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Saw (2004): Revolutionary Torture Smut

 


I was a fan of the first 2 or 3 Saw films when they came out, as a nearly lifelong horror fan who was excited about whatever slasher-related content I could get after the post-Scream boom started to dry up in the 2000s. A 13 year old who spent much of his time consuming an endless stream of music videos is exactly the target audience for this first film. However, it has been many years since I last watched it in full, so I was genuinely curious as to how I’d look at it in my 30s.

Right off the bat, let’s get to the “music video” thing. Every flashback kill and some just normal procedural action is done in this hyper, quickcut editing style that just screams late 90s and early 00s hard and alternative rock music videos, and it is truly appalling. It has aged like raw milk, and it honestly makes the chief appeal of this franchise in their creative kills downright hard to watch let alone enjoy, a total cringefest but far from in the torture porn way they intended.

However, removing myself from the knowledge of what a cliché so much would become as much as I can and just enjoying the film for what it is, it is still pretty good. The intimate, small, horrifying setting our two main characters find themselves in remains incredibly effective at maintaining a crampt, gross out atmosphere. Both actors are perfectly fine, though writer Leigh Whannell probably comes off the better of the two. The sequences are also well directed, keeping things kinetic with a frequently moving handheld to best utilize the small space and action limited by literal chains. It heightens the paranoia and claustrophobia more and more as the film goes on, and it is not surprising that James Wan would become a renowned genre director.

The police scenes are also perfectly fine with Danny Glover being everybody’s platonic ideal of what a police detective should be in countless movies in his career and doing an effective job setting up the kills and giving a fun little action sequence that is a highlight of the film and setting up the deep lore of the series which if you can’t enjoy the kills a great deal due to the editing is a huge part of the appeal. A touch of noir and a touch of hack philosophy go a long way in making this quite unlike most horror films that’d come out by that era.

All the fine threads start weaving together in the climax even if it feels like it takes a bit to get there and some are pretty telegraphed from early on, and despite literally the worst car chase sequences I have ever seen in my life it is full of two different fronts of action keeping you guessing and the heart pounding and most of it is really well done and even the most famous part is more suggestion than gore but perfectly acted and timed and absolutely brutal and bleak.

It is far from a perfect film, but you can really see what a revolutionary thing it was at the time, doing something with a structure and mindset that wasn’t widely seen in the mainstream at that time though they repeat the formula countless times with various twists. I can still really enjoy it for an effective horror movie some 20 years later.







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