Movie Review: It Waits

The name of this film screams out for a pithy, glib assessment of its quality using a structure parallel to the title. "It" stands for the movie and a present-tense verb describes the experience of viewing "It".  This is appealing in that it has the simplicity of the thumbs up/down Siskel & Ebert style of review but adds the subtle connotations of the verb one chooses to place after the subject.  While it's easy enough to think of how one expresses the most extreme reactions to a film using this new method (for instance: It Rocks! or It Sucks!), so much more fun can be had with vaguely absurd yet honest assessments such as It Meanders!, It Suffices!, or, my own favorite and one that describes my reaction to It Waits perfectly, It Tries!

My patience, to be precise, is what It Tries.  It Waits is wrapped up in a sturdy package of inconsequence. The story is pat: a young lady is forced to draw upon her deepest survival instincts to save her skin from a threatening, mysterious beast in the deep, treacherous forests of the American wilderness.  The direction is a stale rehash of overused tried-and-true horror filmmaking: POV shots of the monster stalking its prey, gore, etc. In fact, the only things that distinguish It Waits from others of its ilk are a talking parrot that reminds one of Gizmo from Gremlins and an unusually affecting back story for its protagonist.    

The young woman, you see, is a forest ranger, overcome with guilt over her culpibility in the death of her best friend.  Despite the strapping young boyfriend who's willing to talk about her problems to a fault ("Whatever it is you're hiding… it's diminishing you," says the concerned beau [awww]), she'd rather take the jobs that let her remain alone in an isolated cabin.  Here she sort-of tends to her rangerly duties, but most of her time is spent grieving and talking to the parrot (who, with a perfect mimickry of cold-blooded intelligence, keeps asking innocently posed questions about the grieved-for dead friend).

As our mythmakers would have it, nature abhors a young lady of child-bearing age withdrawing herself from society, and, so, must send forth a demon to help her regain her cultural faculties.  Of course, this means she'll have to get in touch with her fightin' parts and find that, despite having monstrosity within her, she's really an okay person and fit to rejoin the living.  And that's what happens here.  Ho hum.  All of the interesting character bits are swept aside once the monster attacks start; the heroine's defensive maneuvers aren't any different from Laurie Strode's or Ellen Ripley's. Too bad, then, since her self-loathing makes her more interesting as monster prey than is usually found in the pristine virgins or warrior moms of other horror films. Too bad, also, that the acting of Cerina Vincent as our heroine is best left unmentioned.  Whatever strengths are found in the characterization of the heroine can be safely attributed to the writing.

Worse still: the monster is uninteresting.  The opening scene and an exposition-spouting character suggest that this blood-thirsty creature has something to do with Native Americans, but these intimations fade into vagueries and are left behind as the movie fulfills its plot obligations.  The design of the creature doesn't help matters as it has a simplistic skeletal look and wings borrowed from the baddie in Jeepers Creepers.  There's no identity to the thing, nothing about it that centers it as an aspect of this particular environment or as an aspect of the main character's psyche.  The creature in It Waits would be perfectly comfortable scaring things wherever you put it; whether it was in a forest, a space station, or a studio apartment, the results would be about the same. (It Makes Do!)  Thus, we're left with a generic monster terrorizing a bland actress.  Not exactly the stuff that freezes one's blood or quickens the pulse.