Yes yes, I'm a day late on posting these. When one is attempting to celebrate the beginning of their 29th birthday, you tend to forget certain obligations. But I'm going to double up today, and my review for Day 12's picture shall be up within a few hours.
Raph and Max are your typical guns-for-hire, doing dirty jobs for the right amount of money, and only under the right circumstances. Outside of their rather busy work schedule, Raph is attempting to fix a marriage on the brink of divorce, and the fact that he almost forgets his own son's birthday isn't helping matters. While out and about, the two begin searching for a last minute gift, but soon receive orders to pull off a routine hit. The operation proves to be anything but basic, however, and the men find themselves holed up in a secluded area, grouped together with complete strangers and fighting for their lives against infected human beings.
So, this is a thing that exists. I had always assumed that whenever casting companies decided to let professional wrestlers take the lead, they'd attempt to pick out the biggest and/or most recognizable name that they could find. Last year, that thought was shattered following the release (plus my own review) of the fairly mediocre The Call, co-starring the modern king of "Why are you still employed?," Mr. David Otunga. During a random trip to the last Blockbuster Video that I'll likely ever see, I stumbled across Overtime, with legendary low-card standout Al Snow in the lead, and figured that for the cost of one whole American dollar, I'd give it a whirl.
From the get go, you can tell that Overtime has nothing but good intentions, wanting to be a mixture of Jingle All The Way and From Dusk Til Dawn (no, you didn't read that wrong). The only problem is that this film just seems to be trying a little too hard to be "cool" or "fun." Some of the more memorable horror-comedies in recent years didn't have to try hard per se, but the overabundance of cursing and exposition in Overtime shines brighter than a spotlight on the back of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's head. Snow and his partner John Wells at least look like they were having a ball during filming though, as does the flick's villain, who is channeling her inner Jeremy Irons from the infamously terrible Dungeons and Dragons movie released in the year 2000.
There isn't anything necessarily terrible in Overtime, and heck, there are times when it's genuinely funny (inexplicably, any joke revolving around what kind of cake to get for a birthday party made me chuckle), but it reminded me too much of one of those movies that you would have seen collecting dust on the shelf of a video store, or worse yet, sitting in a pile of unsold copies near the checkout lane. I'm honest-to-god shocked that this took NINE WHOLE MONTHS to shoot, especially when you consider how cheap the movie can look during particular moments and with how not-so-subtle some of the pop culture jokes can be. For example, Snow searches for the hottest video game system, the YBox 720, to buy for his son. Don't even bother to groan, I did it for you in spades. Admittedly, I would have never even batted an eye towards this surprisingly short project (it says eighty one minutes on the back, but it's realistically seventy) had the six time WWF hardcore champion not been attached to it. But hey, you could do much, much worse than sit through this. For instance, you could watch Al Snow wrestle in 1999's now-infamous "Kennel From Hell" match.
Yeah, too easy of a shot. I think I'll let Mick Foley stick to the jokes in this case.
Hoping that it will reduce their prison sentences by an entire month, several troublemakers and hoodlums are given a temporary leave of absence in order to help clean up a vacated and dilapidated hotel. Unbeknownst to the assorted group of folks is that while they work, they are secretly being watched and stalked by a silent, disturbed psychopath. When the reclusive murderer, known only as Jacob Goodnight, starts to slaughter them one by one, the remaining youngsters must gather and find a way to stop this maniac, or to at least escape the premises with their lives.
If that description for 2006's See No Evil is a little too by-the-numbers for any of you readers, then I can only assure you that it was the best that I could come up with. Writer Dan Madigan (of WWF/E SmackDown fame) and former pornography director Gregory Dark aren't trying to break new ground with this fairly formulaic motion picture, but man, could they have at least tried to do something out of the ordinary? Speaking of Dark, I am a little amazed, if not slightly bothered, to see a good amount of former adult film directors show up in the former half of this year's countdown. It's pure coincidence. I hope.
There really isn't much that I can disclose about See No Evil, solely because you've seen everything it has to offer already. Let me count the ways: generic hot girls, go-to shower scene, generic douchebags, fairly decent gore and kills, predictable twist towards the end, slight attempt at humanizing the killer, and a washed-out look throughout. Perhaps the only thing that I can disclose is something that I feel is only a problem long-time wrestling fans such as myself will have: Kane (real name Glenn Jacobs), who plays the often stone-faced, eyeball-obsessed Jacob Goodnight, just isn't scary whatsoever. I imagine that should you have no connection or interest in the world of sports entertainment, you may find him to be slightly disturbing, but it's hard for the small part of the audience that IS crossing over from the WWE universe to even care. We've seen this man get stuck in some absolutely horrendous feuds since the character's debut in 1997, so it's pretty damn hard to suspend our disbelief. Yes, he's tall and can grimace awfully well when he needs to, but I can't take him seriously when I've seen skits like THIS over the past few years.
See No Evil made me slightly depressed. Mind you, it isn't because it's an emotionally powerful film, or because you sympathize with any personality in the cast, but because of discovering that it was surprisingly successful at the box office and on home video. True, WWE Studios didn't make an obscene amount of money from its performance, but the movie still over-performed when you consider how many horror and wrestling fans expected it to bomb rather hard. The fact that superior, more well-developed projects such as Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon or Trick 'R Treat have to revel in obscurity, struggling to get a sequel off of the ground or even to make back its full budget, is just a crying shame. Meanwhile, this basic slasher picture, while not entirely deserving of the 8% rating that it currently holds on RottenTomatoes.com, is getting a sequel with bigger stars (Danielle Harris, Katharine Isabelle) and promising directors (Jen and Sylvia Soska) attached to it. It just doesn't seem particularly fair to me.
Wait, Trick 'R Treat IS getting a sequel? Oh. Well, at the end of the day, this movie is still pretty disposable.
Coming up very soon, we're heading way, way back to the 1960s and into the land of Mario Bava with Black Sunday!
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