See No Evil (2006)

Directed by Gregory Dark

Viewed on Shudder

 

Summary: A bunch of young co-eds from juvenile correctional facilities go to an old abandoned hotel to clean it up as part of a sentencing reduction exercise. They find a lot more than they expected…because the hotel is a huge mess and there is no way they can clean it up in time! Also a crazed killer is there.

 

Congratulations to Glenn Jacobs, WWE Superstar Kane AKA WWF Wrestler Isaac Yankem, DDS AKA USWA Wrestler the Christmas Creature, for winning the mayoral race for Knox County! Jacobs has had a long history in the WWE/WWF, and it is fitting that he be featured in the first movie to be produced by WWE Studios, the wrestling company’s attempt to branch out into other media. This first attempt resulted in See No Evil, a slasher movie wherein the villain is played by none other than Jacobs himself. Pretty appropriate casting given that the majority of Jacobs’ career has been spent playing Kane, a monstrous crimson-clad on-again off-again villain.

See No Evil is about, at least initially, a pair of police officers responding to a disturbance at an abandoned religious-themed building (but explicitly said to not be a church) where they find a brutalized young woman before they are attacked by an axe-wielding assailant. One of the officers dies, but the other survives, losing his arm in the process. We follow this surviving officer to his new career, as a corrections officer at a facility for juvenile offenders. His new assignment sees him escorting a small group of young folk from this facility to a dilapidated old hotel, which they will clean up in exchange for a reduction in their sentencing. While cleaning the hotel (or breaking things and making it much worse), they are stalked by an unseen malevolent force who begins picking them off one by one. This is a pretty classic setup for a slasher movie, bring a bunch of young people to an out of the way location so they can do things they shouldn’t, and then they get taken out by a crazed killer. Nothing new, but there is always the potential to shake things up by having interesting characters, a good villain or just a neat location.

I had high hopes that the characters in this movie would be a key differentiating factor to make See No Evil stand out from other slashers, particularly with the inclusion of Officer Frank Williams, the previously mentioned officer wounded by the villain before the meat of the movie begins. The introduction of the police officer turned correctional officer wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it hinted at a lot of things that would have been really interesting ideas to see play out in a slasher movie, like: how did Williams cope with life after the attack and what sorts of difficulties did he have losing an arm and getting a job working with youth offenders? Will his knowledge of and experience with this slasher come into play? Did he continue investigating this slasher since his body was never found after Williams shot him? These all seem like interesting questions to me, but they are never brought up or explored in any meaningful way. Williams barely establishes a character before he is offhandedly murdered, with the focus of the movie thrust upon the young people who are cleaning the hotel. These youngins are either boring stock characters whose personalities are just explained to us or have really bizarre characterization and purpose in the story.

These explanations don’t happen through dialogue though, they happen through captions that describe the offenses that landed them in their correctional facility when we first meet them. That is where things start to get weird though, because I can understand sending a group of lightly supervised young offenders to go do community service if they all committed nonviolent crimes. A couple of them fit that profile, one person is a low level drug dealer, another is a shoplifter, one guy received stolen property, but then we see breaking and entering, and aggravated assault, and assault and battery. Maybe don’t send the unrepentant violent drug dealer with a history of beating up women on a CO-ED community service trip? And the guy even instigates a fight before the bus arrives at the hotel they’re going to!

I could spend hours talking about how much this premise makes absolutely no sense, but I will just quickly summarize that by saying there is no way that a co-ed group of people from youth correctional facilities would be brought to a giant dilapidated hotel to clean the whole place over a course of three days while they are all free to wander wherever they want and have minimal supervision while the two people who escorted them there are drinking on duty. Prisons and detention facilities are undoubtedly rife with abuse and negligence, but this seems remarkably unsafe and really terrible in terms of liability considering all the things that could go wrong here. And the funny thing is that this hotel they’re cleaning, it isn’t dirty, it’s falling apart! Walls are broken, the pipes are breaking, the top levels of the hotel were consumed by fire, how much progress on this project could about half a dozen people halfheartedly cleaning even make? It’s to build character and do community service or whatever, sure, but at one point a character, the super violent one, just starts wrecking things in a hallway. My point is that the premise is silly and leaves us with a few lingering issues.

So the characters are boring and the plot is pretty standard, so one of the only real questions left is, where is Kane and is this slasher villain any good? That answer is…kind of tricky. Kane appears mainly towards the end of the film, as is appropriate, and he gets plenty of screen-time as a giant murder machine who uses a chained hook to murder people, along with various other implements he finds. This slasher, Jacob Goodnight, is kind of an interesting one to talk about and I’m not certain if this was intentional or not but there are a lot of weirdly subversive elements present in how the character is written. Jacob is (and these are kind of spoilers because you learn about them late in the movie) a stunted manchild who, through years of psychological and physical abuse from his mother has gotten bizarre ideas about violence and sexuality and religion that come across as a strangely interesting conglomeration of ideas that almost become social satire but never quite get there. He has this fixation on women with religious symbols tattooed on them where they become these symbols of religious adoration but also the objects of his sexual desire and Jacob visibly struggles with keeping his sexual desires in check. There is a lot of Catholic symbolism, Mary in particular is shown quite a bit, and because the people he kills are “sinners”, it implies that the women he keeps alive are kind of symbolic of being both Madonna and the Whore blurring this mental line that Jacob has. Again, I don’t know if I’m reading too deep into this but this is a rather topical bit of cultural criticism that features a villain who harshly judges others for sin and improper behavior while also struggling with desires to engage in that kind of behavior himself. (Spoilers end here)

As far as Jacobs’ performance goes, well, he doesn’t speak very much but I rather liked him as Jacob Goodnight. He’s kind of a weird looking and threatening guy normally, especially with his head shaved like it is in this movie, and his body language is pretty expressive to make up for his lack of dialogue. I wish there was a little more connecting the scenes of violence and sexuality/religious stuff because Jacob seems very different in those scenes, but I wouldn’t blame the acting for that discrepancy as I’m sure he was just told to be different during the murder sequences. The parts with Jacob are the parts that are definitely the most memorable though, and I will never get the image of Jacob squatting in front of a caged young woman rubbing his hand over his pants while sporting a bizarre look on his face out of my mind. It is gross and disturbing and that is definitely when the movie is at its best.

Speaking of gross and mildly disturbing, it is time to talk about when the movie is at its worst. And that worst concerns the aforementioned violent drug dealer Michael Montross. Michael is a violent offender who is implied to have raped, or at least sexually assaulted, one of the ladies who is part of this group. He is aggressive and eager to fight and cruel to animals and mocks everyone whenever the opportunity presents itself. He is a piece of human garbage and I hoped he would be the first to fall to Jacob’s chain hook thing. Guess who emerges as the hero of the film and is instrumental in stopping Jacob’s rampage? The choice for it to be this character, a violent misogynist who hates everyone, to be the one to stop Jacob, a violent misogynist who hates everyone, is so bizarre and nonsensical that it had to have been chosen for a reason and I cannot figure out what that reason could be.

Along with this confusion the movie is also really quickly paced, it is only 83 minutes with credits, and the editing is bizarre and occasionally nonsensical. At one point one of the supervisors is in an elevator and she is about to be attacked by Jacob, who is somewhere nearby. Then the next shot is Jacob attacking her in the elevator but we don’t see him enter there or her react to him, he’s just there as if neither of these people existed until the edit started. There’s another sequence where Jacob is chasing people in a hallway and for a few seconds it cuts to a mouse that is running in a hallway for no reason except to maybe say that they are scared and running like the mouse is scared and running? There are numerous sequences where things like that happen…and it was a really effective way to keep me invested in what was going on, because I was so curious about what the next weird thing was going to be. There are also a lot of just odd things that happen in the movie for no real reason and I don’t want to spoil them because they just happen out of nowhere.

This isn’t what I would call a good movie. It doesn’t have a lot of things in it that I would call successful but there are a lot of things in here that are weirdly engaging and funny and able to keep your attention until the actually interesting stuff with Jacob and his past gets revealed. Because of this and Glenn Jacobs’ fun performance I would actually give this one a recommendation for people who enjoy “good bad” movies. But if you just want something that is classically good, you can probably give this one a pass.