Screenhead

I, unlike a whole lot of people, actually enjoyed one of the first films from WWE Entertainment, a movie studio that seems to exist for no other reason than to give wrestlers movie roles and try and make some quick bank.  And when Lions Gate put this sucker back on Blu-ray, it gave me just the opportunity I needed to start writing about it.

Today we’re talking See No Evil, a movie that acquaints you with Jacob Goodnight, played by massive man / mountain hybrid Kane, who won’t actually SAY anything through most of the movie, but you won’t really notice.  Goodnight, spurred on by a horrendous religious upbringing, went on to become the Hand of God killer, a serial killer who delighted in brutality and taking the eyes from his victims.  But when a bunch of juvenile detention subjects arrive at a run-down hotel in a bid to clean it to become a homeless shelter, for which they receive time served credit on their sentences, they’ll run afoul of the Hand of God, and most of them won’t survive.

One thing that See No Evil will do is make you actively hate it for introducing the well-known children’s Christian song, “Jesus Loves The Little Children”, into its proceedings.  There are some things that horror flicks just shouldn’t do, and bringing that song into things is just plain wrong.  I understand it was thematically necessary, given that Jacob Goodnight was a lunatic on par with the Westboro Baptist Church, only more apt to throw things, but still…surely they could’ve left the music out of it.

However, there’s a lot to like about this movie.  Kane is sufficiently menacing that he really doesn’t need lines, and the hotel they shot in is sufficiently run-down to project its own menace.  Plus there are all sorts of little hidey-holes and secret passages and whatnot to really add to the proceedings.  You don’t know who’s going to pop out of where and where they’ll do it next.  There’s even a taste of irony–check out what happens to the hippie chick who feeds a starving dog!  And, there’s a beautifully subverted trope in which someone’s cell phone actually works, much to their detriment.

Despite its problems, and they’re fairly minor, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives See No Evil a seven out of ten for its effectiveness as a thriller, even if it’s not exactly high brow.

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