It’s the unholy spawn of Saw, which was in turn only the semisacred spawn of Se7en. This is what the endless rounds of imitation and outright theft do to a supposedly creative industry: result in blurry, smudged third-generation photocopies that can’t even distinguish themselves through attempts at pornographic excess. A gang of thoroughly unlikable idiots is marooned in the grotesque funhouse of an abandoned hotel -- for reasons too nonsensical to get into -- where yer standard crazed maniac offs them one by one, mostly by means of a meathook and a scooping out of the eyes, though there’s some bone crunching and skull crushing going on, too. Flashbacks to the maniac’s childhood intimate that the attempts of his high-on-Jesus freakzoid mother to condition her boy to avoid the temptations of the fairer sex have led him to his career of punishing folk for their sins... but what about the one gal actually dispatched in a tiredly ironic way that suggests she should pay for her virtue? Clearly, little thought went into the thematic motifs, and only a tad more into the mise-en-scène of the gore, which, for all its pointless sadism and would-be titillating provenence -- director Gregory Dark, if that is his name, actually is a maker of porn of the sexual kind -- is shocking only for how unshocking it is. (Any given episode of CSI is more pointedly graphic.) Need more reasons not see it? It’s produced by World Wrestling Entertainment, and the maniac is played by “wrestler” Kane, whose hulking menace is nothing if not laughably clichéd. I realize that sex and death are closely linked in these kinds of adolescent nightmares, and big bald guys are supposedly terrifying, but can’t anyone come up with something new, for pity’s sake?

(Technorati tags: See No Evil, movie, film, movie reviews, film reviews, horror, slasher, Kane, World Wrestling Entertainment, WWE)