Welcome Readers! For many years, I have avoided the Saw movies because I have been operating under three assumptions:
1) They are "torture porn" and that's gross
2) "Torture porn" is for sick people
3) The movies suck anyway
Well, as I've gotten more and more comfortable with horror movies (including movies like Hostel), I've started to think that I've probably outgrown these opinions. I was pretty sure that I could handle the grossness of "torture porn", that I was willing to give the movies a shot despite their scores on the Tomatometer, and as for the sheepishness that comes with openly watching "sick" movies: well, I've made many a post about being criticized for liking so-called sick movies and, if anything, it gives me a weird sense of glee if my movie-watching habits offend others. So there was nothing left to do but to jump into the pile of dirty needles that is...SAW!!!
Saw; AKA "The one where Westley from The Princess Bride saws his leg off."
We start with the OG Saw, a film inspired by escape rooms and David Fincher's Se7en, and directed by then newbie director James Wan (and written by Leigh Whannell, who also went on to direct some excellent films). The first Saw is a solid thriller/horror, though I wouldn't call it "great". The dialogue, in particular, is clunky and the film feels very amateurish, which is not necessarily a bad thing as it adds a level of grit to the whole project. But it's thrilling to see where Wan and Whannell, two very talented filmmakers, got their start.
You know the plot: two men wake up in a dingy bathroom. Their legs are chained to pipes. A dead man is in the center of the room in a puddle of blood. The two men have to use the clues within the room to escape, but the clues ramp up the tension between the two men, especially when a cassette tape reveals that one of the men--oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, totally game in this movie but also sporting a very bad American accent) is supposed to kill the other man, Adam (Leigh Whannell). If he fails to do so, his wife and daughter will die. Despite this directive, both Lawrence and Adam work together and this is one of the only Saw movies where the main victims aren't annoying as shit and seem like genuinely good people.
This fucking puppet, I swear to God you guys.
Meanwhile, a couple detectives are working on a case where a serial killer is setting up grisly traps aimed at drug users and suicide survivors with the goal of forcing them to appreciate life by going through something extreme in order to survive. Not all of Jigsaw's traps make sense in this movie: take Amanda Young in the reverse bear trap--she has to cut into someone else's stomach to retrieve the key to the bear trap on her head that will blow her jaw open if she doesn't complete the task in time. She doesn't have to hurt herself, she has to hurt someone else. Alternatively, a middle-aged man who attempts suicide by cutting his wrists is force to crawl through a razor wire maze in order to make it out of a basement before the door locks shut, sealing him inside.
This is the movie that introduces us to Jigsaw (real name: John Kramer), his twisted sense of morality, and his motives. We learn in this film that he is a terminal cancer patient. But we don't learn until the next film that it was not his cancer, but a suicide attempt he made that led him to decide to put people in fucked up situations to teach them to cherish their lives.
I'm going to be real clear from the get-go: John Kramer is a narcissistic psychopath. The sequels try to humanize him and explain his mindset, but the fact of the matter is he wants to play God and decide who is grateful enough to live and who deserves to die. He holds his victims to standards that he does not hold himself to. His tests often punish people who haven't even done anything wrong, including small children. Drug users and suicide survivors deserve compassion and help, not torture. Obviously, this is a horror series so we can accept a monster as the main baddie, but the films do walk a very ambiguous line between condemning Jigsaw and suggesting that, hey, maybe he's on to something. If you're going to watch this series, in addition to being prepared to see a lot of gore, I would also suggest being prepared to be exposed to some moral and ethical gray areas.
Grade: B
***
Saw II; AKA "The one with the needle pit."
Saw II serves to explain Jigsaw's motivations a little more. In addition to learning more about John Kramer's cancer and suicide attempt, we also learn that he hates the cops, especially corrupt cops.
*sigh* Here's how I feel about that:
Dude, so many cops die in the Jigsaw franchise, you'd think Antifa produced it. I kid, I kid.
Anyway, so Donnie Wahlberg plays Detective Eric Matthews, a hotheaded corrupt cop who shows up at Jigsaw's headquarters only to find out that his son, Daniel is among the killer's latest victims: a video feed on a bunch of TVs in Jigsaw's workshop shows that eight people are locked inside an abandoned building. A nerve gas is slowly being released into the building, which will kill everyone within two hours. There are a bunch of vials of antidote locked throughout the house and the players must to work together and face some gruesome challenges in order to retrieve them.
The eight strangers know that they all have something in common...but what is it? Turns out, Detective Matthews planted false evidence on seven of them to get them convicted of various crimes...and of course the eighth person is Matthews' son. Yikes.
As the eight strangers face their trials, Matthews faces a test of his own: Jigsaw simply wants to talk to him. He tells Matthews that if he talks with him for two hours, his son will be found "in a safe and secure location". Can Matthews sit and talk with this cancer-ridden old man without beating him to a pulp in order to save his son? Well, he's played by Donnie Wahlberg, so what do you think?
Saw II is another escape room type movie (only it's an escape house, in this case) and is not as tight than the first film. There are more characters and less character development. I literally cared about no one in this movie. The movie is kind of one big build up to the revelation that Amanda Young is actually working with Jigsaw as his apprentice and accomplice, which sets the stage for the next movie. But as a movie itself, it's a whole lotta nothing.
I'll also point out that it was during this film that I noticed that the end of each Saw movie does this goofy thing where the music ramps up (and the music is reminiscent of that part in "Live and Let Die" where it starts going dun dun dun/dun dun dun/dun dun [fuck it: 00.49-01.00 in the song]) and there are all these rapid cuts with Jigsaw's voiceover explaining the moral of the story and all the clues the detectives missed. It's the equivalent of explaining why a joke is funny after you tell it. EVERY SAW MOVIE ENDS THIS WAY. I guess the filmmakers must think their audience is too stupid to just see what happens and they have to do shit like call back to Jigsaw saying something cryptic and then reveal very explicitly what he was referring to. To be honest, it was kind of funny once I noticed it--very much an exclamation point on which to end each film. And the end credits are always set to metal music, so it's extra ~edgy~.
In conclusion, Saw II is a decent enough horror film, but nothing special. And it's not nearly as gory as the following entries in the franchise. So if you like horror but hate gore, you're probably safe with the first two movies in the series. That needle pit tho. Damn.
Grade: B
***
Saw III; AKA "The one with the pig vat."
Finally, a Saw with some character development! In this installment of the franchise, we learn a lot more about Amanda Young's fucked up relationship with John Kramer, which is basically Stockholm Syndrome on steroids.
In the third film of the series, a man named Jeff Denlon (Angus Macfadyen) wakes up in an abandoned meatpacking plant. He is informed via cassette tape that he has been so busy mourning the death of his young son, who was hit by a drunk driver, that he has been neglecting his marriage, his daughter, and his life. And you know how Jigsaw feels about people taking their lives for granted! Jeff must complete a series of tests in order to escape--and they all involve deciding whether or not to help the people involved in his son's death. Jeff doesn't have to help them, but he's being given a chance to forgive. He must save a woman who was the only witness to his son's death (and refused to testify in court) from freezing to death; then he has to help the judge who let the drunk driver off with a light sentence get out of a vat which is rapidly filling with pig guts; and finally he must help free the very man who killed his child--the man is strapped to a machine that will, one-by-one, twist his limbs all the way around and finally twist his neck around, killing him.
This is the first Saw movie that contained some truly sickening torture. Most folks will remember the pig vat trap as the most memorable scene from this movie, but it's Timothy Young on the rack that had me watching through my fingers--the guy's leg bones splinter out of his leg when the rack twists his limbs. Y'all, I couldn't. THE CRACKING NOISE THEY MADE. I watched a YouTube video about the Saw movies and the guy said that this is the movie that gave Saw its reputation as torture porn, and I have to agree. In addition to the grisly and disgusting traps, this movie also ramps up the emotional pain by forcing Jeff to burn his dead son's stuffed animals in order to retrieve a key to save the judge's life. Come on, that's just cruel. And in the end, Jeff is literally unable to save the man who killed his son--not because he doesn't want to, but because he can't figure out how to stop the machine. He ends up hugging the man as he is dying and saying "I can't stop it, I can't stop it." SAW. WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO ME DIRTY LIKE THIS?? I thought this series was going to be some light-hearted torture and it is actually making me tear up.
Meanwhile, Jeff's wife, Lynn, is also kidnapped. Lynn is a celebrated surgeon and is forced to keep John Kramer alive or a collar around her neck will explode, killing her. She is forced to perform a damn brain surgery on John and she fucking does it and he lives! But it doesn't matter because that bitch Amanda Young gets so jealous of John's interactions with Lynn, that she shoots her anyway!
Basically, Saw III is Titus Andronicus: it's full of a bunch of bloody mayhem and then everyone dies. Yes, I'm saying that Saw III is ~literally~ Shakespeare. But seriously, everyone dies. Jeff dies, Lynn dies, Amanda dies, John Kramer dies, and all the other people in Jeff's game die. And also, this is my favorite Saw entry yet--the stakes are higher, the characters are more interesting, and the acting is not terrible. You could just tell that the filmmakers enjoyed making this one. It's sick, it's disgusting, but unlike the other Saw movies, you actually feel something.
Grade: B+
***
Saw IV; AKA "The one no one can remember."
Since John Kramer dies in Saw III, Saw IV is the movie where it was clear the producers or whoever is in charge just decided "shit, let's keep churning 'em out as long as they're making money!" There was really no point in keeping the franchise going other than to make money. But money talks and so here we are.
Ok, so Jigsaw is dead, right? The movie opens with his autopsy. However, another game is afoot. The victim this time is Officer Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent), a classic "good cop" whose biggest problem is that he wants to save everyone. In fact, that is what his test is all about. He is led through a series of situations in which he is instructed NOT to help people, or there will be consequences. He learns this the hard way when he immediately saves the first victim from being scalped, only for her to turn around and try to kill him. Why? Well the woman he is saving is actually a sex trafficker of young girls and the room she is trapped in is filled with evidence. So Rigg is told NOT to help her, and she is (separately) told that if he succeeds in saving her, she needs to kill him or she will be convicted of her crimes.
Slam pig!
The rest of the games are similar--Rigg is instructed to bind a rapist to a bed where he, the rapist, must choose between gouging his own eyes out, or having his limbs ripped from his body. Rigg is also instructed to give a key to a woman who is bound to her abusive husband and impaled with arrows. This is actually a compelling trap: the arrows pierce the husband all through major arteries, but pierce not-fatal areas of the wife's body. So if the wife pulls the arrows out of her body, she will survive and hubby will die. That fact that she is decides to live by killing her abusive husband is what makes this a genuinely good Jigsaw trap because it rewards an innocent person and kills a bad person. I mean, the one where the rapist has to gouge his eyes out is pretty cool too.
The final test tells Rigg NOT to open a door before a timer runs out. Well, wouldn't you know it, but the guy opens the door, resulting in the death of none other than Detective Eric Matthews from Saw II, who has been a prisoner of Jigsaw in the interim. So Rigg fails his game and dies...and it is revealed that another detective--Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) was working with Jigsaw all along. Yup, Saw IV sets up the next three movies with this reveal. Because John Kramer and Amanda Young are dead, so someone's gotta keep creating these torture devices. Hey, this reverse bear trap isn't going to blow someone's jaw open by itself!
Oh, I have to note that in this movie we are introduced to John Kramer's ex-wife, Jill Tuck, who plays a large role in this and future Saw films. We find out that at one point, Jill was heavily pregnant with a son and a drug addict at Jill's clinic, which she was the director of, accidentally caused her to miscarry by shoving a door against her in an attempt to rob the clinic. This explains John Kramer's anger at addicts and it's also super creepy because... Jigsaw might have been a daddy?? Ewwww. Oh, and Jill says "I think he always blamed me for Gideon's [the son's] death." Um, what? He blamed his pregnant wife for miscarrying even though it was not her fault? Well, I guess that's par for the course for a narcissistic psychopath like John Kramer. I'm curious if the filmmakers thought this backstory would humanize John but instead it made me hate him even more.
This entry in the Saw franchise was fine. I liked Rigg as a character and the traps were interesting. It's not the best, it's not the worst. Moving on!
Grade: B
***
Saw V, AKA "The boring one."
This was the first Saw movie I was bored while watching. Most of the plot revolves around rejiggering the over-arching franchise timeline to cram Detective Mark Hoffman into the previous stories as Jigsaw's first accomplice. The film contains a number of flashbacks showing that Hoffman was working with John Kramer from the very beginning, even pre-dating Amanda Young. They kind of have to do this to explain certain Jigsaw killings that couldn't have been set up by Amanda and John alone since Amanda is a petite woman and John is literally bedridden with cancer. Basically, John is the brains and Mark is the brawn. Amanda is just annoying.
There is a game in this movie and it's pretty boring: five strangers (who, like the strangers in Saw II, are all have something in common) are put through a series of tests. They are explicitly told at the beginning of the game that they are all selfish people who only look out for number one, and they should go against their instincts to win the game. Ok, how do you interpret that? I interpret it as "oh, we're all selfish and we need to do the opposite so I guess he's saying we need to work together." But these geniuses immediately default to trying to save themselves--even going so far as to actively kill each other to up their chances of survival. It's not until the last test, which involves the two remaining people having to cut their arms and fill up a jar with blood to get out of a room before a bomb goes off. If they had all survived, each person would only need to give a little blood. But since two people are left, they basically have to cut their entire arms off to survive. Jigsaw is sometimes a little too on the nose.
This was a very boring and mediocre Saw movie. The traps were meh and so much time was spent trying to explain how Mark Hoffman was involved in earlier Jigsaw killings. I was mostly playing on my phone and doing household chores while watching it, and I have to say that I was not looking forward to the next installment...however, as you will see, I was pleasantly surprised by Saw VI.
Grade: C
***
Saw VI, AKA "The one with the gun carousel."
The weird morality of Saw continues with the latest victim at the center of Jigsaw's posthumous game being a callous and crooked insurance executive. For anyone keeping count, we know that Jigsaw:
- Hated corrupt cops
- Thought that people with drug addictions and/or suicidal ideation should be tortured into "cherishing their lives"
- Partially blamed his wife for her own miscarriage (which wasn't her fault at all)
- Apparently also hated predatory loan agents and insurance companies
Grade: B+
***
Saw VII, AKA "The final chapter...or is it?!"
Can we have more movies where Nazi skinheads are killed in extremely gruesome ways? There's a scene in Saw VII where a band of skinheads all die in a trap created by Jigsaw's successor, Mark Hoffman. Does the scene serve the plot at all? No, not really. But Saw VII isn't exactly a plot-driven film...it's simply another in a long line of movies that dares to ask the question: how many ways CAN you dismember, flay, or otherwise destroy the human body?
Saw VII, aka Saw 3D, aka Saw: The Final Chapter claims to be, well, the final chapter. As you can see below...it is not. The film does do a couple things that feel "final-y", such as bringing back Dr. Lawrence Gordon so that he can kill off Mark Hoffman (although we never see Hoffman's dead body, so in Hollywood that means he might not really be dead). But the main plot of the film is just another game, like all of the films that came before it. As long as the Saw filmmakers can keep coming up with grisly torture traps, they will be able to keep the franchise going forever.
The victim of the latest game is Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flannery), a man who wrote an inspiring memoir about surviving one of Jigsaw's traps. The only problem is...it's all bullshit. He was never a Jigsaw victim. Until now. Bobby is kidnapped, along with his wife and his handlers (his publicist, lawyer, and best friend). Bobby has to go through a series of tests to save each of these individuals and wouldn't you know it, he fails every single one. This is yet another game that makes me question Jigsaw's sense of morality because Bobby's wife doesn't even know he made the survival story up (unlike the publicist, lawyer, and friend who all knew Bobby was lying). She truly was an innocent victim--not just of Jigsaw, but of Bobby. So, once again, Jigsaw (in this case, Hoffman, not Kramer) punishes people who literally did nothing wrong in order to further torment the actual wrongdoer. And unlike the white supremacists that Hoffman punishes in the earlier sequence I mentioned above, Bobby wasn't really that bad of a guy. Yes, he lied and profited off that lie, but that's a small sin compared to some of the shit Jigsaw's other victims have done (and compared to the sins of Jigsaw himself. I'm honesty pissed this series didn't end with Jigsaw being put through one of his own games).
Saw VII is not the worst in the series, but it's pretty low on the list. It's mildly entertaining, although the acting is noticeably worse than in previous entries. At this point, I'm kind of ready for this experiment in watching all the Saw films to be over. Not because I can't handle the gore, but because they're getting very repetitive.
Grade: B-
***
Jigsaw, AKA, "Why?"
I went into Jigsaw thinking it was going to be Jigsaw's origin story. However, the film begins 10 years after John Kramer's death. A few dead bodies are found with Jigsaw's signature puzzle piece carved in their flesh--is it a copycat or is the psychotic serial killer somehow killing from beyond the grave?
We cut back and forth between two pathologists examining the bodies and a classic Jigsaw game: 5 strangers wake up with buckets on their heads and are told that they must confess their sins in order to survive. For the first game, they are asked to give a sacrifice of blood and are dragged via chains attached to their bucket heads towards spinning chainsaws. All but one survive.
Throughout the series of tests, it is revealed that each individual either killed someone or made a selfish decision that led to someone else's death. Unlike many of the other Saw movies, the people in this game arguably deserve to die. That's a nice consolation given that this is a fairly boring Saw film. Hell, even the traps are less interesting and vicious than usual. After watching some massively effed up shit, Jigsaw feels like a Disney movie in comparison.
This film adds exactly nothing to the Saw universe and it really feels like Groundhog Day at this point. Clearly, the series has devolved into a cash grab. It's not as boring as Saw V, which is still my least favorite Saw movie, but it's definitely pretty low on the totem poll. Especially since there is a needlessly complicated subplot that tries to confuse the viewer by futzing with the Saw timeline. TL;DR: the game we're watching actually happened ten years prior, when Jigsaw was still alive. The fresh bodies that are stacking up in present day is a recreation of the same game in a plot to frame a detective as a Jigsaw copycat. It turns out that one of the pathologists, Logan, is the one who framed the detective, because the detective allowed a criminal to go free who ended up murdering Logan's wife.
Confused yet? Because I was. And I'm ready to watch that last (for now) Saw film.
Grade: C
***
Spiral: From the Book of Saw, AKA "The fancy one."
I call this the fancy one for a couple reasons. First, it has the most famous cast. While Chris Rock takes the lead as Detective Zeke Banks, he's not the most famous guy in the movie. That honor would go to Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, as Zeke's father, Marcus Banks, a retired chief of police. In addition, Max Minghella and Marisol Nichols round out the cast, playing a rookie detective and police Captain, respectively.
Secondly, the films's title is literally "From the Book of Saw". What the fuck is this, the Bible? The book of Saw? I just think it's cute that the producers, or whoever is in charge of movie title decisions, decided to fancy up this torture porn with a title that sounds like an award-winning film at Cannes.
Thirdly, instead of metal music, this Saw movie is set to rap. I don't know why, but rap just feels ~classier~ to me than metal. It also feels more modern. It's like the filmmakers made a conscious decision to drag this franchise out of the aughts and into the roaring 2020s. Not that we really needed more Saw films, but I guess as long as people are still paying to watch them, they'll keep making them. This is also not to say that Spiral is a good movie, because it really isn't. The dialogue is especially heinous, made worse by Chris Rock's emphatic manner of speaking. There's one scene where he's looking at a bunch of crime scene evidence and he says "I've been looking at this shit for five hours! I don't even look at PORN that long!" Um, ok, was the script written by a 7th grader? Anyway, let's get to the plot.
When a corrupt detective is found smashed to smithereens after being hit by a subway train, clues are found near the crime scene and on the bloody remains. Namely, a USB drive that says "play me". The distorted voice we hear that informs us the that speaker is going to "reform the metro police" is clearly not Jigsaw's, but various aspects of the crime scene lead Det. Banks and his new rookie partner, Det. Schenk to believe that there is (yet another) Jigsaw copycat on the loose. When more detectives on the force start ending up in Saw traps, it's clear that whoever the killer is, he is punishing members of the force for their role in covering up and allowing corruption.
Spiral contains some classic Saw tropes: corrupt law enforcement paying for their sins, a huge twist at the end (in this case, it's that the rookie, Schenk, was the copycat killer all along), and traps that force people to harm themselves in order to survive. Still, it's clear that the filmmakers are trying to distinguish this film from earlier Saw films in an attempt to reboot the entire franchise. The ending is left WIDE open for a sequel...to the point where is actually feels a but like a cliffhanger. So I guess we're going to be seeing more "chapters" from this so-called Book of Saw. Yayyyyy.
Grade: C
***
Overall thoughts, final ranking, and franchise grade
Wow, the Saw franchise really upended my expectations in a couple ways. First of all, the movies weren't nearly as bad as I was led to believe. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the Saw movies range from a high of 51% (the first Saw) to a low of 10% (Saw VII). While none of the movies were Citizen Kane, they mostly were not that bad. And yes, I realize that Rotten Tomatoes is rating them based on the critics' opinions, but I tend to pay attention to what movie critics are saying when I make the choice of what to watch. If anything, going through the Saw gauntlet might make me consider watching more movies that are poorly rated by the critics.
Another expectation that was upended was how gory--or not gory--the movies are. The first two aren't really any worse than any other horror movie I've seen. Saw III is where it starts to get gnarly and, I guess if I'm looking at this from the perspective of a novice horror film watcher, yeah they're pretty gross. It really does go to show that one can become desensitized to movie violence. So I think the expectations I upended here were my own expectations of how much gore I could handle. There were a few times I watching through my fingers, but overall I handled the Saw films fine.
The other thing that surprised me was how all over the place Jigsaw's moral and ethical framework is. Yeah, I get it, he's the bad guy. But the movies have a way of presenting him as at least somewhat understandable and sympathetic. I don't know whether the filmmakers wanted us to root for John Kramer or not, but what I took away from the films is that he is a narcissistic psychopath:
1. He thinks he has a right to play God with the lives of others, and that his morals are the correct ones.
2. The difficult things he has gone through in life (the loss of a child, cancer, a suicide attempt) do not increase his empathy for others, but rather decrease it.
3. His standards for his victims are not consistent: some people are put in traps that are impossible to win while others face relatively easy challenges. Sometimes murderers are put in easy traps while drug users are put in impossible traps. Often, innocent people are punished and even killed to cause emotional anguish for the actual target of the game. YET! Jigsaw is always making a point about what "a life is worth". So this motherfucker is willing to kill innocent people to hurt his targets, but also claims to have a greater understanding of the value of human life? C'mon. He has the same mentality of a person who kills abortion doctors in order to stop them from "murdering babies".
What I think is most disappointing is that if the filmmakers had figured out a consistent--and fair--sense of morality for the character of Jigsaw, the films would have been better. As we can see with the popularity of shows like The Twilight Zone, audiences enjoy watching bad people learn lessons dished out in poetically just ways. Alternatively, if Jigsaw was just presented as a madman with no rhyme or reason to his kills, that would have been acceptable as well. It's this wishy-washy middle ground that is the problem. Unlike so many film villains ranging from charming psychopath (Hannibal Lecter) to righteously angry murderer (Kilmonger), to fabulous bitch (Ursula), John Kramer just isn't a good villain. He's not charming enough to be likable, but he's not righteous enough to be empathetic. He is an uptight hypocrite who happens to be an engineering whiz.
So, I'm going to give the series a B- grade. It's good, but not that good. It's too entertaining to get a C grade, but not good enough to get an A or even a B+. It's gross, outrageous, shallow entertainment that may give you a thrill but it's certainly not a franchise I see myself revisiting.
Ranking of the films from best to worst:
Saw VI--B+
Saw III--B+
Saw--B
Saw II and Saw IV (tie)--B
SawVII--B-
Jigsaw and Spiral (tie)--C
Saw V--C
Franchise Grade: B-
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