The maniacal Jacob Goodnight is back in this sequel from Jen and Sylvia Soska, known as “The Twisted Twins” for their taste of horror films.
Amy and Seth are workers at the local morgue when it is revealed that it is Amy’s birthday. When Amy is about to get off of work, she and Seth have been given an emergency by their wheelchair-bound boss Holden. The body of serial killer Jacob Goodnight has arrived from his reign of terror at the old hotel nearby. Both Amy and Seth have heard the news about Goodnight and the hotel. They are shocked but leave his body downstairs in the morgue.
Amy is given a surprise when Holden lets her best friends Tamara, Carter, Kayla, and brother Will in the morgue for her birthday party. When Tamara hears about Jacob Goodnight being in the morgue, it gives her a sense of excitement. When she and boyfriend Carter go to downstairs, they intend to see the body of Jacob and while the couple decide to get their freak on, Jacob wakes up, shocking both Tamara and Carter. When Carter is brutally murdered, Tamara barely escapes. Jacob decides to finish what he started at the hotel by donning a new mask and have a variety of medical tools as his new weapons.
For this sequel made eight years after the original but set only hours after the first film, the script written by Bobby Lee Darby and Nathan Brookes, has everyone under lockdown in a morgue with the maniac Jacob Goodnight. Taking over the directing reigns are identical twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, whose love of horror films gained them a following after their breakout film American Mary. Here, the sisters bring their style to the film and do quite a good job. They even cameo as a pair of corpses in the opening credit sequence.
Once again, WWE superstar Glenn “Kane” Jacobs shines as the now more-grotesque Goodnight, who sports a mask but doesn’t let what happened in the first film stop him. The casting here is perhaps the smartest with the addition of two horror film scream queens. Danielle Harris, known for her roles in Halloween 4 & 5 and Hatchet II & III, plays the young woman whose birthday becomes a living nightmare. Katharine Isabelle of the Ginger Snaps films as well as the Soskas’ breakout, is quite crazy in her own right as Tamara, who gets excited from seeing corpses. Kaj-Erik Eriksen brings a bit of smarts as well as the nerdy Seth while Greyston Holt more or less plays a jerk as Amy’s older brother Will, who constantly berates her for her choosing to work in a morgue over med school.
Once again, the death scenes are a well-made combination of minimal computer imagery and a more exuberant use of practical visual effects. While Goodnight has the new tools from the morgue to assist him, he does get a pivotal scene against one victim with his chain and hook once again. According to the Soskas, they made Kane use a heavier chain and hook for this scene and he impressed the sisters when he threw it like it was nothing. One victim gets chained up after she is brutally killed and it looks pretty gruesome. We even get more out of Kane in terms of his speech as he still feels the after effects both physically and emotionally when he unleashes his destruction.
See No Evil 2 is definitely a worthy sequel thanks to having the duo of Jen and Sylvia Soska direct, casting veterans Danielle Harris and Katharine Isabelle alongside Kane, and of course Kane himself wreaking more havoc as Jacob Goodnight.
WFG RATING: B
Lionsgate presents a WWE Studios production. Directors: Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska. Producer: Michael J. Luisi. Writers: Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby; based on characters created by Dan Madigan. Cinematography: Mahlon Todd Williams. Editing: Sam Bauer.
Cast: Glenn “Kane” Jacobs, Danielle Harris, Katharine Isabelle, Chelan Simmons, Kaj-Erik Eriksen, Greyston Holt, Lee Majdoub, Michael Eklund.
WorldFilmGeek 