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Disgustinglicious
by Christian De Matteo
SUPER
I missed this when it was in
theaters last year because, having made my wife
watch 1,2, and 3 in a row the previous October, she
was so scarred she vowed to never see another Saw
movie again. She stuck to her word and I
missed seeing part 4 in theaters. For some
reason, I never got around to renting it either,
until today, October 14, 2008.
The new one looks pretty good,
and, since I saw parts 1 and 2 on my own any way, I
figured I would be going to see this alone and
wanted to be prepared.
I can't believe I waited so long.
Saw IV is one of the very best in the series.
As any one who's ever followed a horror series
knows, the bigger the numbers at the ends of the
titles get, the worse the movies are. Usually
by part 3 or 4 they are completely reinventing the
mythology (sometimes by part 2, see The Ring Two)
just to have a story to tell. As an old school
fan of the Dracula and Wolfman movies (and The
Creature from the Black Lagoon) I hate when a
mythology gets changed. I don't mind if it
gets added to logically, but going back and changing
the rules always pisses me off. A
monster, or threat, or plot which relies heavily on
rules should never be indiscriminately altered.
Enter the Saw films. I went
to see the first one because something about it
intrigued me. I was very pleasantly surprised,
my only real criticism of the original
Saw, being the
use of unnecessary flashbacks that confused the plot
and the viewer. Then I saw
Saw II and
liked one aspect of it better and another aspect of
it less. Still an enjoyable experience, for
lack of a better description. Then I saw
Saw III
and thought it was pretty psychologically brilliant.
And here I was surprised. Instead of dumbing
down the series as it continued, the Saw movies
seemed to be getting deeper and deeper into the
psychology of Jigsaw and the "victims" he would
chose. The ending intrigued the hell out of me
and I couldn't wait to see what happened next.
Though apparently, I could, as I
only rented it today.
And I wish I'd seen it a lot
sooner. If you haven't seen it yet, and are
therefore as off the ball as I am, let me tell you
this one thing. The film is being told out of
order. I don't think I'm giving anything away,
but rather letting you know that you should just go
for the ride and not get frustrated. Anything
you don't understand will be addressed.
And by the end, you will be dying
to see the fifth one. I can only pray, that
with the departure of Bousman, the director of 2,3,
and 4 the film will still work, because with the way
IV ends, I can only imagine what they are going to
to next. This is one of the most closely knit
series I've ever seen, each film taking place not
only where the last one left off, but sometimes
before the last one ended, the creators managing to
thread a plot through multiple movies. These
films will, if they manage to continue getting
better (a rare feat to complete as we've seen time
and again in this genre) as they have been, will one
day provide the ultimate Halloween marathons,
providing gore hounds and psychology freaks with a
bloody, awful, intense Lost tv series like
experience.
Is Saw IV perfect? No, of
course not. I don't want you to think we've
finally witnessed the Citizen Kane of horror.
It suffers from the same sins as the first three,
some bad acting, bad dialogue, and the always
looming sense that it might just be taking it self a
bit too seriously. And yet, that's kind of the
attraction. The Saw films are a series of
well-crafted, lovingly constructed B-movies aspiring
to be more. The biggest mistake the
series could make would be the seemingly inevitable
(in horror) self-mocking turn if they did stop
taking themselves to seriously. Jigsaw must
never start delivering horrific Freddy lines like
the 1980s Nintendo reference in the Roseanne and Tom
Arnold installment of Nightmare on Elm Street (part
five ,I think): "Now you're playing with
power". The minute this type of humor infects
the Saw films, the series will be dead in the water.
But, if they can manage to
maintain this steam through part VI (and hopefully
stop there, or restart in a vastly different way)
this will become a classic, cult favorite series,
rather than a series with a one or two cult
favorites in it. The web that the writers have
created here is brilliant, constantly turning into
it self, somehow managing to thread clues from past
movies into plots of future ones.
Saw IV is a helluva lot of gory,
disgusting, creepy, awful fun. Be warned, the
concept of the first two films, where they didn't
show that much gore, but instead went for the power
of suggestion and suspense, is certainly gone.
While still suspenseful, the tortures are shown
quite graphically. But then again, when you
have a film that starts with an unflinching autopsy,
what else can you possibly expect.
Any questions you might have at
the end of this one, if the movie gods allow, will
be answered in the next one with, probably, more
questions, a sort of Socratic Water Torture Method.
Enjoy.
Oh, and Tobin Bell, fantastic.
Very cool performance, very cool back story.
His Jigsaw is a bit hard to dislike, or maybe
there's just something very wrong with me.
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