See No Evil
Glen Jacobs
To show you how pathetic my childhood was; the highlight of my week was 11 am on Saturday. That is when my brothers and I would watch Bob Geigel’s “All-Star Wrestling,” out of Kansas City, featuring professional wrestlers with names like Handsome Harley Race, Rufus R. Jones, Solomon Grundy, Butch Reed, Vince Apollo, and Slick. In an era before steroids, most of these guys looked like unemployed high school shop teachers. So it made my elementary school world when my brother, who was my childhood hero, and his friend, Pat, took me to watch the matches that were being held in Des Moines, especially because the World Champion “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair was going to defend his title. Flair, with his long bleached blonde hair, gold Rolex, and tailor-made suit, was the kind of champion you loved to hate. He was always talking about his jets, big cars, and women. He was going to take on local baby face (good guy), blue collar Bulldog Bob Brown. Lead to the ring by two beautiful women, Slick Rick cut a beautiful promo about how all of us hicks were lucky to get to watch the champ, he had his limo out back with the engine running, and how afterwards, he was going to take all the women for a ride on Space Mountain, wooo. Brown ran in to defend the honor of all present, and for the next 60-minutes Flair thrilled the fans, carrying Brown to the best match the local mainstay ever had, and then barely escaped with the title in tow. Leaving the intoxicating atmosphere, we exited the armory. My brother reminding me not to get too close to the other fans as I might catch some thing. As we stood out in the cold Iowa weather, I noticed two women who looked an awful lot like Ric’s girlfriends standing at the bus stop waiting for a ride. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw him, the champ, my hero, Ric Flair, his gym bag in tow. He was walking with one of the baby faces, a man who earlier in the night had expressed his undying hatred for Flair, and they both climbed into a broken down VW bug with a muffler that seemed one good bump from falling off. Although I had suspected it for some time, a light bulb went on in my dull little brain; maybe all that I just watched inside wasn’t real. What you are meant to see is not always the truth.
Professional wrestling is the Rodney Dangerfield of entertainment, sweating profusely, grabbing its tie, and talking about how it gets no respect. At the turn of the 20th century, the highest paid entertainer in the world was a wrestler named Frank Gotch. In the 1950s, wrestling dominated the television landscape. Since the advent of cable, year in and year out, a wrestling program is always number-one in the ratings. The largest outdoor sporting or entertainment event in the history of the world was a wrestling match in Korea. The history of pro wrestling, from legit sideshow strongman who would take on all comers to a billion dollar laser and light show, in many ways mirrors American history, and is a commentary on blue collar America. Anyone who has watched the documentaries Beyond the Mat or Wrestling With Shadows has to admit that it is a fascinating industry. Still, it gets no respect. The non-wrestling fan sees it as a land of big muscles, robes, tans, and tights, wondering aloud how anyone could possibly take it seriously. It is such a joke that no one seems to care that a large number of relatively young grapplers have died the past few years. Last year, Congress stopped everything it was doing because a few baseball players were jabbing needles in their backside, but no one seemed to notice the obituaries of wrestlers like Big Boss Man, Road Warrior Hawk, Rick Rude, Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero, Art Barr, the Von Eriks, The British Bulldog, and dozens of others I could list. At the center of it all is third-generation promoter and All-American huckster Vincent Kennedy McMahon Jr., head of the World Wrestling Entertainment. Even though he is worth $650 million from promoting wrassling, he desperately wants mainstream respect. Yet, every time he has tried, he has fallen flat on his face with the likes of the World Bodybuilding Federation and XFL football league. The one season of the XFL was such a disaster that one game towards the end of the season received the lowest rating in the history of network television and cost McMahon $70 million. Now, McMahon wants to conquer the movie industry. Vinnie Mac, who watched the crossover success of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and to a lesser extent Roddy Piper, Hulk Hogan, and Jesse Ventura, wants to do the same thing with his other wrestlers and this time he wants to keep a piece of the pie. He was able to shakedown the major studios and get production credits on two of The Rock’s films, The Rundown and Walking Tall, with the wrestler still under a WWE contract. So, it was a natural step for him to start making his own films. With a legion of rabid fans, Vince envisions his film division releasing 3 or 4 films a year for the big screen and a half dozen others for television. With movies staring John Cena, Steve Austin, and HHH (Paul Levesque) already in the can, first out of the gate is See No Evil starring Glen Jacobs, a.k.a. Kane, the Undertaker’s “brother.”
For those who have never seen Glen Jacobs, he is a 6’8 to 6’9, 370 pound bald-headed gentleman who looks like he fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. So, a horror film in which he plays a psycho killer seems a natural. In the tradition of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Jacobs is Jacob Goodnight a psychopathic killer with a steel plate in his head and razor sharp fingernails that he can use to pluck out eyeballs. After getting shot in the head by a police office, Mr. Goodnight mainly keeps to himself, living in the crumbling and deserted Blackwell Hotel. So we have our mad dog killer, we need our victims, enter 8 prisoners, and you guessed it, the cop (Matthew Okine) who shot Jacob in the head. Let the bodies hit the floor.
You know you’re in trouble with a movie when you start longing for the glory days of Ed Wood, a man who knew how to make low budget trash. This is a “smash and grab” film, get the audience to purchase a ticket and run like hell with the money. You would have thought that director Gregory Dark would have known horror, being most famous for directing a Britney Spears video and pumping out more porn movies than you can shake a stick at (no double entendre meant, sorry). (He is one half of the Dark Brothers. You have got to love a director who has made such classics as White Bunbusters, The Creasemaster, and Hootermania. Class is written all over that dude.) A low rent horror film and a porn director aren't going to get you respect, but the cash the film makes might.