Film Review: Saw
Like it or loathe it, the Saw series is, undoubtedly, one of the most successful horror franchises in recent years. But right at the beginning, before it span wildly out of control and turned into a hyper-active, verging on tedium gore-fest, the first Saw film was intended to be a one off piece. Penned by James Wann (who had little to do with subsequent films and didn’t approve of the direction they were taking), it started a trend which nobody in the industry could have foreseen: an insatiable lust for horror-porn that hadn’t been seen since the rise of the video nasties in the 70s.
There are a few things to get out of the way before we proceed: 1) Saw was badly acted, littered with dodgy premise, and generally not a well-oiled horror machine by anyone’s standards. Now for the positives: it was original, sharp and, if you can overlook the above, pretty damn captivating.
The film, as we all know, opens with two men—strangers to one another, it would appear—held captive in a dingy, tiled, basement chamber that was originally used for diesel storage. As vision returns to them, a few things become abundantly clear: 1) there’s a dead man there with them, 2) they are stuck there with him and 3) if they want to get out alive they will have to pay dearly, making decisions which could end everything or save the day. From then on it’s a creepy, fright-fuelled immersion into a dark and lonely place. The intriguing thing isn’t the question of if the men will escape—because we all know how that’s going to turn out once we pass the half-way point—but how they will die trying. This question becomes the thread which runs through all future films, and is the thing which worked so well in the first, but became cheap and irrelevant in the next six or so.
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