Saw
Cutting your foot to spite your leg never felt so good!
Starring:
Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Leigh Whannell, Ken Leung, Dina Meyer, Mike Butters, Paul Gutrecht, Michael Emerson, Benito Martinez
Director: James Wan
Screenwriter: Leigh Whannell
Reviewed
by Larry Stanley
I love a good scary movie. Too bad all to many times 'scary movie' in our society means lots of blood, guts and exploding intestines all over the place.
I liked Alfred Hitchcock. When he did a movie that was scary, it was scary. It touched on many of the fears an individual has, sometimes even the ones a person is not aware of. Like in The Birds, or Psycho. To this day, I know people who refuse to have birds in their home or take showers in motels.
"Assss Youuuu Wissshhhhhhhhh!" |
But Hitchcock was like that. He reached into a viewers mind and found the things that are actually scary, and built on them. Which is why films that have Zombies or ghosts in them don't usually bother me. I know they are not real.
Same with films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or House of a 1,000 Corpses. Shoot, I knew people like that when I was growing up. Folks who lived so far out in the country that electricity was a magical thing and it was not all that uncommon to find 'home remedies' being used for everything from broken bones to deciding the sex of a baby.
So, I always know when I am riding around in the backwoods and the boonies to be careful of folks wearing coveralls, covered in long hair and carrying chainsaws and human limbs. I know how to deal with Zombies, spirits and inhuman flesh eaters. Heck I think I could probably even beat a C.H.U.D. if I had to.
Which begs the question, "What scares Larry?"
I honestly hate films about real-life killers. I can't stand films about John Wayne Gacy, or Ted Bundy. And films with a decidedly crazy killer with nothing to lose normally land on that shelf.
Which brings us to Saw.
James Wan has brought to the screen a very effective horror movie that brings to mind a good many of the ideas that Hitchcock strove to bring to the viewer. This drama deals with a serial killer who doesn't really kill anyone, just forces his victims into death by putting them through gruesome games.
Opening with two guys and a dead body trapped in a partially destroyed bathroom, our living protagonists Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Larry Gordon (Cary Elwes) are chained to pipes at opposite ends of the room with the corpse between them. In the hands of the corpse are a pistol and a tape recorder. In their pockets, they each find a tape with the words "Play Me" printed on them.
Upon playing the tapes, they discover that unless Larry kills Adam by six Larry's wife and daughter will be killed.
From here on out, Wan delves into the past of each man as the killer, known as Jigsaw pushes them into the game he has laid out for them to play. Larry remembers that several months before he was questioned by the police as a suspect in one of Jigsaw's vicious murders.
Even though he is released Gordon is still suspected by Detective Tapp (Danny Glover) who brings his partner into the investigation, leading to Tapp's being dropped from the force and suffering a terrible injury.
Wan jumps into the past several times showing the specific moments in Dr. Gordon's life that have led him to this point. We discover that Gordon has many secrets in his life and some of them are shared by Adam although neither of them know it yet.
Jigsaw's various planted clues lead Adam and Gordon to a couple of hidden hacksaws which after they try fruitlessly to cut through the chains are figured out to not be for that, but for them captives to cut off their feet instead.
Along with the hacksaws, they also find a key but find that it does nothing for them either. Adam, while searching through Gordon's wallet finds a photo of Alison (Monica Potter) and Diana Gordon (Mackenzie Vega), bound and gagged. He decides to hide this from Larry.
While Gordon gives a history of Jigsaw to Adam flashbacks show how the killer keeps pushing people into his demented games, making them seek reasons for why their own life should be cherished.
We are given several possible villains during all this. From Gordon himself, to Adam to Gordon's wife, to a hospital orderly named Zep to Detective Tapp. Who is the bad guy? Will Gordon kill Adam? Will anyone think of shooting off the locks?
Ok, there are some plot holes here and there. But not enough to cause any serious problems. One has a tendency to look past some of the minor problems and actually look at the film. And yes there are a lot of things taken from other films, including Se7en, Silence of the Lambs and The Game, and Jigsaw is often seen running around like a character from an Italian slasher film.
There are moments of nail-biting tension and enough nervous laughter while waiting for the final confrontation, but also bringing in a lot of questions by the film's twisty climax.
The violence is actually understated and I want to know what all was cut to get to an "R" rating down from the unrated status it originally had.
The film reaches it's deepest creep-out when Larry's daughter talks about the 'man in my room'.
Director Wan has a nice feel for the horror genre, but he needs to work more with people and bringing out their feelings. Cary Elwes is a good actor, but he almost destroys the entire mood of the film with his over the top emotional outburst in a couple of places.
You can see that he is not actually 'feeling' what is going on around him, but is instead simply 'acting out' what he is told. But even that is not enough to destroy the downright scary feeling throughout the film.
For me, this is the "thriller" I have been waiting for all year. Where other films that were called 'horror' were actually more into shocking the viewer, Saw tries to make the viewer a part of the film by getting us to question our own lives and how much value we put on it.
The question comes up, "What would you do to save your life?'
The answer is, "I hate that question."
| Rating: |
 (3 1/2 out of 4 stars) |
Larry Stanley is the editor and publisher of Penguin Comics and Movies, located at http://www.penguincomics.net and has done over 500 movie reviews in his career. He is also a contributing reviewer to Cultcuts magazine (http://www.cultcuts.net) and Columbia360 (http://www.columbia360.com/) as well the magazine Devine Exploitation.
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