This Is Steph’s Blog

Saw it.

This week, as I was feeling in the holiday spirit, I decided to watch the first installment of the Saw movies. I don’t know why I thought I would enjoy watching this film because I have refused to see any of the movies since Saw’s first appearance in 2004. The movie is about two men, Adam and Dr. Gordon, awakening in a room together and finding that they have been kidnapped and chained to pipes. It is Adam’s job to try to escape before 6:00pm and Dr. Gordon’s job to kill Adam before then or else his wife and daughter will be killed. The man responsible is known as the Jigsaw killer because he never directly kills anyone. He, instead, puts his victims in situations referred to as “games”, in which they are put through physical and/or psychological torture to survive. If they do escape, they are supposed to leave with a better appreciation for life. As Dr. Gordon and Adam try and find their way out, we follow the police investigation for the jigsaw killer, as well as past victims.

Before I talk about the movie itself, I will talk about the editing, because, regardless of my feelings toward the story, I liked both the editing as well as the cinematography. In the past victim situations, the scenes were edited in quick flashes. It was very jumbled, but I really enjoyed the way it was put together. When the victim found out her face was going to be, and I’m not joking, ripped off if she didn’t get the key out of a “dead” man’s stomach, the combination of the ticking timer and her struggle to kill a man who was, in fact, alive and paralyzed, and then finding the right organ (his stomach) and getting the key into the lock, was both nauseating, terrifying and suspenseful. I also enjoyed the wide shots of the various rooms that victims were trapped, that would snap quickly to their faces for reaction. Adam’s kidnapping scene is also very creative and suspenseful. With all of the lights in his apartment not working, he uses his camera flash to light up the room and find his intruder. Jigsaw dresses in a terrifying animal mask and cape when kidnapping his victims and every time the flash went off on the camera, you were just waiting for the killer’s face to appear and I did jump when it finally happened.

I know that they re-edited the movie before it was released to theaters, so that they could give it an ‘R’ rating instead of NC-17, and I do think that they did a decent job. Most of the movie was more of a mind game than it was actually disgusting, but, still, it was disgusting to think about.

My friend insisted that I see the first Saw movie. He said the rest were terrible, but the first film is good and has a great twist ending. I will probably never listen to his movie recommendations again. I like being scared, but this movie was not enjoyable to watch and I didn’t like the situations people had been put in. I don’t recommend this film for its content because I don’t think it was anything more than a film about watching people getting tortured in various situations. I wasn’t scared so much as I was just grossed out, and that is not why I watch a horror film.

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