See No Evil

See No Evil (2006): Yes folks, it’s another dead teen movie and this one stars that famous wrassler ‘Cain’ as the evil teen remover. The group of Cain fodder is composed of juvenile delinquents on a work release program to help clean up an old hotel. Now do you think they would release both male and female miscreants on the same trip and on the same bus to stay overnight at the same hotel!!! Well, at least that gets the boys and gals in a position to try and do a little camel dancing overnight and gives Cain a good excuse to eliminate most of them. Cain is one ‘BAMF’ (non-good derriere female parental unit aardvarker), big as a house, and uses giant ‘fish’ hooks to catch unruly teens.

It seems Cain was abused by his dear old mum who was a bit of a stickler on living a clean life and apparently locked the young wrassler in a dog cage naked until he learned scriptures or at least stopped thinking about girls. This appears to have had a somewhat negative effect on Cain’s social skills and on his vocabulary which appears to run from ‘ah’ to ‘gurr’ and ‘ugh’. With dialogue like that, Cain is unlikely to be playing Hamlet anytime soon. However, to be fair to the movie, it does attempt to explain why Cain is like he is and how he turned up at the hotel in time to eliminate the teens and their escorting guards. In a rare show of continuity, in an early flash back, Cain is shown getting shot in the head and appearing to be headed for a dirt nap. Later in the movie, he is shown with a bullet hole in his head and true to the gore level of this little blood bath, the hole is crawling with maggots, a nice touch which might also help explain his anti-social behavior. I mean, how friendly would you be with maggots eating your brain.

If you like lots of gore and blood in your movies, this may be of interest. If logic and reality is your cup of tea, pass on this one. The movie is rated R for: hooking through the jaw, multiple teen hookees, gratuitous shower scene, rising to the next floor without aid of elevator or stairs, raising Cain, dropping Cain, and especially for the way dear old mum stuck to the wall while becoming a ‘departed’.

Are You Scared?

Are You Scared? (2005): Are you ready for a massive ‘SAW’ rip-off? This one can be classified as a ‘teens in a box’ movie. This is sort of like a ‘dead teenager’ movie except it takes place in an abandoned building so the producer doesn’t have to spend money on sets and can get the building rented really cheap and everyone stays in the ‘box’ for the whole movie. Fill it with cheap actors; steal a plot from a decent movie and you can make a really bad movie for very little money.

Not only did they steal the major plot line but the gimmick used to get the movie started was to make the victims think they were on a reality TV show called ‘Are You Scared?’ Now ask yourself, if you woke up in an abandoned industrial building with a bunch of strangers, and didn’t remember how you got there, wouldn’t you be just a little suspicious that things weren’t quite right. But not these folks, they just go walking into the traps with eyes wide open until the population is severely reduced. And, oh yes, after the titles roll, the black guy is the first to get it. And he even had a new incision in his abdomen made while he was out cold and didn’t suspect a thing was out of the ordinary! Give me a break!
At least in SAW there was an attempt at having a moral to the tale for each victim and each victim had a slight chance to survive. These poor sods couldn’t complete the tasks assigned unless they were superhuman or superman or at least not anywhere nearly as neurotic as they seemed and you can be sure all are dead meat once initiating the set piece carnage scenes. And most of the victims are innocent bystanders with only one or two really being sort of bad. Avoid this one and watch the real SAW movies if you like that sort of thing. The flick is rated R for: beheading, benecking, befacing, befooting, forehead drilling, massive shot gunning, massive burning, and for a massive technical error regarding the explosive properties of gasoline.

The Cave & The Descent

The Cave (2005) & The Descent (2006): Rarely have two movies with such similar plotlines been released so close together. Both are about spelunkers trapped in caves with strange creatures looking to digest them. Both have good photography with “Cave” having some really fine underwater cave swimming scenes and “Descent” having some very unusual lighting effects from the various types of lightning used by the doomed spelunkers. ‘Cave’ is about a group of underwater experts investigating a cave filled with water while ‘Descent’ is about a group of women friends who go exploring a cave for fun. Naturally both sets of cave croutons get trapped inside and must find an alternate way out. Both caves appear to be inhabited by nasties with above average appetites. Both sets of nasties are explained by evolutionary processes, one ultra high speed via a virus while the other appears more of a natural type. What you get is a bunch of blind albino humanoids with teeth. ‘Cave’s’ are more mutated and look like a cross between a bleached Alien, the Predator (bleached), and a Gargoyle while ‘Descent’s are just bleached blind hairless bipeds with sharp teeth.
The ‘Cave’ victims’ dilemma is that their leader appears to know the way out but he also may be mutating into one of the things currently trying to eat them. The gals in ‘Descent’ find out their leader took them into another cave than the one they registered to go into and no one will be looking for them. One of the best scenes occurs in ‘Descent’ when one gal is separated from the group and has no light save from her video camera and all you can see is through the viewing screen of her camera. Both movies are pretty well done for this type of story and should keep you absorbed. The Cave is rated PG-13 and The Descent is unrated but would probably also run in the PG-13 area for massive claustrophobia, unneeded explosions, non-helpful tectonic shifting, massive biting, excessive hungry blind albino things without food stamps, multiple bone piles, mutated fish, and for the flying flapping blind toothy evolutionary creature that just couldn’t have developed into something that ugly.