Saw

Saw Saw (I've literally been waiting years to write that.) It was a fairly goofy horror film. The most central character was a doctor who wakes up chained to a pipe in a room whose only other occupants are a stranger, who is also pipe-chained, and a corpse. A spooky audio-tape informs the doctor that he must kill his cell-mate or his (the doctor's) family will be killed. He also gets a hacksaw and a cellphone with which the killer uses to taunt him periodically.

The film strongly reminded me of Se7en. There's a master-mind serial killer with elaborate and ironic traps. The settings are industrial, full of tile, iron, and plastic sheeting. The visual palate is steeped in a chemical green. This industrial aesthetic has become very popular in horror recently. Gone are the clouds of dry ice and Gothic castles. Long live the age of the rusty metal and the soiled tee-shirt, I guess.

The film's editing style reminded me of the opening credits of reality television. Everything is super-sped-up, flashes of white intersperse still shots and pointlessly rotating shots. There's a sequence with a fat man trapped in a maze of razor-wire which is particularly dire. In a slower film we would be made to feel his increasingly desperate pain as he first gets little nicks and scratches and then deeper and deeper cuts. Instead, the film speeds waaay up and he bounces around the room like a pinball, pausing every so often to mug at the camera.

Speaking of reality television, I think the film indulges in a bit of finger-wagging at reality TV. The killer videotapes his killings, prompting one policeman to actually say "what, like reality TV?" I don't know what the film's complaint is exactly. It seems hypocritical to denounce reality TV for being trashy exploitation because, well, this is a film whose main selling point is its murder-puzzles. Perhaps it's hysterically claiming that reality TV is making us jaded and more brutal (again: hypocrisy)?

Anyway, the plot is ridiculous. Much character-building happens in short hand. Tucking his daughter in to bed, the doctor's beeper goes off. "I hate that thing..." murmurs the little girl. Even in the face of such hackneyed indications of bad parenthood, the doctor still rushes off to work. Oh, 80s businessman! Will you ever learn? His wife then opens the very next scene with "How can you walk through life pretending that you're happy?" What the hell kind of question is that? Does she always start conversations with confrontational pieces of pop-psychiatry? "Hey, Doc! Do you hate your mother because she reminds you of me?" The plot reminds me of Korean horror. It laboriously explains everything, flashing little clues quickly by, but replaying them again during climactic montages. The film is so insecure about its own cleverness, it doesn't want you to miss a single cute call-back.

I'm grousing a lot but the film is really not that horrible. The plot is not exactly gripping but it is relatively unpredictable. The characters are weak, but their main function is to be screaming animals, so who cares? Its greatest weakness is its unoriginality. The murder-machines are fairly fun, but I can tell where they got the set-dressing (Se7en), the plot (K-horror), the editing style (reality TV.) The acting is not so good (at one point the doctor is shrieking and writhing in some kind of mental anguish. The killer's cell-phone rings. "Hallew?" he answers it) neither is the script. It's very easy to rip into this film. It might make a good party-film. It's not awful, just hysterical and, technically speaking, nothing new.