Grand Guignol Week, Pt. the Third: "Saw".

Lovely poster, innit?
Oh, I do confess, as I now wimp out and withdraw from my own self-imposed horrorfest. I twitched, picked at my nails, looked doubtfully up at the dark plasma screen HDTV and back to my waiting DVD collection.
Surely after "Captivity" and "The Devil's Rejects" I could dance lightly over the coming bloody entrails and screeching victims in my remaining three films?
A certain dulling of the senses and a well-practiced regimen of being a once & future critic should keep me from being an official squeamish Old Fart and allow me to wax poetic about young women having their eyes plucked out and their heads smashed in and their hearts cut out and their livers removed and their bowels unplugged and their nostrils raped and their bottoms burned up...
Or not. Alright. I give. Except for my fondly-embraced monster movies pre-"Psycho" I hate horror films! Hate, hate, hate. They're mean. They don't like women overmuch. They're icky. People bleed a lot. A lot. They make sudden, loud noises. And for anyone who knows me, I hate sudden loud noises.
But, to finish out the week I did decide to trash "Hostel" and "Wolf Creek" and went straight to:
Torture Porn #3: "Saw," 2004, directed by James Wan, with Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, Danny Glover, Michael Emerson. Released by Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures.
Ah, well! This is more like it! If Danny Glover is in the damn thing, it has to be something like a real movie, and Elwes was the Man in Black in "The Princess Bride", so I viddy that I'm on safe ground.
Almost.
Owing more to psychological thrillers like "Sleuth" and "Se7en", "Saw" opens with two groggy kidnappees manacled to pipes in a really dirty bathroom. This is immediately a sign of incipient unpleasantness, as I remember on more than one occasion having to make a Greyhound Bus layover in Minneapolis (or somesuch fine, upstanding American city) and using the bathroom at the station there at 3 a.m. (no, really, you haven't lived until).
Elwes and Whannell immediately don't trust each other, figuring something is truly dodgy about the other guy, not realizing a third person in hiding is taking a great interest in their predicament: A sadistic serial killer name of "Jigsaw".
Rather like Batman's The Riddler, Jigsaw has a love of logic problems, especially where the pay-off means a victim crawling through razor wire or having their skull snapped wide by a jaw-wired bear trap. Lovely, lovely man. Well, if it is a man; no spoilers in this blog.
They quibble, threaten, plead, and from their opposing shackled positions toss items and insults at each other across the room -- over the bloodied corpse of a former inhabitant of the room who appears to have taken their own life.
Meanwhile we have flashbacks of how snobby & deserving Elwes' doctor character is of his fate, the manhunt for Jigsaw led by cop Glover, and the Goldberg contraptions that snap & bite and who got theirs and who got away.
The movie is very like director David Fincher's "Se7en": A faceless mastermind leads on the police while setting up themed murders, corpses lie about in tidy dismemberment. Except for the doc's fancy (yet still darkly-lit) apartment, the rest of the world is drab, littered, and badly needing a whole hell of a lot of Windex and Tidy Bowl.
But unlike the preceding horror films this week, "Saw" does have a plot, however labyrinthine, decent-to-almost-good acting, some real heebie-jeebie moments, and a lot of suspense and tense editing.
The film even switches artfully from a fixed camera to handheld or frantic balls-out frantic motion when the need calls for it, such as when the aforementioned Dental Retainer-O'-Doom causes one young woman to go understandably ballistic.
As such things go, the success of "Saw", both critically and financially, has already rendered five sequels in as many years -- although I gather they all just depend on how much more elaborate and wildly sadistic the filmmakers can imagine their new torture devices. Lovely, lovely people.
Overall, the level of true gore is at a minimum, although little 6 year-old Suzie might want to pass on the more gruesome parts of the movie: That is, everything between the Lionsgate logo and the last line in the end credit scrawl.
My Two Cents: Will horror films ever go back to having sympathetic characters? Can't one...single...good guy (and yes, Virginia, there is a Good Guy) prevail by wit, perseverance, compassion, humor, moral character, and Good Old American Know-How? Are we forevermore forbidden from cheering on a Hero as they get bounced off the walls by Evil Critters and have their hair prematurely frosted (you know, like in "Poltergeist")? Guess not. Fighting Evil Just Means You're the Last to Die. I'm ready for something blissfully stupid now. I'm unhappy.
Next week: From "Star Wars" to "Transformers": How Toys Took Over Tinseltown. Now I'm happy. "Gone With the Wind" would have done so much better with action figures.