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Home Entertainment: ‘Keep Watching’ DVD Review

A suburban family finds themselves terrorised by a masked group of assailants in the latest DTV horror, Keep Watching. Directed by Sean Carter, a first-time feature director, the film stars Bella Thorne, Ioan Grufford, Chandler Riggs, Natalie Martinez and Leigh Whannell, and is a debut that shows a lot of promise.

Keep Watching Review

Jamie (Thorne) is a troubled teenage girl at odds with her family. Struggling to cope with both her mother’s death and her father’s new wife, she spends most of her time in the seclusion of her bedroom. Unbeknown to her however, she has attracted the attention of a dangerous group of individuals. This group are murdering their way through ordinary households whilst streaming the whole ordeal live on the internet. After arriving home late from a stay away, Jamie and her family finds themselves terrorised reality TV stars.

With elements of hidden cameras and home invasion, Keep Watching has things in common with The PurgeHangman and Funny Games; its not the most original idea on the market. What Carter has managed though, is to craft a suspenseful thriller. The opening twenty minutes or so weave together all of our character dynamics and set the viewer up for what is to follow. Once under attack, the film is equally strong, Carter choosing to use minimal score to really draw out the tension of the scenes. With everything on screen so quiet, the audience too has to hold their breath to try and hear whether there are any dangers lurking. Unfortunately some of this dissolves towards the end; one too many scenes happen in too much darkness and it becomes a little confusing to work out what’s going on. The lack of light also makes it a little difficult to fully work out the geography of the home. Typically in films like this the opening section is spent walking the viewer around the house, but with Keep Watching we are simply thrust into places that we have never seen and are expected to work out how they fit in with what has been shown to us already so far.

All the cast are seasoned professionals, most being very familiar with the horror genre, and therefore turn out respectable performances. Bella Thorne holds the film together bravely and displays a nice amount of spunk from the outset. Chandler Riggs’ inclusion will keep fans of The Walking Dead entertained, but he spends most of the film taking a backseat. He also gives away the fact that it has taken a while for Keep Watching to make it to screen; he’s clearly a few years younger, and it’s before his Carl hair really grew in.

On the whole Keep Watching offers up enough suspense, tension and entertainment to easily pass a Saturday night.

Keep Watching is available to own on DVD now. 

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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