed "the last laugh" spying Betty Big Eyes portraying an apparent Rodent Queen in the spectacularly cheesy fright fest. Beyond witnessing Ms. Davis' physical demise, WATCHER's main takeaway is that "Karen" spelled backwards is "Nerak."

Florence Engel Randall's book "A Watcher in the Woods" becomes abysmal, dumbed-down entry in Grand Guignol territory by the Disney people, an unusually bland ghost story offering special effects galore but nobody to care about. Young girl's spirit haunts an isolated manor, with Bette Davis doing just-OK work as a spooky neighbor who helps the new residents unravel the mystery. Supporting players Carroll Baker and Lynn-Holly Johnson are acceptable, but the film's major set-pieces, designed for chills, fail to come off due to pedestrian handling. This is a thriller made by people who don't understand the genre, although the production values are up to Disney's high standards. Film is hurt overall by post-production tinkering; the finale, reworked twice due to poor audience reactions, is simply unsatisfactory. *1/2 from ****

Mediocre scare flick, rather dark for a Disney film but not really very frightening. Lynn-Holly Johnson is an appallingly bad actress ruining every scene she's in. Old pros David McCallum and Carroll Baker are wasted. Poor Bette Davis is spared nothing, made to look perhaps the worst she ever did on screen except in Baby Jane where at least she was supposed to look bad. She's still the most compelling presence in the film in her brief scenes. Weak special effects and a nonsensical story don't pull the viewer in, something that's crucial in a film like this. If you enjoy chillers there are dozens of films that would do the trick far better than this blah effort.