Review #109: See No Evil (2006)

Trailer:


Cast/Notable Credits:
Gregory Dark (Director): Animal Instincts Trilogy

Christina Vidal (Christine): Chasing Papi (2003), Freaky Friday (2003

Michael Pagan (Tye): Fallen (1998), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Gridiron Gang (2006

Samantha Noble (Kira): The Gates of Hell (2008)

Rachael Taylor (Zoe): Man-Thing (2005), Transformers (2007)

Penny McNamee (Melissa): Salem's Lot (2004) (Pictured Right)

Glen Jacobs (Jacob Goodnight): WWE/WWF wrestler Kane

A veteran police officer, Frank Williams, and his rookie partner respond to a noise violation at a Los Angeles home. Upon knocking on the door, they hear a woman scream. They bust into the home and find a women on the floor crying. Williams bends down to check out the woman, while his partner checks the next room. His partner is then viciously killed by an unknown assailant, Jacob Goodnight (Kane) and then Jacob attacks Williams. The attacker chops off his left arm, but Williams is able to fire at shot off at him and hit him in the head. The attacker flees, leaving Williams in critical condition and his partner dead. Williams shines his flashlight on the woman is notices that both of her eyes have been removed.

For years later, Williams has become a parole officer/detention guard, and his left arm has been replaced with a plastic prosthetic. Williams and another female officer, Hannah, lead a work release program for eight troubled youth inmates. The program requires the inmates to "clean up" the historic abandoned Blackwell Hotel. A rich man named Blackwell purchased the 9 story hotel back in the day for his own pleasure. Somewhere over time, a fatal fire on the 8th and 9th stories caused the hotel to be condemned and inoperative.

Years later, an older lady, Margaret has decided to renovate the hotel and use it to house the homeless. Margaret went to the courts and with the help of Williams and Hannah, allowed county inmates to help clean the place up in exchange for good time off their sentence.

Now Williams leads the project and has carefully selected 4 guys and 4 girls to work on the hotel one weekend. Under his and Hannah's supervision, the eight inmates take shelter at the hotel as they clean up and restore the place. The inmates are: Tye, Mike, Russell, Richie, Melissa, Christine, Kira and Zoe.

The inmates are locked in the hotel for the weekend, and pretty much have free run of the place. The first night, Richie turns to Tye and explains to him that there was a hidden safe full of cash which old man Blackwell had on the top floors. The "treasure" was never recovered. So Richie and Tye venture off on the top levels looking for the alleged wealth. Mike, Russell, Melissa and Zoe head for the penthouse up top to have their own little personal party with some drugs that Mike had smuggled in. Kira and Christine look for a way out of the place in an effort to escape. And our two officers are getting liquored up in the lobby with Margaret.

As Tye and Richie search for the hidden safe, they run across an unexpected tenant, Jacob Goodnight. Bad things follow for the inmates afterwards. Jacob walks around with a big ole' meat hook on a chain on the deserted top floors of the hotel. He kills the inmates one by one and takes out their eyes and places them in glass jars for souvenirs. Actually he takes them out because of some religious bogus about the eyes seeing sin, and therefore the eyes are part of sin, or something like that.

So the WWF or is it WWE or WCW or what ever the f*ck they go by now, has dipped into it's big wallet and put together a horror movie using one of it's stars, Kane. Kane portrays a psychopathic maniac who was emotionally abused by his over zealous religious mother growing up. He was convinced to rip out the victim's eyes to take away their sin. So Kane kills the young work release convicts at the old abandoned hotel. He takes one of them hostage, because she has religious tattoos on her body, which he noticed during a peep show of her taking a shower. For some reason, he thinks tattoos are sacred and takes her as his prize.

His physical appears for the role is justified. He's a big, strong, mean looking bald dude. His acting ability consisted of him grunting, staring people down and looking mean. He actually said a few words at the end of the movie, but come on' what do you expect from a wrestler?

Every where Kane went, a pack of flies followed. According to the novelization...yes I you read that right, novelization...that one of my friends read, Kane's demented brain was hearing voices from the flies and they were eating his brain alive. This lead to one of the end sequences where we see the hole in his head from William's opening sequence gun shot. The boo-boo has healed over the years into a big scab on the back of the noggin'.

It gets revealed, that maggots has taken home in the back of the hole. Maggots? Are you f*ckin' kidding me? Maggots. This is the f*cked up sh*t you would see coming out of a Nightmare or late Friday movie. Maggots. Throw out any type of realism right now. I can see the tormented childhood playing into the deranged character, but maggots? Sigh.

As for the rest of the cast, they're just a bunch of annoying idiots. Even the film's hottie, Rachel Taylor (pictured right), was unbearable to watch. I know the mentality of a lot of inmates are consistent with the mentality of obnoxious high schoolers. The cast portrayed that part well, but it rubbed me the wrong way in the film. I like to say it was superb, brilliant acting from the cast, but that wasn't the case. I think it was the limited acting ability of the cast itself. The cast just happened to be obnoxious in real life.

Another part of the movie that pissed me off happened to be the common sense little things. The things you just want to say, "That's not how sh*t works in real life." For example, the inmates reporting from work release are coming out of the county jail with all their sh*t. They have like all of their personal belongings, walk mans, backpacks, personal clothing, and covered from head to toe with all their accessories like jewelery. WTF? I didn't think jail was such a luxury like that.

I always thought, you go to jail in the clothes you got arrested in. All of a sudden they have these massive wardrobes with all their personal crap like they were going camping. Ugh! IF this was a county jail program, I could see them in either inmate's clothing or if they're lucky personal clothes. But where did all the other crap come from?

Okay, let's say these inmates do get approved for this work release project. Their supervision is one male officer and one female officer who once at the hotel, let them do whatever they want as they get liquored up in the lobby.

Unsupervised inmates? Really? I know they are 'locked' in the hotel, but these are male and female delinquents. No, they won't try anything funny like...have sex. They'll stay in their rooms all night and swap stories. Men stay in their rooms and women stay in theirs down the hall. Scouts honor. Right. Wouldn't that be a lawsuit if one of them got assaulted by another one? And the film makes a point about Mike being the abusive drug pimp that got Kira locked up. So let's NOT watch them closely.

Oh yeah, and they're allowed to venture through the hotel all by themselves whenever they want. These aren't necessarily model citizens here. Mike walks around for half the film with a busted pipe in his hand as a weapon. I guess they wanted this program to fail!

The movie did present some good ideas but came up short on delivery. There was a nice little twist ending to the film. It's not as obvious if you're not good at picking those type of things out. But if you are, it won't come as a major surprise.

See No Evil had some good, brutal, gruesome kills to it. The film used the meat hook on a chain weapon well, it provided some nice deaths. However the film did provide in my opinion, one of the gayest kills ever. It was the cell phone death. No it wasn't like that crappy movie Pulse, where evil ghost came out of the cell phone killing people. Or the even crappier movie One Missed Call, where the evil dead Japanese spirit left you a message saying you're gonna die. Kane shoves a cell phone down a chicks throat killing her. I guess she either suffocated or choked on the damn thing. It was pretty lame.

My favorite kill was: Trap Jaw. Not the He-Man character! * Highlight to Read * Detective Williams is upstairs in one of the deserted hallways with two other kids. At this point, they know who the killer is...don't ask, they spill out key plot points in a few exchanged lines right before. Williams is armed with his side arm and is walking down the hallway when the meat hook comes out of the ceiling and latches on through the bottom of his jaw and up through the skull. Kane pulls him into the ceiling ending his life. * Yeah it was pretty cool. It was a good use of an awesome weapon.

Overall, the movie ended up sucking. It failed to deliver in many, many ways. It was a cheap Hollywood adaption of a horror movie with a wrestler as an evil villain. Wrestlers may be good actors in the rink, but on the big screen...no. Wrestlers maybe fine as villains in low budget, tongue and cheek horror films, but as long as Hollywood doesn't script some wrestler into a major villain role like Michael Myers...whoops. Strike that from the record. The movie's title should read, No See Evil, as in DON'T SEE EVIL! It would have saved me a great deal of time.

Misc. Movie Trivia
-Film opened on May 19, 2006 and made $15 million at the Box Office ($4.5 million opening weekend
-Original title of the movie was called Eye Scream Man
-Produced by the WWE & Lions Gate films