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Unseen Evil

DVD

*

Directed by

Jay Woelfel

Written by

Scott Spears

Cast

Richard Hatch

Tim Thomerson

Cindi Braun

Frank Ruotolo

Jere Jon

Cindy Pena

Robbie Rist

R

90 min

Unseen Evil, or, 'The Biggest Bastardization of Native American Culture Since Chief Lucky Strike,' provides us with not only a Yuma Indian creation story, but also with the sad, sad consequences of their story being accurate.

Apparently, as the Yuma Indians tell it, four eagles created the planet: the black one, the brown one, the white one, and the UNSEEN one (the movie provides UNSEEN in all caps, so don't blame me). This begs the question, if there were four eagles, and one of them has never been seen by man (another verbatim quote from the script), how do they know there were four of them to begin with?

Freaky, huh?

Anyway, we rejoin our craptacular in the making with a pair of college students (those darn college kids again! Aren't they just the wackiest?) and their terribly ambitious professor, along with a handful of minor-league mercenaries. They're off in search of a Historical Find, a burial mound, which is, coincidentally, the exact same mound we just saw earlier in the film, containing the nasty, bloodthirsty, evil UNSEEN. At least, that's what I'd guess it is. This particular burial mound may, apparently, provide proof that other explorers had been visiting North America well before Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and their ilk had arrived.
[BB]
The movie then turns into a morality play as the two coeds decide they don't LIKE the thought of having the relics of long-dead Indian civilizations sold on the black market, and thus grow VERY UPSET with the professor, who responds in the terribly mature manner of directing his hired thugs to hold guns on them while tying their wrists together.

The burial mound is, indeed, stuffed to the gills with artifacts and assorted barterables, which the professor and his coterie of hired thugs grab up and stuff gleefully into gunny sacks. Other things, much less identifiable corpses of what can only be called "things," are also in the burial mound. Of course, the professor and company don't seem to care much about these corpses, while the coeds are too busy screaming about unethical behavior and the evils of greed to anyone who'll listen.

That is to say - nobody!

The predictable comes to pass--the UNSEEN and its formerly corpsed-up minions try to do the two typical things of protectors of haunted burial mounds:

1. Recover the stolen piles of loot.

2. Kill everybody even vaguely associated with the project.

Of course, as our mercenaries discover, it's really, really hard to kill something that has never been seen by man.

I can't believe this kind of crap is still being produced. It's almost identical to a horde of other movies before it. Deadly Species, among a host of others. The acting is nightmarish, with the lone black male mercenary veering wildly between legendary badass caricature and gibbering and screaming like one of those really awful actors in the thirties and forties who was always screaming about "being ascair'd o' dem ghosties." The female actors, at least the one that survives, is a shrill feminist ecoterrorist who is constantly screaming about macho male pigs engaged in "dick-waving contests" and about how AWFUL, AWFUL it is of them to be LOOTING and DESTROYING historic sites!

The UNSEEN effects are nothing short of misery made celluloid, alternately a low-budget Predator ripoff or shoddy CG animation. Occasionally, it's a snuffling, screaming pig-sounding thing seen only in the usually repulsive 'He-Who-Walks-Behind-the-Rows'-vision.

The firearms wranglers should be shot themselves--there are NO muzzle flashes. In full light or in shadow, guns never fire with visible flashes.

The only high point of Unseen Evil is the performance turned in by an actual actor, Tim Thomerson of Dollman fame. As Chuck, a park ranger ambushed earlier on, Tim Thomerson plays the classic hard-boiled character he's so used to, and does a fantastic job of it. His colleague, Bobby (in a pleasant and welcome homage to the bumbling, everpresent duo of Chuck and Bobby from the earlier Ernest movies), is a bumbler in his own right, but always ready to help Chuck out.

Extra features are...you know what? There ARE no extra features. That's right, folks, it's a DVD utterly devoid of extra features. No subtitles, no trailers, no 'making-of' featurettes... no nothing!

How monstrously awful this is.

All in all, despite a thoroughly adequate performance from Tim Thomerson, nothing can save Unseen Evil from being a movie better left UNSEEN.

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