“Well, it’s early August, which means spooky movies are on rotation in my house, baby!
I’m going for it, a Saw Watch 2023.
Now, I skipped the first one because I’ve seen it SO MANY times, but from the second forward, I’m less confident I remember much. So I’ll try and get to ’em with the exception of Spiral because I saw it earlier this year, and…I was going to say I’m skipping it because you really don’t need to watch it, it has nothing to do with the Saw series other than borrowing a name, but the truth is, I’m skipping it because woof.
Saw II was certainly a “the magic is still alive” movie, I think in no small part due to Tobin Bell being an awesome creep, the Stephen Lang of the time.
It also upped the ante by trapping more people in a larger environment, increasing the chance for everyone to get in trouble and making sure there were plenty of traps to go around.
It’s kind of interesting, the “torture porn” moniker this series got. I really don’t find this movie any more visually awful than Day of the Dead, for sure. Of the deaths in this movie, I think we could realistically call…I’m going to say 2 of them as spectacles of suffering. The rest are quite quick, and really not graphic in the way I think these movies are reputed to be.
And while there’s certainly some torturous violence in it, the movies (so far, in 1 and 2) have been SIGNIFICANTLY less rape-y than a lot of other horror movies, really not addressing the concept at all. I was sure we’d go there with all the people stuck in the house together, but no, it’s pretty much unaddressed (which is fine, BTW, I think it’s totally fine for a silly movie like Saw II to not address this topic).
I don’t know, I feel like these deserve a genre reassessment. Barbarian, which everyone hailed as like the greatest modern horror movie ever, and that was certainly as graphic, if not more so, than Saw 2, IMO, and it didn’t NEED to be in order to tell its story. So why was it in there?
Are people confusing this movie with Hostel? Which, by the way, also had like one torture scene, and that was kind of the point of that movie, by the way, that sick fuckers with lots of money would pay to torture another human being (perhaps also this is a good time to someone who wants to write an essay about how that movie is about the corruption that comes with wealth to take that shot, and, I don’t know, throw in something about how when we turn away as an audience, it’s like the way we turn away from the predations of the wealthy. Use that word, too, “predations.”)
I guess we’ll see. Maybe these get worse as they go, I mean, I KNOW they do story-wise, but we’ll have to see if they get to be a little much or kind of maintain the same level of perhaps shocking for 2005 violence that is pretty much present in anything you’d see today.”