AMERICAN MARY’s Katharine Isabelle reteams with the Soska sisters for the remarkably life-affirming slasher sequel, SEE NO EVIL 2.
the medical establishment. Unlike its oppressively heavy predeces- sor, SNE2 is something of a rare bird among today’s horror fare in that it is a horror film designed for an audience’s enjoyment. Though Lionsgate sadly saw fit to deny the film a theatrical re- lease, SEE NO EVIL 2 was clearly built to be enjoyed on the big screen, in the dark (into which it plunges us occasionally with great glee), in the company of a lot of other like-minded people who want to scream and have fun with it. It sets its tone of tongue-in-cheek irony right away with loving de- tails of numerous tools of death which are gradually revealed to be the forensic instruments in a mor- tuary, rather than the savage tools of Jacob’s workshop, which are then followed by what may be the most delightful director’s screen credit in movie history.
Working from a script by first- timers Nathan Brooks and Bobby Lee Darby, the Soskas immedi- ately set about fixing the original’s most faulty carpentry by establish- ing a core group of characters that we come to quickly care about.
Our heroine is Amy (Danielle Har- ris), a perky morgue attendant who, akin to Mary Mason, has surrendered her dream of becom- ing a doctor because “we all end up here eventually”—meaning the morgue. There are hints that life has disappointed her, and that it is also passing her by: it’s her birthday, which she planned to spend partying with a group of friends, until she, her infatuated pathologist co-worker Seth (Kaj- Erik Eriksen), and paraplegic boss Holden (BATES MOTEL’s Michael Eklund) are suddenly inundated by the incoming from the previous film’s slaughterfest. But some friends don’t take “no” for an answer and the birthday party finds its way to Amy at the morgue, led by her best friend Tamara (AMERICAN MARY lead Katharine Isabelle). Dragged along in Tamara’s undeniable, partying wake are her boyfriend Carter (Lee Majdoub), another girl- friend named Kayla (Chelon Simmons), and Amy’s brother Will (Greyston Holt), who intuits Seth’s interest in Amy and advises him that his sister deserves better.
There is a lot of sublimated, frus- trated attraction in play—between Amy and Seth, also between Will and Kayla (who manages to over- turn Will’s tendency to see her “as a sister” with a hot kiss), and Tamara sits on Holden’s numb lap to tease some grisly details out of him. Anxious, fascinated by weird crime details, and feeling game for some dangerous drama, Tamara uses a feigned need to pee to seek out the unmouldering remains of Jacob Goodnight, which she ends up straddling and teasing on a morgue slab with an apparently effective kiss of life—it’s the only explanation we get of his immi- nent resurrection, but better a sexy kiss than a lame deus ex machina.
Once Jacob’s carcass arises from his slab, the movie is off and running, and the next half hour or so is fresher than anything the American slasher genre has seen since the 1970s. The Soskas de- light in their morgue’s haunted house possibilities, cutting off the lights, letting us see just a little, and startling us with sudden bursts of violence and volume. The film
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