Let
me start by saying that See No Evil is not good. In
fact, to say it is bad really is giving it the benefit of the
doubt, but I will say that, much like your typical stalk and
slash victim, I got what was coming to me with more than a little
extra punishment tacked on for good measure. The set-up - I
hesitate to say plot – involves a “theme killer”
(a phrase I recently discovered and fell in love with in the
Lon Chaney Jr. classic The Mummy’s Tomb) who
once went toe-to-toe with a cop, leaving one with a prosthetic
hand and the other one with a bullet hole in the back of the
head that dispenses maggots like glistening, writhing Pez. I’ll
leave it to the reader to determine which character gets which
disfigurement.
Skimming forward to the processed meat food of the picture
proper, a co-ed group of eight Hot Topic punk rockers and Abercrombie
bad asses take a deal to clean up an abandoned art deco hotel
for three days in order to get a month’s reduction on
their Juvie sentences, all under the barely interested, much
less watchful, eye of a female officer and the previously-maimed
cop. Once they are locked into the hotel, the grown-ups leave
the JDs to pretty much have the run of the place, and they of
course get right to all of those things that we know one shouldn’t
do when one is being stalked and slashed.
Actually, there is little stalking and even less slashing in
this movie. For the most part our killer chooses his victims
quickly and sometimes throws them a little beating before giving
them the old Blade Runner eyeball removal. So I guess it would
be better to call See No Evil a Pick and Poke movie.
Some of the gore is fairly well done, and before he settles
on the old hotel killer stand-by of the fire axe, our man relies
on a hook on a chain for some of the picture’s few brief
moments of originality. Frankly, if the producers had been smart,
they would have accentuated the weapon with an internet-friendly
campaign, reshot the opening with Sam Jackson as the cop’s
partner and changed the title to Hooks on a Chain.
C’mon, it’s better than the puntastic title it went
out with. Get it?!?! His victims will now . . . See No Evil!
It’s a corker! A knee-slapper, I tells ya, buddy!
See
No Evil is the WWE’s first non-Rock powered feature,
and squeezed into that charming, meathead-shaped hole is the
lumbering burn victim that goes by the unlikely moniker of Kane
(as played by Glen Jacobs). Now it’s sure to be said by
many that in the role of Jacob Goodnight, Kane (as played by
Glen Jacobs) shows that he is just a one trick pony playing
a deranged serial killer with misinterpreted Bible issues, but
I think this is unfair to Kane (as played by Glen Jacobs). First
of all, we have all been amazed by his range in the squared
circle, portraying a mad dentist as well as the second man to
bring life to a towering big-rig themed bodyguard, not to mention
the obvious homework he did for this role. Where have we seen
that pallid hue before? Those pudgy fingers and child-like vulnerability?
That clammy, out-of-breath scenery chewing? If Kane (as played
by Glen Jacobs) didn’t base this performance on the works
of young Academy Award winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman, well
then, as the sailor said, “I’ll eat my flat hat.”
Now, I’ve taken more than a few cheap shots and sucker
punches at this mess, and it really is a mess, but it was asking
for it, I swear. Even with the mercifully brief running time,
the interchangeable characters are left unmentioned for seemingly
long stretches—to the point that when we do check back
in with them, we are actually a little surprised that they have
not been Picked and Poked off-screen to set up a good old fashioned
Closet Corpse Creep-out. (You know, that moment when a forgotten
character’s corpse falls onto a living character who is
either looking in or hiding in a closet.)
I will mostly lay blame at the feet of the also unlikely monikered
Gregory Dark. You may remember Mr. Dark from his little bit
of ink a few years ago, when he directed Britney in her From
the Bottom of My Broken Heart video and word “leaked
out” that he was half of porno’s answer to the Coens,
The Dark Brothers. He directed New Wave Hookers 1 through
4 (If remember correctly 4 is the one in which
the New Wave Hookers fight the Russian) and Hootermania,
and a bunch of other titles that either I haven’t heard
of or just aren’t funny enough to reference here, and
through all this, Mr. Dark has learned a thing or two about
filmmaking. Unfortunately the other three things he knows about
filmmaking he picked up from a weekend of watching Nine Inch
Nails videos and Nine Inch Nails-esque Marilyn Manson videos.
The
picture is supposed to be disgusting, surely designed to get
under the skin of today’s teenager, who is honestly more
grossed out by a moderately filthy toilet in wide shot or someone
drinking out of a dirty shot glass than by a close-up of eyeball
tearing or dripping matted hair and brain, but even the filth
is too generic, too artfully arranged. Everything is crawling
with roaches, and I do mean EVERYTHING. A competent filmmaker
could have made a decent little shocker on the roach wrangling
budget alone. Yet not a single character ever seems to touch
a bug. Jacob is always preceded by the flies that choose to
swarm him instead of the numerous rotting hobo corpses in the
halls, but this is never used to make us uncomfortable. The
grime of this picture would only bother the most OCD; it’s
never a threat, it’s just part of the décor—the
cinematic equivalent of designer-distressed denim.
See No Evil also reminds me of something I’ve
often said about remakes: A remake is only acceptable when one
takes only the few elements that make up the core of the original
and recontextualizes them into a wholly new film, and if one
goes that far one might as well change the name, given that
fans will recognize the similarities and non-fans don’t
care either way. So let’s test that, shall we? Rundown
hotel? Check. Peeping crazy with sexual/id/mommy issues? Check.
Shower scene lacking all but the most fleeting of nudity? Check.
I’m kind of starting to feel bad about all those bad things
I said about Gus Van Sant.
This isn’t to say that See No Evil is a complete
loss. I will admit to watching it with a big sloppy grin on
my face, partly fueled by my inner 13-year-old Fangoria
geek, partly by the much older ironic hipster that enjoys laughing
at a movie that lets eight kids walk out of Juvie wearing off
the rack non-conformist gear that tells just what kind of archetype
they are because it’s easier than differentiating their
vague shades of rebellion when they are all wearing orange jumpsuits.
That, and no matter who you are, if you don’t at least
giggle if not outright cackle when a pack of stray dogs fill
their bellies with piping hot irony, then I’m not sure
if we can be friends.
See No Evil is truly the “critic-proof”
picture. If at any time you thought you might want to see it,
then you are going to see it and well you should, with the venue
depending solely on how much dough you would be willing to throw
away. If you have no interest, even if I told you it was the
birth of the next level in horror, that it was the Citizen
Kane of wrestlers-pretending-to-kill-teenagers movies,
you wouldn’t go. So those of you who want to should go
and just enjoy what there is to make someone like you happy.
As far as I’m concerned, it can’t be any worse than
that Ron Howard picture—after all, Opie didn’t direct
The Creasemaster.
Yeah,
okay, so I saved that to close with. Sue me.
