They See You opens on November 1st with reports on the radio of missing kids and widespread panic. At the police station, Detective Daniels (Vince Bingham, United We Fall II: The Exposed Truth, Shadows Light) and Deputy Hasty (Jed Brian, Unlisted Owner, Fangs) are talking about the two kids sitting in the station and the strange board they have before going off to investigate the missing kids.
Miah Sanders (Tetra Lloyd, Drama for the Holidays 2, Quarantine) is not happy. His mother has been called into work leaving him to watch his brothers Stokely (Jack Gross, Weekend Warriors, Courageous Love) and Ben (Jace Carson, Spaghetti Face).
A trip into town leads to a bit of what they think is just petty theft when the brothers steal The Board of Samhain from a shop run by Mabry King (John Wells, One Must Fall, Wolf Hound) and his brother Parker (Jason Crowe, The Bloody Man, Hooker With A Hacksaw). We all know stealing magic items with evil histories never ends well, doubly so on Halloween. This will be no exception.
Director Tory Jones (The Wicked Ones, Angel) and co-writer Cheyenne Gordon (Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2, Scream for Summer) get They See You off to a rather shaky start. The reports of widespread panic are accompanied by footage of a man calmly raking leaves. And I have a hard time believing the cops would leave their only suspects/witnesses just chilling in the lobby. There’s also a lot of long-winded expository dialogue to sit through as well.
Once we get past the first half hour and the brothers, along with Miah’s crush Cammy (Harper Dawahare, Placid Park) unwittingly unleash a horde of demons things do pick up. The kids plus the King brothers, (that was their younger selves in the police station prolog), have to send them back to where they came from and close the portal they opened.
They See You was filmed on a low budget and it shows. Whatever the things they summoned are supposed to be, they wear Halloween masks for much of the film When they finally remove them the makeup effects are very minimal. And, as is usually the case in films like these a lot of the killing is done off-screen. That said, we do get some fairly bloody on-screen deaths, and it’s not always who you expect that dies.
Unfortunately, there aren’t that many other surprises to be found in They See You. The plot is cobbled together from The Barn, Night of the Demons, Supernatural, and a few other familiar films. And much of the last half of the film is simply the leads running from the creatures and getting the people they meet in the process killed.
It’s also full of huge lapses in logic and careless mistakes. From characters going in the hot tub in their underwear, only for it to be dry in the next scene to the creatures being able to magically know the brothers’ names but not see through smoke from a flare. And since the King brothers knew what the board could do, why was it on display in their shop rather than locked away somewhere?
They See You had some potential but suffers from an incredibly sloppy script that really needed a rewrite to fix all of its gaffes. Most of all it needs a new final scene because, while I won’t give it away, it ends on a note so incredibly and unbelievably stupid I had to watch it twice to be sure I wasn’t missing something.
Deskpop Entertainment has released They See You to various Digital platforms including Tubi. You can check the film’s Facebook page for more information. And you can check FilmTagger for more films like this.