1.0/10
"See No Evil" is a film that is violent, ugly, witless, and stupid. It isn't often that you come across a film this bland, yet here we are. As a horror fan, I was just genuinely angered by the weak, senseless treatment of the movie's narrative material;… More
1.0/10
"See No Evil" is a film that is violent, ugly, witless, and stupid. It isn't often that you come across a film this bland, yet here we are. As a horror fan, I was just genuinely angered by the weak, senseless treatment of the movie's narrative material; and to top it off, nothing else works in the slightest. It may get a small audience for one of its stars, Kane (a professional wrestler), but that's it. Otherwise, the whole thing is a mess; and I barely came out alive from what is quite possibly one of the worst films of the 2000's.
Two police officers do an investigation of a presumably abandoned house that ends with one getting hacked to death by an axe wielded by a giant brute of a man and the other losing an arm at the mercy of the same attacker. However, the surviving cop is able to shoot his assailant in the back of the head, and it is then that he presumes his job is done.
However, years later, such thoughts are put to the test. We see the same policeman again, but this time, he is accompanying a bus filled with delinquents to an old, dirtied hotel run by an elderly woman who cannot give it the ol' cleaner-upper single-handedly. I feel no need to name the delinquents, the police officer, or the innocent old hotel keeper because all characters here are irrelevant. You won't care about any of them. Not for a second.
Upon the arrival to the hotel, the filmmakers are walking an over-used but potentially intriguing path by making us wait for things to happen. I can't say I was involved during these moments; far too much talking and over-indulgence for me to actually enjoy myself. The mistake of those behind the camera is that they give us stupid, annoying characters and dull visuals to stare at for all those "tension building moments", which are less "building" than one should (or would) be lead to expect.
The hotel is home to hidden evil; to be precise, the same man that attacked the police officer. It's not quite touched upon how the officer with one arm was able to get out of the house from the film's opening scenes if the attacker had not be pronounced dead, but in a film without logic, nobody cares and nobody should.
Knowing that the big man (Kane) is just around the corner, waiting to slice up each evil-doing delinquent, you know how the rest of the film will go; he will kill, they will scream and run, we will snore. "See No Evil" is appallingly bad in how it lives by the stereotypes that cannot be ignored in the world of the slasher film; it's a needless accumulation of all the things about movies that I resent.
I can't say anything good about this movie. It looks bad. It sounds bad. The hotel is creepy at moments (especially when there's no characters in the frame, oh joy!) and in others, uninspired. I've already said all that I can about the characters and the story. Perhaps I must discuss the psychopath at the center of it as well. He too, like the people he is stalking and subjecting to sadistic torture, is flat-out boring. The writers tried - ever so hard - to give him the kind of back story that makes horror movie villains like this work, but each flashback and every additional detail is so poorly done that you lack any sympathy. On the brighter side of things, Kane is convincing - if only visually - as his villain character. He lacks the emotions that his character should lack; but he never quite gets the part down as I would have wanted him to.
Do I see no evil? I would say that, in the end, I actually do. In fact, I see a lot of evil. Evil that attempts to assault the audience's intelligence. Evil that doesn't understand how to balance the conventions and clichés of a genre film effectively. Finally, "See No Evil" contains the kind of evil that lashes out with vile, sadistic, violent, and ultimately unconvincing force. The film is far too poorly done to truly be disturbing; while at the same time, I found it unwatchable in an entirely different way. I was not disturbed. I was bored. And insulted. And stupefied. I have seldom seen movies like this be this dumb; but hey, someone's got to make them.