SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SAW FILMS....

I haven’t decided yet whether the SAW films are crudely made torture horror porn or a set of brilliant interlocking films on the human conditions (perhaps the best interlocking film series I’ve ever seen).

What I find is I may be turned off by individual acts of violence as they occur in a particular SAW film but I am always left amused or curious or interested at the end….In other words, I’ve never felt disappointed or that I was seeing something with no depth, that was only gratuitous gore at the end of the film.

In this day and age of searching for easy answers, the self-help tough love premise of the SAW films that is John Kramer’s traps provides an often dead on satire….The useless people here can only prove themselves when faced with death or the death of their loved ones or even the deaths of people they hate.

SAW 7 or Saw 3D as it’s also know although the 3D serves no real purpose I can tell, purports to be the last in the series and it does have an air of finality about it….Without giving anything away, the final fate of Hoffman the protagonist of SAW 4,5, and 6 is satisfying.

I liked how in the final movie we actually had a character who attempted to use the Jigsaw murders as the basis for his own self-help book….Too bad he was a phony (and paid the price for that).

What I specifically like about the SAW movies is how well the films fi together….This isn’t FRIDAY THE 13^TH or NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET where a bunch of dumb teenagers get killed in successive films with little to connect them….The intricacy of the plotting as well as the serial nature of the events make the SAW films like one long story instead of individual movies….I still think that the fact the third and fourth movies were basically happening at the same time was a stroke of creative genius.

Is the violence too much?  Well sometimes….I think one of the nastiest scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie was the beginning of SAW 6 when two loan sharks had to cut off bits of their flesh – The one who cut off the most would avoid being killed by the trap.

However, the traps themselves are creative and nasty….Any revulsion is offset by respect for the imagination that went into the construction of it.

What’s my favorite SAW film?  Here’s the order from my favorite to least favorite-3,6,1,7,5,2,4