See No Evil 2

Directors: Jen & Sylvia Soska
Screenplay: Bobby Lee Darby & Nathan Brookes
Starring: Glen ‘Kane’ Jacobs, Danielle Harris, Katherine Isabelle, Chelan Simmons
Year: 2014
Country: USA
Running Time: 86 mins
BBFC Classification: 15

See No Evil 2 begins with mass murderer Jacob Goodnight (played by WWE superstar Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs) being wheeled in for autopsy by pretty mortuary medic Amy (Danielle Harris, from Hatchet II), straight after the first film has concluded.

It’s Amy’s birthday and a group of her friends have snuck into the morgue to be with her on her special day. These include freaky girl Tamara, Amy’s brother, Will, sexy blonde Taylor (who’s got a thing for Will) and Carter, Tamera’s boyfriend. Also resident in the morgue are Amy’s two co-workers, wheelchair-bound Holden (who reminded me at times of Alan Rickman – in looks, not acting ability) and nice guy Seth, who’s clearly in love with Amy.

It’s not long before the impromptu party breaks down and various people split off from each other, including Carter and Tamara, who head over to the autopsy room for a spot of copulation among the corpses, which leads to one of the funnier lines in the film where Carter pleads for his kinky (in a necrophilia kind of way) girlfriend to: ‘babe, please get off the dead guy’, as she’s straddling the not –quite-so-dead Jacob. A few minutes after that Tamara finds out that she’s capable of influencing a different kind of ‘stiffy’ and all hell breaks loose as Jacob dispatches the two terrified lovers, tools up with various bits and pieces of unpleasant looking surgical equipment and heads off to say ‘Goodnight’ to the rest of the young folk!

What follows is a by-the-numbers ‘slasher’ movie, which, although pretty well shot and directed, falls rather flat due to a general lack of originality and some pretty flaccid scares. As one would expect there’s lots of creeping around in darkened corridors, playing ‘cat and mouse’ with the intimidating killer and some pretty grisly death sequences to please the gore-hounds. Characters do some pretty dumb things and one has to wonder how come the authorities didn’t make absolute certain that Goodnight was dead before handing him over to the mortuary.

What the Soska sisters do bring to the table is a sense of style to proceedings and a bit of a twist three quarters of the way into the film, which I didn’t see coming. Most of the characters are stock ‘Scooby Doo’ type teenagers, although the central couple’s sweet natured relationship and chemistry was a pleasant surprise and made you care about what happened to them throughout the film’s relatively short running time – the end credits are about 10 minutes long!

There’s very little attempt at explaining our crazy man-mountain’s kill spree, apart from flashbacks to his abusive mother who insisted (before he killed her) that he could ‘see the sin in other people’ and should execute them accordingly. Good parenting there! Sadly I felt that any wrestler type could have played the bad guy role here and that ‘Kane’ didn’t really instil him with any personality of his own. A shame really as Jacob Goodnight could have been a contender for a ‘slasher’ great if he had a bit more about him.

Having seen the Soska sisters’ earlier films, Dead Hooker in a Trunk and American Mary, which both showed a lot of promise, I was expecting a bit more from this glossy but rather vacuous and run-of-the-mill ‘slasher’ flick. A shame really as I do hope this film won’t be the last we see of them as they do have plenty of talent. Let’s just hope the next film they make is more than just a good location for some decent gore effects!

See No Evil 2 has recently been released on DVD and Blu-ray and is being distributed by Lionsgate. Special features on the disc consist of three featurettes, these being:

Kane’s Goodnight: An icon reborn (8 mins)
This is the usual sort of self-congratulatory stuff that is often wheeled out as an extra of interest, which mainly consists of Kane talking about playing Jacob Goodnight as a bigger version of Norman Bates – you wish Glenn, you wish!