See No Evil

Over the past several decades, we've seen professional wrestlers from WWF/WWE, WCW, and ECW try their hand at actually acting on the big screen.  Andre The Giant, Hulk Hogan, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, David Batista, John Cena, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson among others.  The only one who as actually managed to successfully transition from pro wrestler to actor is Dwayne Johnson.  Batista's definitely had a few movies, but nothing terribly noteworthy as he doesn't have an eighth of the personality and charisma that The Rock has.  John Cena has just had one flop after another.  But Dwayne Johnson is a runaway success.  His movies aren't Oscar-worthy, and they shouldn't be.  But most of his action roles are immensely entertaining.  One of the most spectacular wrestlers in the sport was Kane, a nearly  7 foot behemoth that weighed over 300 pounds.  When it was announced that WWE Films' first motion picture was going to be a horror movie starring Kane, I could honestly see it happening.  The movie? See No Evil.

See No Evil opens as two cops investigate a run-down house, and find a female victim whose eyes have been ripped out.  Out of nowhere, a giant wielding an axe kills one cop and maims the other, before being shot in the head.  4 years later, the cop that lost an arm is now working at a local jail when a group of criminals are part of a work-release program.  They are taken to an old closed down hotel that is run by a seemingly nice old lady.  Later that night, the group of misfits escape their rooms and explore the hotel, not realizing that there is a deranged psychopath named Jacob Goodnight(Glenn "Kane" Jacobs)stalking them.

Okay, so a slasher movie doesn't really need a story other than to get to the next kill.  As far as horror movies go, See No Evil is kind of "middle of the road."  It's not a terrible slasher by any means of the imagination, it just doesn't really strive to do anything new.  We have a bunch of very unlikable people getting picked off one by one in particularly gruesome fashion, but because they come off very unlikable, it's hard to actually care what happens to these people.  For the most part, the acting is actually not that good.  I'm not expecting them to win any Oscars or anything, but it would certainly help if the actors put forward a little more effort.  Except when they're getting chased by Jacob.  Their reaction seems pretty genuine.  I mean, it would have to be if you're being chased by a 7-foot lunatic wielding a chain with a hook on it.  And that's one of the highlights of See No Evil: Kane as Jacob Goodnight.  Given Glenn Jacobs' personality in the WWE, it's not really that much of a stretch to have him play a gigantic psycho.  He's physically imposing and his facial expressions really make this guy a serious threat.  And yet at the same time, those same expressions also give the character a little bit of humanity, as the character has been manipulated his whole life by his psychotically religious mother, so that allows some sympathy for the character, which is not what I expected from Kane.

So, how are the kills?  Overall, not bad.  Jacob Goodnight has a particular fascination with the eyes, and I'll leave it at that.  It gets pretty bloody.  This is very gritty and violent movie as you would expect a slasher movie to be.  The visual effects are mostly practical, but there definitely some CG used here, particularly in the climax of the film.  Fact of the matter is, is that if it wasn't for Kane, this movie would've been tossed aside, and rightly so, as there are much better films in the genre.  The characters are unlikable and make stupid decisions, some of the CG is used too much and quite frankly, See No Evil is a very derivative film, that rips off much better movies.  It isn't bad for what it is, but for fans of the genre, you can do better.  On a side note, this film was released back in 2006, to mostly negative reviews, but it still managed to be popular enough to warrant a sequel, also starring Kane.  If you're a fan of Kane, like I am, this definitely worth a watch, otherwise, anything else will do.  See No Evil is sufficiently graphic enough to hold my attention, but it's just not what it could've been.  7.5/10.