4.28.2007

movies: Saw

I'm making a push to get caught up on recent relatively acclaimed horror films.
(And yes, anything after roughly 1989 counts as 'recent' to your increasingly senile narrator.)

First in line is Saw, the screenplay of which got a lot of hype before it was actually produced.

Pocket review, an essentially crummy movie with a couple of original ideas.
It's a poor man's (a very poor man's) Se7en.

A clever, game-playing killer dispatches victims via diabolical set piece murders featuring an overabundance of digital color filtering and enough pointless jump cutting for fifty normal films. The potentially interesting conceit of telling the story from the vantage of the killer's two latest potential victims, trapped in a dismal white-tiled bathroom of indeterminate location, is largely squandered.

And the twist shock ending was a big letdown- it wasn't telegraphed, but it fell apart like a cheap suit after about 10 seconds of scrutiny.

I'd rate it 'watchable' for fans of the genre, but the plot runs on the ridiculous stupidity and incompetence of the protagonists (just one example, it requires belief that a nebbishy hospital orderly can overcome grizzled veteran cop Danny Glover not once but twice).

Next up is Hostel, which should prove the mettle of my resolve to even the most sceptical observer given my legendary hostility to the director's first opus, the pustulent dungpile Cabin Fever.

Pelf sez it's good, and he despised Cabin Fever at least as fervently as myself, so I'll give it a shot despite the deafening clamor of my internal alarms.

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