H'ween Horrorthon: 'SAW' (2004)

"Live or die. Make your choice."

Tobin Bell as Jigsaw.

"Hello reader. I want to play a game".

Right now, this blogger is forcing himself to relive the nightmare of watching a movie which, though praised by many for its originality and its raw verve, this blogger dismissed vehemently on account that while it had plenty of sick, shocking moments, it was not his cup of tea, even though he had subjected himself to every gross-out picture known to man. The film in question, was the first of its kind, where a serial killer decided to teach his victims the value of human life. It would be the first time a horror movie would give you front row seats to a carnival freak-show where victims would be tortured to death for sport—or rather, in this case, to see the bigger picture.

A film that would signal the arrival of...Torture Porn.

[Bicycle with freaky clown shows up...]

The mad genius behind this freak show is actor and writer Leigh Whannell from Melbourne, Australia. In 2003, a short film he and his friend, Malaysian-born director James Wan, produced and directed called Saw 0.5 caught the attention of Lionsgate Films and the feature-length version (this one) was made for a $1 million dollar budget and released just two days before Halloween in 2004. It would be the start of a growing movie trend that was initially started in 1995 when a director named David Fincher made a film with a couple of actors named Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt in which the victims were tortured and killed off-screen and we heard all the gory details in Se7en.

It seems these two maverick filmmakers thought that we as an audience wanted to see all of this up close and personal, so here it is—the gist of the plot. Two men (one played by Whannell himself, the other by British actor Cary Elwes who played a really sweet guy in a personal favorite of mine, The Princess Bride) are chained in a warehouse basement with a dead and rotting corpse in the center holding a tape recorder. They are given clues by me—a sick man who was dying of terminal cancer; this man was played by a character actor named Tobin E. Bell, whom I must say, did me justice. They are told by me that if they want to live, they must submit to a test of wills in order to survive. Along the way, I provided them with hacksaws in order to use at their discretion. However, one of them finally understood that the intention is not to cut through the chains, but what was being held. Their feet.

The Brilliant Poster for the Film (2004)

All the while, two detectives, an aging veteran, played by the Lethal Weapon guy Danny Glover and Asian-American actor Ken Leung, who starred in Rush Hour, are onto me. They interview one of my test subjects: a young woman junkie named Amanda, played by model/actress Shawnee Smith, who got the best life lesson offered; How to get out of a reversible metal mouth trap within a minute while trying to find the key in the contents of a man's stomach. She wins and learns the lesson I was trying to teach her.

My test subject, played by Elwes, learns that his wife and daughter have been kidnapped by a freaky batshit orderly played by TV actor Michael Emerson. The test of will indeed culminates with whether or not my guy will use the saw to escape the thick chain at his foot. No more will I reveal. The game is on you now. This blogger's fate is to remember why this film was disliked by him in the first place—

***SPOILER ALERT (Yes, my good friend. If you are reading this, then you are fully aware of what happens and be thankful that I'm not describing the many traps and games I set in SAW II, SAW III, SAW IV, SAW V, SAW VI, and SAW VII, The Final Chapter!)***

The reason I am making this blogger relive the torture of watching this film is to remind him that there's a little thing called "actual logic." He was supposed to believe in the fact that a man dying of terminal cancer (uh, me) could stay completely motionless for hours on end, wake up at the very end and reveal himself to be The Jigsaw Killer (again...me) and announce that my creator had failed in his test and then leave him to die in the shithole room I put him in. As luck would have it, the motives behind my actions are all explained in the six sequels that have been made about my legacy which have all had various degrees of success at the box office—including a new reboot film set to be released this October (named—what else? Jigsaw!).

Oh, I'm sorry. Were you expecting to actually play a game? Well, here it is. Subject yourself to this and others like it: prime examples of this would be Hostel and The Human Centipede and see if you can revel in human suffering and pain and seeing all facets of the human anatomy being torn, cut, ripped, slit, splattered, and dismembered in loving and almost sensual fashion, with no regard for story, sensibility, or even scares for that matter for hours and hours and hours and hours...

That is...why it is called...Torture Porn! Game Over!

[Freaky clown on bicycle laughs maniacally.]

Next Up: a brilliant psychological horror film—featuring a ballerina.