Saw Apologist

Saw III has been out on DVD for --- weeks now. When I rented it from my local video store, there were plenty of copies. Many, many copies.

In May of 2004, after the first Saw movie debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and then was shown at Cannes, I attended the World Horror Convention in Tempe, Arizona. The movie had a lot of buzz. Like 28 Days Later that had come out the previous year, this was a horror film with a slightly different bent. Unlike the watered down remakes of the day, Saw was 'extreme' but still had an interesting story premise. That's what I knew of the movie by the time it was widely released in October. I was eager to see it though not interested enough to put down $8 for a theater ticket. When it finally hit the video shelves, it had become a sensation. It took me two weeks and two different video stores to get my hands on it. Even my husband, a man who never watched horror films, was impressed. It was the story that got him. It was the twist that he didn't see coming. It was the "wow," and the "oh yeah." Sure, the traps were interesting. Those set it apart from the man-with-the-chainsaw or man-with-the-knife movies, but in the end even those things were just part of the tapestry of the story.

Then came Saw II. I don't know about anyone else, but I was dubious. Yug. A sequel. I didn't rush to see it. Didn't rush to rent it. My husband was the one who picked it after I came up with no better movie choice on Sunday afternoon. And even though I had seen the first one, I didn't expect the twist at the end. Sure, my expectations had been low, but the film deliver far beyond my expectations. The acting was marginally better, the production values had been raised, and though the story now revolved a complex game, it still wove together the disparate groups of characters at the end.

2006 brought us Saw III. The critics killed my interest this time around. Too brutal. Too gory. If you enjoy watching character being tortured, fine...but shame on you for enjoying it because there's no story to this one. No plot at all. I heard that over and over again. My husband doesn't believe in movie critics, so he plucked a DVD right off the overly heavy shelves the first weekend it was out. Obviously, the general public wasn't quite as thrilled with this one either.

The critics are right. The critics are wrong.

Saw III is brutal. Previously, the movie Hostel had been blasted for its violence and bloodshed, though it was no worse than some long past gore-fests (Peter Jackson's 1992 Dead Alive easily comes to mind). But Saw III goes beyond stomach churning right to wincing and shrinking back from the screen. It's fiction, but it's still needlessly hard to watch in places. The first Saw was inclined to show the set up of a 'trap' and then flashes of the aftermath, leaving the viewer to fill in the details. Saw III leads the watcher through most of the traps from beginning to end, a techniques that isn't any more affective than the "less is more" of Saw.

But Saw III does have story. No, it's not the best story ever written, but it holds together better than 75% of Hollywood plots. On a theme level, it's all about forgiveness and overcoming the need for vengeance. Of course, what makes this Saw is that the tale twists and turns on itself. As I said, I was critical going into Saw III. I was verbally nitpicking issues while watching, something I'm not inclined to do, but by the end of the movie, the writers had answered my problems. And with a minimal amount of dry exposition. As is the case in all of the Saw films, If you've been paying attention the sum-up montage isn't needed at all.

Saw IV looms on the horizon and is promised by Halloween of 2007. Darren Lynn Bousman (director of Saw II and Saw III) will be back to direct and James Wan and Leigh Whannell (writers of the original three movies) are serving as executive producers, but the franchise is bringing in new writers. I, for one, only hope that they retain what keeps the Saw movies a cut above the rest. Not the gore, but the story.