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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

SAW

04:09 / 10.03.05

probably on DVD now where you are.

er... saw it today on a theater. liked it quite a lot, despite some flaws [discussed ad nauseum at imdb.com's boards]. some very unsettling scenes - been a while since a movie left me that nervous.

needless to say any following discussion about the ending is a spoiler, so...

05:42 / 10.03.05

See thread for The Machinist, where I go off on Saw as well.

It's got a really great and compelling premise - two guys waking up, not knowing how they got there, chained up in a room and finding creepy instructions to murder each other or mutilate themselves - but after that it's an awful, terrible, preposterously stupid movie, sorry Hector. Yeah, there's some "SHOCK" scenes that are genuinely unpleasant but one eventually has to wonder, after Se7en and The Cell, exactly what continued purpose there is to dreaming up the Most Depraved Scenario Possible.

Example of Saw's ham-fistedness - in one of the MANY achingly silly flashbacks, the police track the killer to his abandoned warehouse lair, the address of which is - I shit you not - STYGIAN STREET. Not a joke. I didn't pay attention closely enough to see if the building number was 666, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Also, laughable dialogue such as this exchange:

"Who hired you?"
"I don't know, it was just a guy, some guy."
"Well what did he look like?"
"I dunno, man, I don't remember, I didn't take notes!"
"Was he tall, short, fat, skinny?"
"He...he was a tall black guy with a big scar on his throat." Yeah, nothing remarkable about that.

It also has probably one of the silver screen's great terrible performances in Cary Elwes, who was never a brilliant actor to start but in Saw is laugh-out-loud comedically awful. As the movie progresses he becomes more and more "unhinged" and at the end is reduced to tearful whimpering and huge bellowing primal screams in the least convincing manner possible.

And then of course, as is apparently compulsory these days, there's the obligatory shock twist ending that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.

I swear to you, we were watching this on dvd and the only way we could get through it was to give it the Mystery Science Theatre treatment, and on at least 4 occasions we would crack some joke - "hey, wouldn't it be funny if (x) happened next" and then IT WOULD. Stuff we were saying as a joke would then follow with total earnestness in the film.

Really, really bad.

09:08 / 10.03.05

Re: STYGIAN STREET. To be fair, Stygian is the name of an independent Australian film at least on the the guys - Leigh, the writer/guy in room who is not Elwes - worked on. So it's a little tribute to that.

Yes, the film is pretty terrible, but you have to give them credit for going to Hollywood with a short film and a script and getting a pretty incredible deal. They've probably got at another film on the back of SAW, and who knows what they'll do with that.

15:19 / 10.03.05

I'm sure there's other ways to wink at your own film. They may have been trying to be clever but it provided a moment of surely-unintended, eye-rolling comedy in what was supposed to be a grisly, dark horror film.

SOME SPOILERS BELOW, if you care, but it's not the end of the movie...

On that scene - the police track the killer to his lair on (snicker) Stygian Street, bust in and find all kinds of evidence. They pull back red velvet sheets to reveal elaborately constructed dioramas of the killer's deathtraps, complete with little toy victims. They're moving on down the line, pulling sheets off each one, and then something under one of the sheets moves. They pull off the covering and reveal a live man, strapped into a chair with two power drills rigged to burrow into his head! Then they hear the service elevator start up - oh no, the killer is coming back!

Do they radio for backup? Do they free the guy in the chair and stand at the door of the service elevator, guns drawn? No, they COVER EVERYTHING BACK UP, including the vicitm, and tippytoe over behind a desk to hide and "see what he does." And then the killer comes in, presumably from having just been wandering around outside in broad daylight, wearing a not-very-inconspicuous floor-length hooded red and black satin robe. I think there may have been scary designs on it too. He mumbles some spooky nonsense then starts up the drills, and that's when the cops jump out and try to apprehend him and then the killer shoots a sword out of his wrist like fucking Wolverine or the nazi guy from Hellboy.

What a stupid movie.

17:10 / 10.03.05

The plot holes start right at the beginning. How come that guy's managed to survive being unconscious underwater for however long?

18:05 / 10.03.05

Also, what kind of private detective photographer who's trying to be discreet uses a FLASH?

And why -

SPOILER

SPOILER

SPOILER

does ZEP (another pet peeve of mine, character names that sound completely false; see also Trevor Reznik in The Machinist), who is revealed to be just a pawn in the Jigsaw Killer's game, and is being coerced into complicity, never actually tell anyone "I'm sorry, I have to do this or I'll die" but instead acts like a movie villain and does things like hiss "I can seeeeeee yooooouuuuu" in a creepy voice to a video monitor, when no one is around anyway? Painfully inept and nonsensical misdirection on the part of the filmmakers.

And how can Jigsaw lie there motionless - apparently self-drugged - for 6 hours and still be in control of the game? How did the captives receive electric shocks from what appeared to be ordinary shackles? Who triggered them?

It just completely falls apart if you try to appply any logic to it. The Machinist is just pretentious and cliched, but Saw is flat-out nonsensical.

19:18 / 10.03.05

How did the captives receive electric shocks from what appeared to be ordinary shackles? Who triggered them?

Well, the chains were locked around metal pipes going through the walls/floor - and presumably hooked up to the mains at some point, with a remotely-triggered on/off switch. At one point, we saw the "I can seeee yoooouuu" screen-watcher turn the electricity on - and, later, Jigsaw appeared to do the same thing with a hand-held control thing.

But yes, full of holes. I still quite enjoyed it, though.

15:03 / 15.03.05

I liked it, too. I was genuinely scared, although given the holes in the plot I'm finding that reaction hard to justify.

02:14 / 16.03.05

I'm just going to point out here that my brother did some score work for one of their earlier films and says that Leigh - the writer/actor - was one of the biggest fucking idiots he'd ever met. So, you know, feel free to hate the film just for that.

12:11 / 17.03.05

whatever did he do to cause your brother such offense?

10:58 / 19.03.05

Well the internal beartrap was nightmarish.

Jack The Bodiless

15:52 / 23.05.05

No the plot doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but I tend to find that applies to virtually every movie I've ever seen - there's no movie in the world which, given the right/wrong mindset, you can't deconstruct to show that it's nonsense. The Usual Suspects, one of my favourite films, is one of those movies - award-winning screenplay, actors and directors, genuinely involving, and so all the plot holes/gaps in internal logic are reconned by the enthusiastic fans as 'puzzles'. Most of Cameron's quibbles are easily explained/rationalised if you can actually be bothered to do so... Of course, since I can't be arsed to defend Saw to that extent, I'll just say that I really, really enjoyed it, but that I'm a sucker for this kind of movie, so I'm the perfect target audience... oh, and I didn't think Elwes was that bad. (honestly, I love it when people watching movies like this - with characters being put through a mental and physical wringer so wonderfully ridiculous it verges on the camp - complain that the acting is 'unconvincing'). All his 'prison' scenes were shot in six days with no rehearsal, so I think he did quite well, considering...

D Terminator XXXIII

15:30 / 18.07.05

A se7en for the 21st century?

Dude. You have lost your mind.

However, with a beginning that strong, I would like to see it remade. Possibly by Fincher.

I really don't have problems with faulty logic - this can actually enhance my enjoyment of a movie - but the way 'logic is as logic does' was presented by the inept director and editor made me want to kick both the TV screen and the DVD player.

Overrated but fun, if you can stand to be enraged by questionable storytelling choices.

15:42 / 18.07.05

The film hurt me to watch it, I became angry at the stupidity - not just plot holes and obvious need to tie scene to scene linkers that made no sense, plain out right stupid people in it.

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Why on Earth did the police cover up the man with the drills attached to his head, just to see what the killer was going to do next? Why? Why? There's two policemen, one covers the villian one covers the drill thing, but the one that covers the drill thing, armed with a gun as he is, and surrounded by tools etc, doesn't think to just smack the fuck out of the drill parts straight away? Why not pull off a stupid hood when you have a man under arrest, why not put on some handcuffs? Arghhhh. Yes the machine had started, and yes they were trying to save a panicking man, but they let him get into that position by just wanting to see 'what the killer's up to' - he's a fucking killer! He's up to killing for god's sake!!

So yeah, I didn't like the film for many reasons, mainly that the characters were stupid, the twists were there for twists sake, and mainly because it was awful - with all the rock star speeded up shots that added nothing, NOTHING to the tension.