Friday, January 30, 2015

See No Evil 2 – What Happens When You Put Well-Known Horror Actors in One Film



Runtime: 90 minutes
Release Date: October 21, 2014
Rating: R
Director: Jen Soska & Sylvia Soska


Amy (Danielle Harris, every horror movie in the world) is working late at the city morgue on her birthday with Seth and Holden. Seth has a crush on her but hasn't worked up the nerve to tell her, which causes Holden to pick on him almost every night. Just as she's about to leave for her birthday party, they see on the news about a mass murder at an old hotel. Yes, despite eight years passing between the movies, this one takes place hours after the first film. Though they encourage her to leave, she decides to stick around and help.


Luckily for Amy, her friends sneaked into the morgue and surprise her by jumping up from sheets on tables. It would give me a heart attack, but it makes her laugh. Among the party guests are her extremely overprotective brother Will, close friend Kayla who has a major crush on her brother (Chelan Simmons, Final Destination 3), and her whorish friend Tamara (Katharine Isabelle, Ginger Snaps) and her boyfriend Carter.


It doesn't take long before Tamara and her boyfriend leave to find a bathroom and instead stumble on Jacob's body. Rather than run screaming in the opposite direction, Tamara gets off on seeing his body. This leads to a truly uncomfortable scene, where she climbs on top of his body, straddles him, kisses him, and does some grinding to get herself in the right mood. As she and Carter go to town, she suddenly looks over and realizes that Jacob is gone. Jacob isn't happy about those other kids killing him, and he makes that clear when he goes off on another killing spree.


Taking See No Evil from a hotel to a morgue sounds interesting in theory, but there was something about the sequel that I just didn't like. It wasn't a bad movie, but it won't ever replace the original in my mind.


This is clearly one of the largest city morgues in the entire universe. It consists of multiple floors, underground tunnels, and dozens of locked areas. In a series of scenes that irritated the hell out of us, Seth has dozens of keys on his ring that give him access to various parts of the building. When they get stuck in one area, he doesn't have keys for that space. However, he later has keys that operate all the cage and prison-looking doors at the underground levels that clearly look like no one used them in years.


And I know that Harris has a lot of fans, but she just doesn't do it for me. I prefer her in films where she takes a backseat than those where she has a starring role. After watching the Hatchet films, every time I see her, I think about that annoying fake accent and it grates on my nerves. There came a point in this one where I actually said, "see? This is why I don't like her. She's just around to make sure that the characters I like die."


Speaking of those characters, I have a soft spot for Simmons. Every time I see her, I get a little excited and have to point her out. She is just so cute, and she tends to add a breath of fresh air and some humor to most films. She has a cute scene with Amy's brother in this one, where she keeps throwing herself at him and finally asks why he won't go for her. When he tells her that he sees her as a sister, she just throws herself at him. I kind of want to hang out with her in person.


As for Kane/Jacobs, he does what he does best. Since he now has a massive hole in his eyesocket, he grabs a mask from the morgue to hide it and grabs some tools too. He breaks through security doors that others can't dent, attacks people with a bone saw, and generally acts like a mad man. The sad thing is that See No Evil 2 turns Jacob into just another slasher. We never hear the creepy song from the first movie, we barely see those gruesome finger nails, and there are hardly any references to the eyeball removals until the very end.


I was excited about a sequel to See No Evil 2, but I was hoping for a true sequel and not a film that changed Jacob's character and turned him into yet another generic slasher.

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