Review: See No Evil D

A Film Review By Stefan Vlahov

Before I get to the film, I want to talk about wrestling for a little while. This is the first film to ever be produced by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) which I used to be a big fan of. That is, until Kane took off his mask and costume and shaved his head. Kane was my favorite wrestler, not only because he was probably the strongest (not steroids either, just pure mass) and he was second in the Steve Austin Royal Rumble. He was this close!!!!!! His character was also very good. The mask covering his face and the long hair, and the costume that didn't show his body and the gloves - everything added up to one of the most exciting characters to watch. The last episode I saw of WWE was the one when he took his mask/costume off and became a totally different character. WWE - an already lacking and over-cooked series had lost it's last appealing wrestler. In a way, it was the end of a legacy. Kane symbolized what WWE was all about, and he isn't Kane to me anymore.

Granted, I still looked forward to See No Evil, hoping I could at least witness the shell of a character that I once respected and was a fan of. Well, I did see a shell of the Kane that was. His silence and his body-structure make him resemble even more of a killing machine than anyone else in a movie this year. Too bad he has found himself in the wrong movie. After seeing so much horror dreck like BloodRayne, Stay Alive, and Tamara, I wouldn't have even dreamed that this film would turn out as bad or even worse than some of those. So how can a film be worse than a film in which several stupid characters are killed off in a video game (Stay Alive)? A film in which several stupid characters get brutally murdered in an abandoned hotel by a priest (Kane). Yup a priest. It's amazing the amount of films that involve killer priests these days (this one, The DaVinci Code, V for Vendetta,) it's almost as if we are leveling religious groups to the lows of criminals. You know what I would love to see: a movie that portrays members of the Church of Satan as the bad guys - now that film will have balls. Not the devil himself - like The Omen - but actual members. I can't believe Hollywood thinks that Christian priests are worse then devil-worshippers. By default, they shouldn't be.

But former porn director Gregory Dark has made See No Evil so violent and gory that it reminded me of exploitation flicks like Cannibal Holocaust or some German movie I once saw, but forgot. But don't accept the cutesy, fun gore in the vein of Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive. No this is serious stuff, and by the buckets. Yet not even the abundance of gore and torture and eyeballs, and cockroaches, weren't enough to distract me from the terrible quality of everything else, starting with the plot which is almost non-existent. In fact I'll summarize it in one sentence (it might be a run-on): A group of trouble-makers are sent to clean up The Blackwell Hotel as their punishment, but little-do-they-know, there is a killing zealot in there just waiting for sinners like them to get rid of, and boy does he. That's all. Everything else is people running around in the hotel (which is way too confusing to not be called mazey) with only a few pauses that leave time for hiding and of course, killing.

The cast is not worth talking about. While Kane does about as good a job as he can with what he's given, there is nothing else. Not even the girls are that hot, although Christina Vidal has some nice ones. But other than that forget the cast. The killing of the cast is the better part, although it does border on hilariously funny at times, because of the film's low budget of $7 million. Still, a lot of the stuff here looks passable, especially the eye-balls that Kane's character takes out of his victims (get it SEE No Evil). Of course, the killings are sometimes warranted, considering how stupid these characters are at times. I mean, if you though the characters in Stay Alive were stupid, these are a new low. Why were they even played by humans, they could have been played by monkeys and it would have had the same effect. Heck, it might have been even better, because I would've cared more about the poor apes.

The other technical aspects of the film are just plain bad. While I did laugh at the obvious dummies that were used for some of the death scenes, I cringed at Ben Nott's poor cinematography that is even worse than some of the stuff that was being released in the 70's. The score is a big let-down too, because Tyler Bates' The Devil's Rejects at least had some creativity behind it, but here he is hamming it up, which is really bad when you are trying to live up to high expectations of Devil's Rejects.

I think Kane should have turned this film down. This is yet another strike against him for me and it feels a lot like the third one. I'm sorry Kane, but you will never become the movie-star The Rock did, not only because of your looks, but because of your poor decision to make this your debut. On second thought, if Kane had his Kane costume on, this movie might have gone up in the rating, but as it stands, it's simply bad. Director Gregory Dark only goes for the 'money shots' here, since that is what he used to specialize in, but this isn't porn, this is a feature film, and it needs a plot and good acting. One of the worst films of 2006 so far.