Every once in a while a movie comes along that surprises the crap out of you with just how unassuming, yet spleen jarringly awesome it turns out to be! See No Evil is not one of these, but let’s just say that lowered expectations make for a much smoother ride down the bumpy back roads of movie reviewing.

World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the WWF for those of you who missed out on the whole World Wildlife Fund lawsuit many many moons ago) has decided to get into making their own movies. With former company carrying beefcake charisma machine Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson making a sizeable name for himself as the new go-to “action hunk with perfect teeth” for Hollywood, WWE head honcho Vince McMahon decided it was time to take preventative measures before any more of his potential bank makers jumped ship for the high glamour, big pay-off, easy living life of the Tinsel Town set. Wanting to get as much company exposure as possible without risking the loss of his contractual work horses, Vinnie Mac started a movie production division of World Wrestling Entertainment that would feature only WWE contracted performers in the top billing. Not only was/is this the hope to get the logo out there into the mainstream again (something the company’s been struggling to do since the booming days of “Stone Cold 3:16” and “Do you smell what the Rock is cookin’?”), but to hopefully placate the locker room prima donnas’ egos… or just drive their so-called “good names” deep into the Hollywood sewage so as to make them box office poison and thus kill their sad little dreams of starring in summer blockbusters. Either way, there are now several movies in production at WWE Films as of this review and one that’s already harkening a fret-filled financial future for the franchise: See No Evil.

Instead of going with a big name wrestler who already has some exposure (say “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or Paul “Triple H” Levesque who had slightly-more-than-minor roles in the The Longest Yard remake and Blade: Trinity respectively), the WWE brain bank decided to push ahead with a lesser known “wrassler” by the name of Glen Jacobs, better known by his ring moniker of Kane: the former burn victim and little brother character to fellow horror-based WWE employee Mark Calaway, aka the Undertaker, who played the role of an intergalactic bounty hunter with the voice of a small child in the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando… not to get into some kind of squared circle “Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon” thing, I’ll just never get the sound of “You’re a dead man Ramsey!” out of my brain and I thought lovers of bad cinema that might not be so versed in the “sports entertainment” world might like to share in this bizarre life experience with me.

As for the rest of the movie’s cast, they’re not household names, nor are they unknowns looking for their first big break. No, the rest of the cast is pretty much made up of “Hey, wasn’t she in the Freaky Friday remake?”, “Wasn’t he that guy in Stella Got Her Groove Back?” and “I wonder if she’s Jesse Ventura’s daughter.” types. Yes, yes and no by the way.

So, they’ve got a cast of never-weres headed by a guy who throws around half-naked men for a living. Not exactly a good start on the road to financial success for the hitchhiking WWE Films’ first feature. Will they have any better luck using their other thumb to flag down a ride to success? Well, when your other thumb consists of a writer whose sole experience is writing storylines for televised professional wrestling programs and a director whose bulk of professional experience lies in the realms of music videos and spank cinema (including Between the Cheeks , The Devil In Miss Jones 3 and a personal favorite from my younger days: Deep Inside Vanessa Del Rio), you’re setting yourself up for critical and box office suicide… or maybe not.

Yes, it’s taken me an incredibly long amount of time and space to get to the actual movie itself, but let’s get to the down ‘n’ dirty. Jacob Goodnight had a rough childhood. Not only did he wind up with a stupid name no one outside of an Amish village would curse their child with (and I used to do data entry for the state of New York’s immunization records, so I’ve been witness to a multitude of bad choices made by people who shouldn’t be allowed to breed let alone label another human being for life), but his crazy religious fanatic of a mother had a thing for locking him up in animal cages, beating him repeatedly and constantly demeaning him in an effort to make him a good little Christian soldier for the Falwell militia. There was a heavy emphasis on the visually alluring form that Satan’s influence likes to take, hence why Jake grew up to be a demented serial killer whose calling card was leaving his victims sans ocular orbs, i.e. eyeless. He got a little sloppy though and two beat cops stumbled onto his operation. One of the fuzzies was fragged while the other lost an arm before planting a slug in the big lug’s dome. The rookie survived, but Goodnight’s body was never found, so somewhere out there is a large monster of a man with a bullet in his head and revenge in his belly.

Four years following the events of that night Frank Williams, the former rookie cop turned one-armed warden-of-sorts, is one half of the authority figures taking a co-ed team of juvenile delinquents out to an abandoned hotel to do clean up duties. In exchange for cleaning up this burnt out old landmark for the local historical society, the kids will get a reduction on the sentences given to them for their various minor offenses (drug possession, shoplifting, wearing stripes with plaids, etc.). They’re nothing special, you’ve seen ‘em a million times and nobody’s even bothering to try giving these characters depth any more because we all know they have no real value beyond their sole purpose: to become hamburger and suffer graphic violence in the process. The only cast members of note are the adult supervisors of this weekend of rehabilitating sanitation engineering, the one-armed Williams, his female equivalent/potential romantic interest (happy with her two arms) and the old lady from the Historical Society who’s brought the group together in the name of landmark preservation and exploiting delinquents for cheap labor.

From here on out it’s pretty standard slasher fare: the big monstrous killer/amateur eye surgeon has taken up shop in the burnt out remains of the very hotel in which our cast is temporarily crashing for the weekend. Though the electricity to the place is fully functioning, nobody thought to turn the phones on and since the only cell phone in the place was stolen by one of the little hoodlums (who also winds up being one of the last two people to find out there’s a bloodthirsty colossus on the loose), nobody can call the proper authorities to get their asses out. No one is safe from Jake’s wrath as young and old alike are taken out with a meathook on a chain and numerous painful looking eye gouges that makes me wonder if the writer didn’t take at least one happy memory away from watching Gigli…

See No Evil tries to be kinda interesting in regards to it’s station in life as a basic “hulking killer” flick. For instance, ever wonder how the slashers seem to have no problem finding his victims, even in a big place like, say, a 10 story hotel? Lumpy McEye-stab has tied lengths of wire to various items throughout the hotel (things dirty sinners would use, like beds) that all connect back to an old fashioned service bell set-up, so every time someone sets off one of these bells, it’s labeled for whichever part of the hotel the victim-to-be is in. Hey, it’s pretty friggin’ clever in lieu of a Sliver Special (i.e. security cameras) if you ask me, so this makes a nice fat mark in the “Pros” column for me! There was one big plot twist near the end that is either done very well or that I just completely missed in my advanced state of brain deterioration. I think it really caught me off guard because I wasn’t expecting anything tricky from what looks like such a cookie-cutter cut ‘em up on the surface. See No Evil didn’t have to be smart in any way, but it tried and therefore it gets an ‘A’ for effort! Well… it gets a B- anyway, cuz some of the stuff that came out as a result of the big twist seemed to be stretching my disbelief a little too far, resulting in a painful snap back like when your older sibling snaps you on the arm with a rubber band and you have to walk around with a bid throbbing welt on your arm for the next 24 hours. Ouch.

The gore was graphic, squishy and passable for the most part with many of the killings inducing the occasional cringe or wince of pity pain from yours truly. The final resting place for the cell phone is particularly satisfying, as it’s kind of thing that deserves to be done to that particular species of human. Painful, justified and leaves me with a warm glow in the pit of my torso and a soft smile across my chapped lips it does. Though this is a nice little change of pace from the plucking of peepers, there is a slight problem with the cell phone death scene as it doesn’t involve the destruction of the victim’s oculars in any way. When you’ve got a serial killer on your hands, they’re supposed to have a specific method to their victims, all killed in the same manner or finished with the same goal in mind. We already established that Jakey-Pooh’s mommy beat a hatred for eyes into him, so why does he choose to break character for this one death? Could it be that he hates loud cell phone users enough to break his murderous mantra momentarily in the name of semi-ironic violent retribution, or am I just being a nitpicking shithead? I’ll take door number 3 Monty!

I’ve already displaced any and all need for commenting on the acting, so let’s talk about the directing. Though I can’t speak for Dark’s prior work (I get all my porn from the internet), he looks to be a big fan of Nine Inch Nails music videos. Everything looks dirty and dreary and swimming in amber while the camera jumps around frantically and things tremor violently from time to time like the whole thing was filmed on top of a fault line. Though many will thumb their big critical noses at this type of eye candy movie making, I hold no such grudge. I wouldn’t call Darky or his final product “genius” in any definition of the word (especially since two of those definitions are for a Roman guardian spirit and a Muslim genie), but I do call it a half way entertaining way to butcher off a couple of hours from your day while waiting for something better to happen. All in all there are a hundred-thousand worse ways I could think of to spend your time and money and a few hundred of them are sitting on the shelves of my DVD collection right now. I don’t see a sequel coming from the smoking remains of See No Evil , nor do I see the next Dwayne Johnson or Hulk Hogan in Glen Jacobs nor the next David Fincher in Greg Dark, so I expect the movie to be lost in the bowels of horror movie obscurity like so many other slasher pics. Kind of unfortunate given the potential present in the final product, but if you want to be noticed you’ve got to stop doing your shit half-assed (pun intended) because the general movie-goer’s money isn’t going to buy something like this, especially not a flawed rendition.

One last happy thing to say about Glen Jacobs: before he became Kane, he had a far more hilarious other-self by the name of Isaac Yankem D.D.S. whose whole gimmick was that of a large and menacing dentist with a taste for pain and a the kind of dental work that would make you think thrice before letting him anywhere near your own ivories. Click the rolling head at the bottom of the page for a little history on the career of Mr. Jacobs and have a few laughs on us… cuz that’s all we can afford right now.