Halloween is shit. Not the original John Carpenter classic, nor even the divisive Rob Zombie's remake, but the holiday. Although I fail to see how it counts as a holiday particularly but even so. Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves, it's so patently commercialised and far removed from its actual original concept and purpose it's literally now just an excuse for kids to troll round their neighbourhoods demanding sweets or causing havoc depending on their proclivities. It also seems to have become an excuse for people to wander around drunk wearing next to nothing, smeared in fake blood and pretending that being "a dead, sexy Crown Green Bowling player" (or whatever) is anything other than a lazy excuse to get their arses out. Credit where it's due though, charity shops must love October because they can finally shift that God-awful 70s wedding dress to some bellend doing the suicidal jilted bride bullshit. Before you accuse me of being bitter (pun intended) about not being able to eat sweets any longer, bear in mind I've this spectacular of a killjoy for approaching a decade now; before I was just mildly annoyed by the whole thing and now it just fuels my soul-crushing disappointment in humanity.
There was always a bit of an upside to Halloween however that became a tradition of sorts; for a good run of 7 years, there was a new Saw movie.
Now I'm no massive fan of horror movies in general, in part because they promise so much more than they ever deliver, but I've always had a soft spot for Saw. It's very rare nowadays for a horror movie to be a surprise; each sub-genre has its own tropes, twists and beats that are now just clichéd and dull, none of the more recent monsters are ever going to be as popular and legendary as the Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees or Leatherfaces of this world and it's never long before someone rolls out another reboot. I think we're becoming jaded, cynical and desensitised as an audience and the good old days are done. Just cast your eyes over the DVD section in ASDA and you'll see a plethora of cheap but unerringly crap-looking straight to DVD horror bollocks. Netflix is the same. It seems like anyone with an HD camcorder, access to catering quantities of ketchup and power tools is making horror movies.
I suppose it's always been that way; horror has a tradition of DIY-style guerilla filmmaking on a shoestring budget, but back then it was harder to do. Or at least more expensive. You had to invest in it, not just bang it together over a weekend in an abandoned factory your Dad's mate works the security at.
Saw has that old school ethos, or at least it did to begin with. The first movie was pretty tight; a handful of actors, a couple of sets and a pretty decent central concept, despite some fairly ropey internal logic. It was gory, yes but it didn't start out as the egregious torture porn it regrettably became. After maybe the second one, the plot just became an increasingly convaluted way of moving between traps. Again, let's be honest, the main draw of a Saw movie is finding out what horrific ways the designers have come up with to introduce sharp objects into the vital soft parts of a human body. Did anyone really care why John Kramer decided to take passive-aggressiveness to homicidal levels? Does anyone stop to question why the Police in these movies seem to suffer from chronic and terminal stupidity? Why have they not run checks on private citizens purchasing large amounts of the raw materials and industrial equipment necessary to create a room with moving walls strong enough to reduce a man to a raggedy strip of clothed jerky? Why do we never see security camera footage of a homeless person accidentally stumbling across and into a warehouse full of equipment that would have given Torquemada a raging boner for a full week? No, everybody just wants to see somebody strapped into a device that snaps their legs off and beats the victim to death with them unless they can solve crossword puzzle where the first letters of every clue spell out the name of the girl they bullied in high school in less than 45 seconds. That or perform complex surgical procedures on themselves without passing out from the pain or blood loss using only the instruments you get in a 5 year old's dress-up doctor set. You can see what they're trying to do; monkeying around with your perception of the time line, adding more and more layers to who Jigsaw actually was and how many helpers he really had. They want it to be the thinking man's torture porn without realising the irony of that statement or the impossibility of achieving it. The series jumped heroically over basically every shark going once it killed off the main antagonist until it was more flashback than new story at one point. I don't give a shit how Goth you are, anyone who thinks that creepy little puppet is a reasonable toy for an infant needs to have a quiet word with themselves. The last one was basically a clip show and had the added bonus of a dream sequence.
Of course, I say "last one".
Yes, that's right folks, the relentless quest for your hard earned cash means Saw once again returns to cinemas, just in time for you to down your drink and rock up to the showing as a sexy Pig Face, whatever that travesty might look like. It probably involves ass-less chaps though. I haven't seen it yet, but because I'm a complete mark I will and I suspect you'll hear about it. The trailer is predictably light on how they managed to keep Jigsaw alive, as it were, despite him being dead for a decade but does give us a tantalising glimpse at a trap which seems to be a laser collar. The next sequel I assume then, will be set on the International Space Station.
It might not seem it, but I do like the Saw movies. They're trashy, but not £3 supermarket bargain bin trashy. They're so wonderfully chock-full of plot holes, your average Swiss cheese looks positively slab-like in comparison. They're not plagiarising anybody but themselves and that's better than the alternative, which appears to be Nazi cyborgs riding zombie velociraptors or clown ghosts or somebody lost in a wood full of disgruntled raccoons from Hell or whatever. That being said, if some smart cookie decided to adapt Night of the Crabs, then we'd be talking.
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