See No Evil 2 (2014)
Directed by Jen Soska & Sylvia Soska
Viewed on Shudder
Summary: Jacob Goodnight returns from the dead to wreak havoc on a group of people foolishly partying in a morgue. A horror-filled evening with a surprising amount of atmosphere results.
Congratulations once more to the newly inaugurated (as of tomorrow) Mayor of Knox County, Glenn Jacobs! When Jacobs won this mayoral race I figured it was a perfect time to review See No Evil, and now that he is inaugurated I can’t think of a reason to not explore that film’s sequel. Before I even turned on the movie though, I noticed a few things that intrigued me about this sequel.Everything has been changed. The director/writers/producers/music are all gone and replaced by a brand new team. Couple that with the fact that this movie came out a full 8 years after the first one and went straight to DVD, there are a lot of red flags here. However, I should know by now not to judge movies based on any of these things, because after finishing it I have to say that it’s a lot better than I expected it to be.
See No Evil 2 picks up immediately where the first film left off, with Jacob Goodnight mortally wounded and picked up by a ambulance where Jacob dies and is subsequently brought to the city morgue. His rampage from the previous film turned what was supposed to be a quiet night at the morgue into a race to stay ahead of the piling up bodies. One of the technicians, Amy, decides to skip her birthday party to stay and help out her coworker Seth, who she has a bit of a mutual attraction to, and their supervisor, a wheelchair-bound jokester named Holden. Amy’s friends roll with this and conspire with Holden to have her party at the morgue instead, a decision that surely won’t end with their horrible demise. While this party is going on, interpersonal conflicts happen, bizarre fetishes are explored, and Jacob Goodnight happens to wake up from his death sleep to begin his killings anew.
Now, the first See No Evil was far from a perfect film but it at least managed to keep my attention with its bizarre editing, odd religious symbolism and the strange charisma that Jacobs brought to the role. The religious symbolism is kept and doubled down on and Jacobs is as weirdly charismatic as ever, but there is one stark difference between this movie and its predecessor, and that is the editing. Gone are the scenes of nonsensical movement, strange cutaways and laughably bad fight scenes. They have all been replaced by a more clean and crisp editing style that is a bit more suited to a movie that is trying a lot harder to be a more serious piece of horror.
To that effect, there are a lot of more subtle changes that are used to enhance the horror aspects present in the first film. The biggest differences are visible in the setting and the atmosphere of this sequel. Our story here takes place in a morgue and I must confess something to you, dear readers, and that is that I find any sort of medical facility mildly terrifying. Hospitals are the freakiest places on Earth and morgues aren’t that much better, especially when these settings are portrayed as they are in this film, when they are big, empty, featureless dark mazes full of unpleasant things. I love the setting of this movie and the atmosphere is really well executed as all these creepy characteristics that facilities like this have are highlighted and elevated by the smart cinematography. Numerous sequences involve characters trying to escape this morgue only to be cut off by Jacob’s presence or his sabotage of the alternate exits that they find. During those sequences everyone is trying to navigate these hallways, but they are shot in a way that makes them appear even more disorientingly similar and labyrinthine than they would normally be.
Getting more into the characters we have to work with, there is a noticeable improvement from the previous film as to the quality of the cast. Smartly, they are significantly smaller than the first film’s and most of the movie focuses on Amy, and Seth, who have some decent chemistry and are able to pull off their budding romance and the requisite horrified reactions to the things around them. The outer cast is where things start to get a bit dicey, as Amy’s friends can get a little hammy, but usually not enough to distract too much or be inappropriate for a movie in which everyone is being stalked by a maybe supernatural seven foot tall murderer. One of the more interesting character dynamics is between Amy and her brother, who have a few arguments about Amy’s direction in life, as Amy’s family is judging her harshly for deciding to drop out of medical school to work in a city morgue. The acting in those arguments isn’t perfect, but there are some interesting character moments that occur as a result of their disagreements and how that influences their choices. Amy’s friends are….okay, they are kind of horror movie cliches, but they’re cliches on purpose if that makes any sense? For example, one of Amy’s friends is a drunk fool who has a sexual obsession with serial killers so she brings her boyfriend down to the room with Jacob’s “dead” body so they can have sex near it because that is what gets her off. But this seems a bit smarter than a lot of other slashers because the movies are about a villain who is disgusted by the ‘sins’ of sexuality, so it feels like an acknowledgment or a nod to the kind of thing that would frequently happen in older slasher movies where the killers seemed to be targeting teens who had sex but the movies would never elaborate on why. This is kind of a reconstruction of that idea, I think.
Overall, it is a good movie, but there are a few things that drag the movie down and pacing is at the forefront of that. It isn’t surprising that the movie has methodical pacing, as most of the scenes of horror occur when the people in the morgue are trying to sneak around and figure out a way out of the building without getting murdered. Those scenes start off being interesting, as the tense and oppressive atmosphere help to drive the scares but this results in there not being a lot of plot to the movie, which is okay but if there isn’t a lot of plot to drive a movie like this then you really need some solid characters and the people here are fine but they aren’t really enough to carry the long sequences of sneaking around. There are also a lot of flashbacks to the previous movie, there to explain Jacob Goodnight’s origins and his psyche, which would be generally helpful given the long gap between the release of the original movie and the sequel, but watching the two relatively close to each other only serves to highlight the fact that the sequel needed these scenes to pad the movie up to 90 minutes. Maybe the pacing could have been improved by trimming the runtime down to 80ish minutes but that’s neither here nor there.
This may be a mixed review, but I consider this movie to be shockingly successful given the incredibly low point of the original film. The Soska Sisters did something really neat with a movie that a lot of other directors would probably just try to phone in or quickly and cheaply produce and I commend them for their efforts in realizing what from the first film worked and what needed to be fixed. The Soskas haven’t made a ton of other movies but their performance here is quite good and I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for their other works. I would recommend See No Evil 2, especially if you like slasher movies or claustrophobic horror.
Recent Comments