THREE MASSIVE MANIACS AND A REALLY NICE GUY - ALL SQUISHED INTO A SEVEN FOOT, THREE HUNDRED PLUS POUNDS MAN...






Kane/See No Evil 1/See No Evil 2 (1992, 2006, 2014)

Do I really have to say 'Watch out, there's spoilers!' at the beginning of each review? If I do, I quit. I mean really, if you want 'The kills were nasty, the ending satisfying and I give it three out of five' go somewhere else. I mean it. Leave. NOW.

Don't be disheartened young ones, this won't be a huge review of the life of Glenn "Kane" Jacobs. Just the basics: He was born in Spain, has been married since 1995, began his career in the WWE in 1992, is best known as "Kane", and in the horror movie world as "Jacob Goodnight".

If you've ever seen him as Kane, you know he looks like a nightmare. Towering over his opponents he has been known to smash everyone and everything in sight (in the WWE). To call him a nice guy out of the ring is not saying that the wrestling is fake. I know the score on that. 


They may have "stories" they make up for drama, but the moves and the routines takes strength, coordination, caution, and lots and lots of practice. THAT is not fake. One wrong landing, one wrong execution of a move, and a wrestler's career can be over in a second, if not his life. People have died in the ring, most notoriously Owen Hart, who died due to a mechanical malfunction in 1999.

They take very strict measures to insure the safety of wrestlers, and training in order for their time in the ring to be safe and precise. So in that way, no, wrestling is not fake. The drama may be, but the men pay for their fame with a lot of injuries during their careers.

See No Evil (2006): I reviewed this movie October 21, 2013, so I'll just touch on this one so we can go on to the new Soska take on the Jacob Goodnight story. Basically the WWE wanted to make an 80's type slasher movie so they have the monster, the evil mother behind the monster, a bunch of kids that nobody's gonna miss anyway, and a whole lot of unlikely coincidences to make sure they go to their untimely demises.

There were two things that, if you remembered nothing else, stood out. The huge chain with the hook on the end that 'Jacob' threw like it was nothing, and the fact that after (sometimes before) each person was killed, he also pulled out their glazzies - oops, appy polly loggy. Some Clockwork Orange is still in my system, I guess it takes some time for the gloopy stuff to get out. 'Jacob' plucked out their eyeballs, keeping them in jars of liquid.

They killed him pretty good in the first one too: Not only had he lived with a bullet hole in his skull for four years (nice shots of maggots and flies coming out of there - the sound of a fly buzzing meant he was nearby), so to really, really kill him, they shoved a pipe through one eye, then shoved him out a five? six? story window into an atrium, with an interior shot of a piece of rebar splitting his heart. He was dead, dead, dead.

See No Evil 2 (2014): "He's not dead anymore." That's my favorite line of this movie, which has gotten both good and bad reviews of how the sequel was treated. The second movie, much anticipated as it was to be directed by the Canadian Soska sister team, was bound to come under harsh scrutiny. I personally think that it was unfairly due to their youth and the fact they are women. Sad but true.

They loved the saga of Jacob Goodnight and felt he could be a long-living (sort of) character and wanted a sequel. Hey, they were bound to make a few changes, while sticking to the general formula of the movie, that is, to keep it close to an 80's type slasher film. Just with a lot more gore. You HAVE seen American Mary, right?

Not to say I don't have my problems with this movie. It picks up right where the first movie left off (never mind that it was eight years ago) as the bodies are removed from the dilapidated hotel and brought to the morgue.


I was excited to see that the Soskas had a cameo at the beginning as two bodies that had just been autopsied. Unfortunately, they do not appear elsewhere in the movie. They did bring with them favorites Danielle Harris and Katharine Isabelle (American Mary). Unfortunately (and my biggest gripe) Katharine Isabelle played a drunken idiot in this movie - Danielle Harris got to be the 'smart' girl.

So coincidentally (of course) the bodies are brought in on the night of morgue attendant Amy's (Danielle Harris) birthday, when all her friends have planned a surprise party. Nothing is more surprising than having a seven foot corpse get up and start picking off your friends one by one...

My problems with it? Let's do those first and get them out of the way. All the bodies should have been in bags yet none were. In fact the other bodies were not even present anywhere in the morgue yet the supervisor said they had received at least seven of the victims.


Tamara (Katharine Isabelle) sits on Jacob's body and taunts him about the fact his mother tortured him as a child. If this movie is taking place just as they're removing bodies from the hotel, NO ONE could know who 'Jacob' was, what his motivation was, or his history. They wouldn't have known the significance of his wounds including the whip marks, the hole in his head, and the condition of his heart.

His mother had referred to him as the Hand of God and the media knew this when there was no way they could possibly have found out so quickly and broadcast it as the bodies were still being brought to the morgue. And they had his mother (with no wounds showing) already put in a drawer? Really?

From some magic room in the morgue Jacob managed to find the signature chain with a hook to use as in the first movie. There was also a freaking sweet looking knife they had to actually have hand made - but his mythology of 'seeing the sin' was gone and he didn't pluck out eyeballs. He did talk a lot more though - in the first movie I believe he had one line - in this he talks quite a bit.


Some complained there were too many 'flashbacks' but you have to remember - a lot of people have probably never watched See No Evil and it HAD been eight years so...

Lets go to the positives. Glenn Jacobs is a truly talented (and very coordinated) guy who can play mean and nasty like few others - not to mention do his own stunts (But then again, who the hell are you gonna get to do 'em for him?)

I usually don't list things like camera work, direction, shots, etc. 'cause, well, those things aren't funny. A lot of movies make 'em really stupid, but not funny.

The Soska sisters, young as they may be, pay a lot of attention to detail (if you ignore the parts they kind of just did away with) and several scenes were particularly well executed. One that stuck with me was when a rack of shelves with glass jars filled with liquid and other icky things was pulled on a guy by Jacob. The detail of the glass shards and flying stuff was neater than any 3D trick and this was not a 3D movie. You could just about see each individual shard as they flew through the air - very cool.

Originality: Embalming Jacob was a freaking sweet (and messy) idea, especially since the liquid was blue (watching blood and then blue gunk fly out of his eye socket was particularly gory) and a great device to keep him going for more movies; the whole cast dies for a change, despite there being the good, the bad, and the stupid; Kane was terrific - he talked this time - maybe a bit much but it puts him apart from the Jasons and the Mike Myers of the genre.

Overall I'm glad I have both DVDs and I can't wait to get hold of The ABC's Of Death 2 to see what letter the Soskas got to make into a gooshy, bloody mess.




                        

MOVIES YOU WATCH BECAUSE OF WHO'S IN THEM EVEN THOUGH THE MOVIE FREAKING SUCKS





Torment (2013) Canada

Have I mentioned I hate home invasion movies? 'You're Next' was an exception, but not a completely successful one. I think this is one of few films that has an honest title 'cause watching this Canadian whine fest was sheer torment for me. It's just another psycho 'family' in animal masks torturing another family. So why did I bother?

Well, the father, Cory, is played by Robin Dunne of the SyFy series (that was good until it got stale) Sanctuary, the mother, Sarah, is played by Katharine Isabelle (GO AMERICAN MARY! YES!!! CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOU IN SEE NO EVIL 2!), and there's a brief but ineffectual part for Stephen McHattie (who plays in a ton of stuff but I really liked Pontypool) as a gosh-golly-gee sheriff who dies pretty quickly. 

The boy is... just some whiny kid. Just kidding, Peter DaCunha did a good job as poor Liam who has to suffer with his dad's new wife (apparently things just aren't movie worthy unless at least one family member is already dead) as well as being abducted.

Whoops, wrong movie...

So, even though he has FREAKING KATHARINE ISABELLE for a new mother (sorry, she's just too cool - just ask the Soska sisters), he doesn't wanna go to their vacation house that everybody in movies apparently has tucked away somewhere - they must be in the same towns as all the abandoned asylums and prisons and hospitals, 'cause there ain't any near where I live.

Meh, I still liked the other one better...

Okay, this is a scenic place I live in so there are more than a couple of vacation homes here. I just don't own any of 'em.

When the family first gets there, the house is not only broken into but trashed, and it's obvious somebody's been living there. Do they turn and go far, far away from it until the police say it's safe? No - and we shake our heads 'cause we know they've got to do something really stupid or the movie doesn't start. And since it seems to be a "thing" now, the psychos all wear animal masks. That's... a really dumb fashion statement.

And absolutely NO backstory. Not that I wanted any, that would have just made the movie longer, but hey, a small explanation as to why this 'family' of animal heads wants to live in everybody else's house and torture people would have been appre... nah, never mind, it kept the movie shorter, good enough.

Believe it or not this is NOT how he dies...

So capture, scream, get free, run, get captured again, scream, get free, run... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Over and over until the end of the movie when Dunne gets shot and it's bye bye daddy. Isabelle saves the kid and they get magic blankets from the paramedic who's BY HIMSELF TO TRANSPORT ONE OF THE PSYCHOS because apparently that's how they do things in Canada, eh?

Same with the police - McHattie was by himself (which was fortunate since he was duct taped to the driver's seat of his car (don't even ask me how they managed that) and got blown up. So at the end they send ONE cop to transport another of the psychos but wait - one they thought was dead rescues her because hey, she's not cuffed, there's no cage in the car, and apparently anyone can open the doors. Canada's a real secure place, eh?

Sorry about that. It wasn't Canada that sucked here, it was this movie and that's all I've got to say about that. Now I've got a review to do about ANOTHER movie about Hitler's head in a jar so... I'm a little raw right now. Heil Canada!

                        

A LITTLE BIT AUDITION, A LITTLE BIT I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, A LITTLE BIT FLESH & BLOOD, A WHOLE LOT OF MISOGYNY




Dead Hooker In A Trunk (2009)/American Mary (2012) Canadian

This flinch fest has a little bit of everything - torture, rape, murder, misogyny and a small hint of humor. In a sick kind of way. I saw American Mary first and I was kind of glad - watching the Soska sisters' first effort of an independent film makes one realize that with practice this team might make some pretty good stuff. Just not yet. Seeing them both you can really tell they had quite a bit more money to spend on the second one.

Now there are those who would argue vehemently with me - DHIAT was recommended to me as an excellent movie, and I had heard AM was like the movie Audition (1999) an excellent foreign film I reviewed 8/24/12, that I'm going to have to get a copy of - it's a flinch/gore fest and the story is good. But back to the Soska sisters.

That they have talent is without question. Like I said, I think if they keep making movies, they'll get better and better. These two had great promise and certainly original stories but, well, let's start with the first one.

When you write/direct/produce a movie and then decide to star in it, you're gonna have trouble. For one thing, the more 'hats' you wear, the harder it is to keep control of them all. As actresses, they were uneven and at times cartoonish, but did show promise. The story is - umm - bizarre is about the only word I can think of for it and I was hoping this wasn't going to be a cheap version of Weekend At Bernies. It wasn't.


Dead Hooker In A Trunk (2009): The characters have no names, just description of their personalities. There are four. First is Badass (Sylvia Soska) a tough twin to Geek (Jen Soska) and we get a small bit of backstory that as a small child she was forced to shoot her father after he killed their mother. Geek wears glasses because, of course, in movie lingo this means she is not as pretty as her sister but smarter, right? Even though they're identical twins. In this film, except for looking alike, they have little in common. 

They are joined by Junkie (Badass' friend) and Goody Two-Shoes (Geek's friend) - the only male in the group and shown to be the weakest one of the bunch. The fun begins when they smell something strange in their Firebird (a restored 1969 Pontiac Firebird with mag wheels - too good for them but I'd take it) and discover, well, see the title.

Thus a chain of events is set in motion and the movie gets very choppy - there's almost no flow, just 'scenes' that happen one after another. The Soska sisters set out to show women can use gore just as good as the big boys can, and there's plenty of it. In the course of trying to get rid of the body, Geek loses her eye by being hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat (interesting) but instead of going to hospital just puts an 'X' of electrical tape over the hole (better than duct tape I guess). Then Junkie gets a severe cut via chainsaw to her arm by a drug dealer while she was making a pickup so Badass, having a gun from a previous scuffle, proceeds to blow everyone's head off and rescue her.

Now we get into cartoonish territory. We have Geek wearing her glasses over a tape covered eye socket, and as they're all out arguing on the side of a road Junkie waves her arms in frustration and a truck comes by and whoops! No more arm. 

Not to worry though, Badass simply retrieves the arm out of the 18 wheeler's grill (WTH?) and sews it back on. Ooookay. So the hooker's still in the trunk and the four decide to bury her together. As Badass digs a hole the hooker... wait for it... sits up. Badass promptly bashes her over the head with the shovel without a second thought. Yikes. But they don't bury her yet and back in the trunk she goes.

This goes on for the rest of the movie, with bad things happening to the group and a definite all-men-are-evil-and-will-hurt-you theme running throughout (Goody Two-Shoes doesn't count - one they think he's gay (he's not) and two he's a born again Christian youth group leader. With a foul mouth. Sigh.). The two injured girls don't act like they are in any kind of pain and still don't even go to a doctor and the rest of the movie's storyline is finally revealed - the hooker was killed by a serial killer and placed in their trunk for... a while I guess.

It wasn't really much of a shock to discover that it was Goody Two-Shoe's pious priest who was the serial killer since there really wasn't many men in this movie (sorry for assuming the serial killer was a man but roughly 85% of all serial killers are male). His motivation? A botched circumcision left him a bit... different and women made fun of him his whole life. Huh. That's... kind of dumb. You've gotta admit that of all the reasons someone would want to kill...

In the end in a twisted sense of justice, he is set on fire and burned, and the hooker dumped in the ocean, with our four now-friends driving off into the sunset. Ick.


American Mary (2012): While this also had quite the unique story (and also smaller parts played by the Soska sisters) it was uneven and seemed to run out of gas long before the ending, which was pretty dumb. But my problem is the title of the film itself. The character is a student studying to become a surgeon, named Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle), and as she does... what I'm about to describe, she tells all that she doesn't want her name spread around in case the police come back to her so they call her 'Bloody Mary'. So where did American Mary come from? There's no reference to it in the movie and no explanation either.

So Mary is studying medicine in Seattle, Washington (really Vancouver B.C.) with a sadistic teacher named Dr. Grant who's a real A to the double S to the HOLE. He picks on Mary constantly, both in class and in the hospital when they make rounds. But Mary badly wants to be a surgeon, even practicing on turkeys outside of class, to become the best there is. One BIG problem. Mary is from a Hungarian family in Budapest and they don't have money. And she is broke. Very, VERY broke. Desperate she goes to a strip club for a job. The owner, Billy, says all the right things (insert sarcasm here) like 'You're not fat under there or anything are you?' Like I said, all men are evil and will hurt you.

Before she can, uh, shake her booty Billy's bouncer comes in and he asks her to come with him to help stitch up an associate of his who had been tortured - for cash. Now. For five grand she does the distasteful job and manages to get back home before she loses everything she hasn't eaten for the last few days.

The movie gets weird from here. I mean that in an interesting way. If you have no experience with the concept of body modification, you won't understand what the big deal is here. I'm not talking about the cute little green dot earring in your nose (which always looks like snot to me) or the standard rose/skull/eagle tattoo on your arm/thigh. I'm talking hardcore. If you look up body modification, you'll find it's not for circus freaks - there is a population of people so desperately unhappy with themselves that they will do just about anything to alter their appearance. Or just think it's cool. Whatever.

This is not part of the movie - it's real...

Not just plastic surgery, but things such as 3D modification, voluntary amputation, and something not mentioned in the movie but last I heard only two people in the WORLD are willing to do it - tattoo the whites of your eyes. EYES. Blue eyeballs. Or whatever color they choose. These people also are willing to take the necessary risks to attain these modifications - unless the person is very good (and sterile) you can go blind or die from the complications.

So Mary meets Beatress - a stripper from Billy's club. Right away there's something... alien about her. She loves Betty Boop. A LOT. So to make the outside look like she felt on the inside... lets say the effects are startling. She has a friend who basically wants to look like a doll - and that means female, but, uh, not anatomically correct shall we say? Her name is Ruby Realgirl and she designs dolls and wants to be one herself - her face already is so frozen that when she speaks her lips barely even move. What does she have done? Umm - look at a Barbie doll and you'll pretty much figure it out. And she pays a LOT of money.

Mary is then invited to a party with other surgeons. This was a massive duh. Why they hell would surgeons invite students to a party unless... yup, roofies all around. In no time, the horrid Dr. Grant has her in a bedroom and she is violated, choked, raped and videotaped. For whatever reason, he doesn't have her dumped somewhere - she wakes up in the bed next to him. That... was not realistic. Dazed and messed up she asks Billy for a favor and soon Dr. Grant is trussed up and in her apartment. She decides to 'use' him to practice some other body modifications so that she can continue her new profession and collect some very high fees. Oh and she does it without anesthetic, just to be fair. I thought it was fair anyway.

So Mary starts to become famous for her skillful technique and willingness to do anything a customer asks. Anything. Cut it off? 'Kay. Sew it up? 'Kay. We then get to see the Soska twins again playing German body modification fans who want to always be together - even when apart. That involves switching arms and for whatever reason, 3D implants of horns in both foreheads. She gets another surgeon to help her since both arms need to come off and be sewed back on immediately. And of course since this is fantasy just as unreal as the first movie we won't worry about the little things, like connecting the nerve endings, muscles, fusing bones, you know, the micro surgery needed for this kind of thing...

And Dr. Grant? He's fine - what's left of him. Hanging by his flesh from hooks, all limbs amputated, lips sewn shut and being fed through an IV, Mary keeps him alive - whether for revenge or more practice we don't know 'cause somehow a security guard discovers her and tries to free the guy - the guard ends up getting his head turned to paste. Mary was mad and Mary made a mess.

Even though a detective has been harassing her with questions, she continues her work. Billy is worried though - Beatress has disappeared. Turns out that Ruby has a husband who doesn't quite appreciate his new anatomically incorrect wife. He beats the bejeezus out of Beatress until she tells him where Mary is. Mary doesn't discover this until she's already home - where he's waiting for her. How he got into her locked apartment we don't know - all we know is the movie has a few minutes left so...

The husband stabs Mary who returns the favor and kills him. She manages to sew her wound shut but the next scene is of the police crawling all over her apartment. They've discovered her album of 'work', including the hapless Dr. Grant. And Mary? She stitched herself up, but the internal bleeding was too much and she lies dead on the floor. What a flat, nothing, what the hell ending.

So what have we learned kiddies? Creativity is great. Practice is good. But maybe for the twin's next project they should step back and concentrate on the story and the direction instead of giving themselves excuses to parade in front of the cameras. Oh and remember - men are bad. Just ask them.