Review of See No Evil (2006) by Steven W — 12 Apr 2013

Ah, the perils of WWE films. Ever since The Rock thundered through the box office with his Mummy 2 spin off, The Scorpion King, Vince McMahon has been trying to replicate it's success by working to the theory that if WWE fans tune in to watch guys wrestle every week then they're just as likely to turn out to see the same guys in movies. It's taken a while but it seems like McMahon may finally be getting the message that this is definitely not the case but back in 2006, before WWE went fully PG, Vince poured his companies money into this second rate, slasher flick with Glen "Kane" Jacobs in the psycho role.

Written by one time WWE creative member Dan Madigan (whom was shortly afterwards fired for pitching a character based on a thawed out Nazi stormtrooper that even Vince McMahon thought was in bad taste - this is the man who suggested an incest storyline to cash in on his daughters real life pregnancy, so it must have been pretty bad!), See No Evil tells the story of a group of young offenders shipped off to an abandoned hotel to do a spot of community clear up only to find that a monster with an eyeball fetish has moved in and is somewhat reluctant to leave.

There's some nicely inventive death scenes along the way, one involving a mobile phone is particularly brutal, but that's about as much merit as this film has.

Given that the victims are all jailbirds immediately establishes them as unsympathetic. There isn't a single one of them that we can rally behind against Kane. Horror films live and die by having characters that an audience wants to survive this ordeal and See No Evil has none. Performance wise a couple of them stand out, Rachael Taylor's shoplifting uber-bitch is the most entertaining of the stereotypes and does mark herself out from the blandness of the rest.

See No Evil plays it completely wrong with Kane. Choosing to reveal him fully within the first half hour of the film is a massive mistake. It cuts any sort of mystery as to the bad guy out of the film, particularly for anyone watching who has been familiar with Kane for the last 15 years on WWE programming. It doesn't help that Glen Jacobs looks not unlike a a rather pissed off jelly baby but that he has played Kane for so long on weekly TV, as both a bad guy and a comedy good guy, that once he's revealed it's difficult to really be scared of him at all. Keeping Kane mute throughout the film was another mistake. Jacobs can do the taunting psycho thing very well and it should have been capitalised upon here.

The twist that Madigan probably thought was so impressive is pedestrian at best. Predictable and with no real consequence to anything that's really happening, the film splutters to a halt as the ideas run out.

The novelty of seeing wrestlers in films never really caught on, but it was never aided by having them in films of such poor quality. This is poorly written, fairly executed with one or two redeeming moments but overall an excuse for something that one or two folk probably thought was edgy and gripping but the rest found a bit of a waste of time.