Godsend (2004)

Do you think movies have too many entertaining parts? Perhaps too many things about them that stand out, make sense and make you want to watch more? Well, if you do, have no fear – Godsend is the movie for you.

Director: Nick Hamm

Starring: Robert de Niro, Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was actually released a year before the other shitty Robert de Niro thriller, Hide and Seek – but when I saw these movies as a kid, this was the order I saw them in, so that's how I'm reviewing 'em. It's a woefully uneventful film with all the charisma and liveliness of a hay bale after a barn fire.

We start off with what everyone always wants to see at the beginning of a film, a birthday party scene. When has watching a birthday party of people you don't know ever been entertaining? Like yeah, really, I'm stoked to watch people pretending to have a birthday party for some kid in a movie. That sounds like awesome cinema!

Godsend: it makes you not want eight year olds to have good birthday parties.

You'll notice very quickly in this that the movie's only mode of getting you invested in the characters is to show the most fluffed up, happy-crappy nonsense ever. There's no real meat – just pictures of the characters smiling and laughing. Because that's the barometer for how life works...either you're happy without a care in the world, or your son is dead. Those are literally the only two options.

Because, yup, in the next scene, Adam dies. His mom, played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, takes him out to buy a new pair of sneakers. While he's outside playing, a bicycle implausible swerves for no reason in the path of a car, which then swerves to avoid the bike, and ends up hitting Adam, killing him instantly.

You'd have to be a really terrible driver to actually do this. I mean, like, blind-deaf-mute kind of driving.

The next few scenes are just the parents, Paul and Jessie, grieving because, I presume, those shoes were really expensive, dammit!

"Damn you, Nike products! My wallet is crying even more than I am!"

Luckily for them, at the funeral, they run into an old professor of Jessie's, played by Robert de Niro. He really came prepared, as he's already got a whole spiel planned about how his new science lab can clone their dead child and bring him back to life.

"You can trust me because I am wearing a suit and tie."

Paul and Jessie spend an astonishingly short amount of time discussing this – I guess Paul is a bit on the fence at first, but once he watches some more blandly cheerful home movies of the family smiling and laughing, he's on board for this abomination against nature.

And I get it – losing a kid is a devastating thing. But the movie just doesn't portray it as any kind of big deal – there's really no depth or understanding of the grief. They're just sad because they can't make more happy-pill-addled home videos of people laughing and smiling. We don't know anything about this family or about the kid, and the movie just rushes through all their grief in favor of bullshit thriller junk. Like so many films in the mid-2000s, it exploits human tragedy in favor of shocking plot twists and cash-grab thrills with zero substance, which basically makes it an instant zero-star film for me.

Clearly the movie was trying to convey sadness - that's obvious. But it's just not well done. We don't get any real insight into these characters and their motives just by showing us extremely generic videos of them laughing together.

Okay, so there's some half-assed dialogue thrown in about how she can't have any more kids, or some shit like that – so grieve naturally, and adopt a kid then. Fucking hundreds of people do that every day. I get that, given the chance, it might be tempting to try and bring your kid back – but come the fuck on. There were no red flags given by the creepy, mysterious old man who showed up at the funeral and told you he could clone your dead son? This merited no skepticism?

The most trustworthy face in the universe, ohhh yeah.

But hey – I'm sure it'll be fine. When has something this shady, dangerous and insane ever turned out bad in a movie? While you're at it, go give your credit card information to that guy in the ratty coat who's been standing on a street corner all day and says he has good financial advice for you. I'm sure he'll help.

They go through an overly long and boring scene of getting the wife artificially inseminated again, and after the baby is born, she thanks God for it. Yeah, fuck all those doctors (and the probably-illegal scientific developments) that made this possible. Thank God instead.

But really, I was just hoping the baby would come out like this:

What a beautiful hellspawn abandoned by nature...

But whatever, they do it and then eight years go by and their new genetic abomination of a child is at the same age their old son was when he died. They also had to move to some remote location in a beautiful country home, because all of these stupid movies always have to have super nice, clean looking homes that look like nobody has ever lived there. I mean, why bother making any aspect of your movie relatable?

And how did this kid get so many friends again? I think we need some plausible scriptwriting here – just remove most of the other kids and have him eating cake alone.

No, we don't need any more birthday scenes, you hacks!

The rest of this film sinks into levels of banality I never knew were possible. We get tons of lame-ass jump scares where the movie goes quiet for a second and then some loud sound happens. There are also a bunch of idiotic dream sequences where Adam dreams a bunch of kids in school are making fun of him, and also another one where he's attacking someone with a hammer. Eh, it happens – this is pretty much all a metaphor for puberty.

There's also a few times when he acts weirdly, like when he gets in a swinging contest with a bunch of bullies at his school – because you know, bullies have contests to see who can swing the highest in between atomic wedgies and swirlies in the bathroom. It's just part of the bullying vocabulary. But yeah, after he falls off the swing, he spits in his teacher's face.

Oh, and there's also the tiny little detail that he kills that bully later on by shoving him into a frozen lake. I'm not even being sarcastic – it really is just played off like a tiny little detail, given no weight or drama behind it. He killed a kid? So what! He's having dreams about hammers! THAT'S the important thing!

This is a metaphor for the fact that you should turn this movie off and go outside instead of watching any more.

Eventually, Paul and Jessie, being geniuses, figure out that not everything is quite right. Really, guys? Genetically cloning your dead child in a secret hush-hush experiment where the scientist who told you about it swore you to secrecy ISN'T a trustworthy thing? Gee, only took you almost ten fucking years to figure that out. Nothing gets past you guys. You're real Sherlock Holmeses, the both of you.

Well, I say both of them, but really Jessie is trying to cling to the hope that things will be okay, so it's really just Paul who's actively suspicious. The two of them have a seemingly endless slew of conversations in the last two acts of the movie that all kinda go like this:

PAUL: There's obviously something wrong with this kid because we cloned him and now he's having weird dreams and acting strange!

JESSIE: No, he's our son and we have to protect him!

PAUL: You're crazy!

It's like two people with Alzheimer's forgetting they already had the same argument before.

That's it – just that mind numbing conversation, repeated enough until you want to claw your eardrums out with a spork. Jesus fuck this is a boring movie. They take an hour and forty minutes for the movie, and most of it could be dialed down to one two-minute scene. I don't know if you're keeping score, but yeah, that's called trash filmmaking from the dumpster.

So, I guess if you even care, they figure out that Adam has some other kid haunting his mind, Zachary Clark. Paul then goes out and finds this old housekeeper lady who knew the real Zachary Clark from years ago. I love how this lady was apparently just ready to drop everything she was doing to talk to this idiot about a story that has obviously traumatized her. Like, she was just waiting all these years for some dumbass to come to her door and ask about it. It's basically like she doesn't exist except when exposition is needed.

"I only exist for this one scene, in a vacuum, to spew exposition. After the scene is over, my non-existent character disappears into thin air, never to be seen again."

The story is, I suppose, that Zachary Clark was bullied by kids at school, so one day he killed his mom with a hammer and then burnt down the house, or something like that. I guess in some reality that might make sense, but it isn't mine. We also find out – dun dun DUN – that de Niro was the father of Zachary Clark and has been trying to clone him.

I get that it's trying to be a plot twist, but it's a pretty poorly done one, with how much plot they tried to cram into that very short few minutes, like a dozen Twinkies into the mouth of a fat Dachsund. I get the idea the writers just fell asleep writing the rest of the movie and then the producer just came in, scribbled some nonsense on a napkin, stapled it to the rest of the script, and then turned that in to be filmed.

If you can believe it, de Niro and Paul get into a fight in a church in which a fire is started. De Niro leaves and we never fucking see him again – oh, except for this newspaper clipping in which front-page news was devoted to saying “No new information found on disappeared scientist.” Fucking brilliant, that is.

Paul then goes and saves his wife from being killed by Adam/Zachary, and talks Adam down just by saying a few nice words. Wow. That's pretty much the lamest and most anticlimactic ending this movie could have had – what if other horror movies had that as the climax? Michael Myers in Halloween talked down by Dr. Loomis saying “it's okay, you're a nice person.” That would have improved it tenfold.

"Please, just stop acting crazy. I want to get a paycheck without having to emote in this crap movie." 

The actual ending is when they're moving into yet a third home to try and start over again – but it turns out, as we see in a rather blunt shot of Adam being pulled into the closet by “Zachary.” Awesome – it's like the Psychology for Dummies version of Session 9. Thanks so much for that.

This film is just the kind of thing you'd pick out of the bargain bin box at Walmart when you literally have zero other ideas for what you want to see. And then you'd just wish you had forgone watching anything and just stared at a wall for an hour and forty minutes. At least in the latter case, you'd be able to think in solitude without the idiotic dribble of the movie's story constantly annoying you. Goddammit, I hate this shit. It's just so fucking bad, and every scene just hurts me.

It really says something that this movie was such a low point in de Niro's career – I mean, fuck, even the one where he cross-dresses was better than this.

Yeah – safe to say, I'll be sticking to Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Heat next time, thank you very much. I'd rather remember why de Niro used to be a legend instead. As for this movie, well...

That about sums it up.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Satan's Little Helper (2004)

Doing these reviews, you fake anger – you watch a stupid movie, then you take an exasperated tone and bitch about how ridiculous it was that the movie got made, et cetera – you guys know the deal, you know what I do. But every now and again a movie comes along that I don't even have to fake it for. Sometimes you're just sitting there seething with rage at every new scene and wishing death on the characters every time they utter a new insipid line of dialogue. Sometimes you just reach a boiling point and its name in the tumor developing in your brain is revealed as if in some Hellish vision – and it is called....Satan's Little Helper.

Director: Jeff Lieberman

Starring: Alexander Brickel, Katherine Winnick, Amanda Plummer

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This is a 2004 ass-fest full of horrible characters, horrible writing, horrible storylines...it's just a cauldron of everything wrong with the world. If you're wondering why horror these days is so formulaic and bland, well, you can thank the sheer unrepentant awfulness and tastelessness of this piece of garbage for jolting the mainstream studios awake like an electric shock to the nipples and going “HEY! You need to make money off of this and movies like Satan's Little Helper aren't helping!”

Well, as much as I'd love to continue stalling, I guess that doesn't work when you can already scroll down the page and read the rest anyway.

We start off with a little boy named Dougie, who is obsessed with a handheld video game in which you help the Devil wreak havoc on Earth.

This would only be a good game if Daniel Radcliffe was involved.

That's fucking unbelievable – the first thing we see in the film, and already you ask the audience for a Herculean jump in suspension of disbelief. Why would this game exist at all? In the United States of America, where you can be sentenced to prison time for posing for a dick-sucking picture with a statue of Christ? Where atheists are still viewed by the majority of the country as completely amoral, stink-bomb-throwing hooligans with no moral compasses? Where a prayer takes precedence over the National Anthem a lot of the time?

...and you're telling me a game where Satan helps you beat people up would be made in THAT climate?

...well, I just don't find that very likely.

But anyway, Dougie was clearly dropped on his head as a little boy as he then has a conversation with his mother, Amanda Plummer, about whether or not Satan is real and if Dougie can go find him on Halloween and hang out with him. Plummer, who I'm sure was stoned off her ass every second she was filming this shit, makes up some stuff about how Satan is evil and evil is everywhere. Personally I would have just said Satan is film studio executives, but hey, different parenting for different folks.

Then they go to meet Jenna, Dougie's sister, who is returning home from college for Halloween, because you know, Halloween is the type of holiday you normally go home from college for – and yes, apparently classes just give you time off to go do that. She brings her boyfriend with her, Kurt Cobain MK 2004:

It came from art school...

They go back home and start getting ready for Halloween. Dougie runs away and meets up with this guy, a serial killer in a Halloween mask who he sees propping up an actual dead body. Dougie, being a fucking retard, doesn't see anything wrong with this and instead asks if he can help this clearly psychotic killer, whom he mistakes, quite understandably, for Satan himself.

"Even I think you're an idiot here."

Of course the killer says yes, too, because why wouldn't you want some dumbass kid running around with you if you're trying to go on a mass-killing spree? I'm really just wondering here; what did this guy do the other 364 days of the year? Clearly Halloween was a real special time for him as he could be so lazy and just kill people in public, and no one would notice (because as the movie will soon show us, Halloween means people don't notice people being murdered in front of them). Did he just sit at home the other days of the year going “fuck! I got no ideas now that I can't just leave my dead victims out in public in the middle of the day! Oh well. Better just stay home and watch Mean Girls again.”

"I mean c'mon, who would actually fall for this? I'm just doing it to see how long it takes to get caught!"

If you're wondering what the fuck the rest of the family is doing while Dougie just wanders around town by himself (not bad parenting at all), well, good thing I'm here to tell you: Amanda Plummer is dressing her daughter up like a pirate wench, even though Jenna doesn't want to and the costume is even skimpier than what you see most actual prostitutes wearing.

"I forgot what boobs looked like."

I get it, Halloween means dressing up and being sexy – I just find it hilariously misguided that the mother is MAKING her daughter dress up this way. Kinda backwards! I mean the only thing the mother DOESN'T do is physically take her daughter out there and start filming her having sex with her Kurt Cobain boyfriend out there.

Dougie eventually returns home with “Satan” in tow, who he takes down to the house basement, where Satan cracks open an old wine bottle to...pour over his face for no reason, as clearly there's no mouth hole in that mask and you're really just wasting good wine.

Things get even more wretched as Dougie makes a plan with “Satan” to kill off Kurt Cobain boyfriend guy because Dougie is possessive of his sister, or some crap like that – apparently Dougie and Cobain-boyfriend are going to the costume store to get a costume and then “Satan” will jump out and kill the boyfriend. I guess the storyline here is that Dougie doesn’t think “Satan” is actually going to do anything serious, like he’s just playing around or something. Even that’s pretty flimsy though – was there nobody to tell this kid that hanging around with weird grown men in Halloween masks who don’t talk is a bad idea? Even three-year-olds could grasp that!

"It's just so obvious it hurts!"

So “Satan” knocks out the boyfriend and then goes home, where Jenna and Amanda Plummer both assume it’s the boyfriend in a mask and costume. This could maybe be plausible for a few seconds when they’re playing around in the living room together, but when Jenna takes “Satan” upstairs (still thinking it’s her boyfriend) to have sex with her? HOW DOES SHE NOT NOTICE IT ISN’T HIM?!

"I'm your girlfriend and should probably pick up the signs that your touch feels different and you're not acting like him, but I'm also a complete idiot!"

And I get it – the movie is trying to be funny with all of this. It’s obviously not asking us to take it seriously as a scary movie or some kind of drama; that much is clear. But it’s just so unfunny. If the script were written with any clever satire of horror movies, or actually funny moments, a story like this might work - but everything is just so fucking bad. It’s seriously incomprehensible how this thing ever got out of the editing room.

Because get this – nobody guesses that the guy in the Satan costume ISN’T Jenna’s Kurt Cobain-esque boyfriend for the next forty minutes of the film. Are you shitting me? Am I even in reality anymore?

No, clearly I’m not – because we have a scene next where the guy in the Satan costume tries to eat out Jenna – while still wearing the mask which has no mouth hole.

Another horrible scene - she constantly gets a scared look on her face when she suspects the guy in the mask might not be her boyfriend, but then as soon as he does stuff like this, she forgets about it and is suddenly super aroused and not suspicious at all. Either she's just as horny as a horned toad or...the movie just makes no sense.

Just...every fucking scene makes me hate myself in this movie. Every scene just goes lower and lower and...no, not “lower” like that. You perverts!

Then Dougie and “Satan” go out and buy a bunch of knives and hammers and ropes to kill more people with, which Dougie still thinks is just fun and games. Guys, we’ve gone far past the point of this kid being retarded, and into the new and terrifying realm of “this kid is actually some kind of subterranean Mole Person who has never had contact with human beings before the movie began.”

When “Satan” stabs a worker from the store right in front of Dougie, there’s still no reaction – he just thinks it’s cool. You little douche. I hate to be mean spirited, but I really was hoping this kid would die at this point – he’s just so awful. This kid is making me yearn for Rush Limbaugh speeches and reddit commenters talking about how the Jennifer Lawrence nude picture leaks really WERE her fault. That's how bad this kid really is!

"Coooooool...let's bomb an abortion clinic next!"

What’s that? Don’t believe me that he should die? Well, check out the next scene in which “Satan” goes on a shopping cart rampage through the parking lot and runs over a pregnant woman, a woman with a baby carriage and a blind man.

I just...do not have WORDS to describe how despicable that is, so instead I’ll just muse on the incredible coincidence that a pregnant woman, a woman with a baby carriage and a blind man were all walking in the same area right when that scene happened. Just one of those wondrous coincidences I guess!

Oh, are you not convinced this kid is the worst human being in cinema yet? How about the next scene where he watches “Satan” break into some old lady’s house and murder her, and still doesn’t care? Is THAT proof enough for you?!?

I hate this kid so much, I want to age him rapidly to the age of 35, then force him to rewatch all of the awful things he helped do in this movie. Over and over again.

Back at home, because we can’t have anything likable in this movie at all, Jenna complains because her boyfriend and Dougie haven’t come back and it’s been several hours. Rather than be worried about silly things like their safety or the fact that it’s not normal for people to disappear for several hours after just going around the corner to the store, she’s worried that her boyfriend is cheating on her.

"How dare you make me think I was getting cheated on!"

Really. THAT’S your big worry? Why not focus on the REAL problems like “what kind of nail polish should I wear?” or “what should I buy my parents for Christmas?” Geez, get some perspective!

Meanwhile, “Satan” gets arrested by the cops, but apparently, off screen, he kills them all, because this movie secretly wanted to be a Terminator sequel. And because this is a small island town, apparently that also means the entire town is now without a police force and complete anarchy will reign, as highlighted by this scene where “Satan” high-fives some idiot who calls him “Nigga.”

Hmm, let me check – yup, I do think my life span went down a few years just watching that short two-second scene. Thanks, movie! I didn't want to live that long anyway.

So “Satan” comes back and acts weird, prompting Jenna to think SOMETHING isn't quite right about her boyfriend who hasn't spoken a word or taken off his mask to prove it's actually him! Really?!?! Is that your brilliant fucking conclusion? You truly are the next Einstein. But it isn't until “Satan” kills their father that Dougie and Jenna truly see it isn't really her boyfriend and IS actually just some murdering psycho! Oh man – nothing gets past you guys.

"I just can't believe something bad happened after we didn't notice a guy in a mask who was obviously a killer, was killing people!"

Then “Satan” kidnaps the mother, ties her up with tape and forces her to go to this party, where of course nobody realizes she's being kidnapped and just assumes the guy in the Satan mask is her husband.

"WOAH! What good costumes! We're going to choose to ignore the fact that you look scared as shit and just assume it's logical that someone would choose to dress up as Chiquita Banana wrapped in cellophane as a Halloween costume! And that guy with you who we don't see his face and he never speaks a word, and has to hold you to keep you from trying to run? I'm sure that's not suspicious at all! Let's not even bother checking!"

Because like I said – Halloween is really just an excuse for psychopaths to get away with murder, and everyone in this world is so dumb they might as well just be a colony of lemmings, damned to extinction on their island which they were probably exiled to because of their stupidity – they're certainly not equipped to survive in the world anyway. I mean they didn't even notice when two people dropped on the floor dead from poisoned punch – which, by the way, is what the killer did in the movie's rolls of fat in the last 10 minutes.

"Woah! Such realistic Halloween death effects! Great costumes, guys! We'll just leave you on the floor to lie motionless like you're actually dead, because it's Halloween and we can't tell the difference!"

What's this killer's plan again? Either he's just the MacGyver of serial killers, or he's got the attention span of a speck of dust. “Muwahaha, time to kill random people and pose them like Halloween props...no, wait, time to follow a little boy around and do whatever he says...no, wait, now it's time to kill a bunch of people at a costume party I didn't know was happening until fifteen minutes ago! I'M NOT RANDOM AT ALL!”

The boyfriend and Jenna finally meet up again and kill who they think is the killer, but it's actually just the boyfriend's dad, which was a plot element explained while we were being lobotomized by the other scenes.

Then, apparently, the killer shows up again wearing a Jesus costume. I don't know why, but it does make something very clear to me that I wasn't sure about before: God really is dead.

He somehow kills the boyfriend, then does the old “disguise the boyfriend in the Jesus costume so they shoot and stab HIM instead of the real killer” trick, which doesn't make me at all want to kill myself. Oh wait yes it does. My bad.

The movie ends with the real killer coming back with this incredible disguise and presumably slaughtering the entire family, which is as close to a happy ending as we're liable to get.

I don't know whether to be angry that Dougie couldn't tell that was a mask and that it was the killer, baffled that the killer found a police officer costume so fast or relieved that the movie is over and these miserable, miserable characters died. So many complex emotions!

Of course, the only actual happy ending there could be to THIS film would be the director just appearing on screen and apologizing profusely for the whole thing, then erasing our memories of it via Men in Black thingamajiggies. But as is, this is pretty much the worst of humanity.

I mean it – this whole thing was about as funny for me as watching a concentration camp video. I just don't get it; what was supposed to be funny about this? The fact that it was doing traditional horror tropes badly on purpose? Well, congratulations – do you want a medal for that? It doesn't take effort to make a fucking shitty movie like this. It DOES take effort to put actual jokes or satire into your script that have a point and actually SAY something, which is the point of any satire – not just to be bad for the sake of being bad. Which this movie does not do.

It's just complete shit – they regurgitate a couple really old cliches, throw in the most unlikably stupid, asinine characters you've ever seen and beat the whole thing into your skull with a near two-hour runtime until you're too dumb to think about anything, and then wallah, the movie has succeeded! It's seriously beyond comprehension until you actually see it yourself. But don't subject yourself to this. Save your precious brain cells! This movie deserves to be burned in a garbage can.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

REVIEW: Saw (2004)

A couple of years ago, I finished up watching the entire Saw series, even reviewing the last two. And I still stand by what I said about those movies back then: they are garbage. But far be it from me to deprive the Internet of my opinions on the very first Saw film and the one to kickstart a modern revival of the horror genre.

Director: James Wan

Starring: Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannel

IMDb

I remember seeing this right after it came out. I was about 13 or 14 and I had never seen most classic horror films – I was just getting started on the genre. I remember sitting in my house and watching this on our big screen TV. I also remember being spellbound by just how crazy this shit was – I mean for someone my age back then, this was pretty hardcore. As I continued to get into horror films that summer, this one stuck with me.

And it was quite a revolution back in 2004. Back then, when all we had was shitty sequels to low-grade American parody-slasher films and remakes of Asian horror films, something like Saw was a big breath of fresh air. Looking back with the knowledge I have about the genre now, I really think this was a good thing for the genre. It was a unique concept for its time and really set the stage for…well, a whole bunch of crappy direct-to-DVD torture porn films. But the point stands – for its time, and in the climate of horror films at the time, this was a refreshing change.

But does it hold up now? Let’s find out.

We start off with two guys waking up in a dingy, dirty old bathroom. Because all good horror stories start in the same manner as your average drunken trip through the underbelly of Europe. But as Hostel was a few years off, we actually see something else is going on – there’s a dead body in the room with them. Chained up and unable to get out, they find some tapes that inform them of why they’re there: Dr. Lawrence Gordon, played by Cary Elwes, is there because he never did anything as good as The Princess Bride again. Adam, played by writer Leigh Whannel, is there because he helped to spawn this entire series. And both of them are there because they didn’t value their acting lessons enough to actually apply any of them in this movie.

Oh, OK, those aren’t the real reasons – could you tell? But it does point out another thing about this movie…the big theme behind it is that the Jigsaw Killer, the series’ villain, wants to show people the folly of their ways and make them see why they should appreciate life more.

Some tapes in their pockets reveal the objective of the whole game: Dr. Gordon has to kill Adam by 6:00, or else Gordon’s family will be killed instead. Also, apparently, the dead guy on the floor was poisoned and shot himself in the head because of it. They figure out they’re being watched through a two-way mirror with a camera behind it and break the mirror, revealing the camera.

We then get to see some of Jigsaw’s impressive resume. Through flashbacks we see some of how Cary Elwes’ character Dr. Gordon was involved with the case, as they suspected him of being Jigsaw after his pen was found at a crime scene. Apparently Gordon’s sins included being a condescending jackass to the orderlies at the hospital just for saying they knew the patients’ names:

How dare you care about people, you sniveling snot-wart?! Allow me to laugh at you and mock you in front of everyone! I WAS IN THE PRINCESS BRIDE! I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT! MUWAHAHAHA!

And we get some of Jigsaw’s finest moments, sure to make it into the family album, such as putting a man who cut himself into a pit full of barbed wire and forcing him to crawl through them to escape…

"IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT! I SLIPPED WITH A KITCHEN KNIFE IN MY HAND!!!"

Putting a guy who claims to be sick to get out of going to work into a room full of broken glass with a flammable substance smeared on his body, and then forcing him to hold a burning candle as he has to read letters on the wall…

Poor John Cusack, never had a chance after he made Identity...

And putting a drug addict into a room where she has to stab another guy in the gut to get a contraption off her head that would have ripped her head in half.

Oh stop crying, at least you don't have to be in the sequels!

…okay, so they’re all pretty unrealistic and elaborate traps. And honestly, they only tenuously seem to have anything to do with the alleged “crimes” these people have committed. Frankly it makes Se7en look like a down-to-Earth True Crime story in comparison.

The violence in this got its bad rap as torture porn and needless violence, but really, this movie doesn’t have a lot of that. The sequels get way more over the top, but this one remains pretty squarely focused on telling a story and on having a message to it. The amount of actual gratuitous gore and violence is fairly low in comparison with other movies of its kind. The implication of the violence is really what the makers of the film were going for – plus the dingey, dirty settings add a very grisly atmosphere to the whole thing. It really does create an atmosphere of being stuck in a run-down, shit covered bathroom.

So most of the movie that isn’t flashbacks is just Gordon and Adam trying to figure out how to get out of there. These parts are actually fairly good, and as bad as their acting is, I like the characters well enough to be invested – and seeing them try to figure shit out is fairly entertaining. It’s actually a fair bit more character driven than any other Saw film would ever get, which is nice – it’s nothing amazing, but the characters are at least characters, rather than compilements of cliché like in later films. They find some rusty old saws (TITLE DROP!!!1!!!1) in the toilet and also a great family picture of Gordon’s wife and daughter:

Aw, how sweet; the best Manson Family photo ever.

Then we get another flashback to show the last time Gordon saw his family. Apparently Gordon was a giant jackass who, when confronted with the reality that his daughter had a nightmare about a man being in her closet, doesn’t even look at her and instead keeps typing on his computer.

"I'm almost done with this level of Candy Crush Saga!"

To his credit, I guess he goes and comforts her afterwards, so it’s not too bad. Then he and his wife have the most generic, nonspecific argument ever as she accuses him of not being happy. He says he is, she says “I’d rather you just break down and tell me you hated me; at least there’d be some passion in it.” I really hope Leigh Whannel doesn’t try his hand at writing romantic dramas any time soon. If somewhere in the world, there exists a superstore for phoned in, generalized movie arguments, this one would be the best seller.

Gordon leaves and then we get a shot of the daughter in her room. And you remember when I said she was scared because of a “nightmare” about a man in her room? Wellllllll…

What happens when Linus from Peanuts grows up and goes insane...

Heh heh…that’s actually pretty funny. Apparently the kidnapper is Zepp, that orderly from before who Gordon made fun of just for knowing patients’ names. He wears all black and likes to hold stethoscopes to his captives’ chests while holding a gun to their heads to see if their heartbeats get faster. How interesting…and utterly pointless…

We see later that he's being forced to do this. Which is odd because it sure looks like he's enjoying this shit much more than any normal person would under the circumstances.

Meanwhile in Not Flashback Land, a note on the back tells Adam to turn off the lights. Despite his confusion, Gordon does and they find an ‘X’ on the wall that leads to a box full of bullets, two cigarettes and a note that tells Gordon he can use the poisonous blood on the floor to put in the cigarette and kill Adam with. Instead, Gordon turns off the lights and they make a plot to pretend Adam is dead. But then the Jigsaw Killer whips out his secret weapon, electrocution:

Should've had this sign in the room with them.

We also see that Danny Glover is playing a washed up, obsessed cop character who slowly goes crazy over the whole Jigsaw case. Danny Glover playing an old cop? How unique. That kind of thing has never been done before and is totally original for an actor like Glover!

So, yeah, if you want a realistic portrayal of a man’s descent into insanity, you might want to stay far away from this movie. Because unless you think decorating your apartment like John Doe from Se7en and talking to yourself in a raspy voice while laughing like a child molester is captivating, you may be disappointed. But how did he get like this when he used to be a pretty straight detective?

"I'm so obsessed! I'm an obsessive cop to END all obsessive cops! LOOK AT MY OBSESSIVENESS!"

So apparently Glover and his partner, Ethnic Stereotype to Show We’re Not Racist, went to this warehouse where they suspected Jigsaw called his home. Because of the Law of Movie Implausibility, they’re of course exactly right, and he has all his killer contraptions and what not just laid right out in the open for any random loser passing by to see through the windows. Since it’s right in the middle of the city, what are the chances that’s never happened before? Apparently pretty high.

So now we come to the portion of every horror movie that I like to call “We Don’t Understand Anything About Policework.” Here we have several different items to check off. Usually I just do a long paragraph of ranting and swearing about it, but honestly I’m just so tired of that. Sooooo it’s checklist time.

[x] Not calling for back-up or even bothering to get a search warrant? Check! Even when they realize it is Jigsaw’s lair after all, they still don’t!

[x] Waiting for him to get further inside the building and even far enough to activate a trap and slit Glover’s fucking throat because “they want to see his face.” Uh. See his face AFTER you arrest or shoot him? What’s the logic there? They could have just shot him right when he came in the door, but nooooo, so Glover’s throat gets cut and we get the next item on the checklist…

[x] Activated a trap that almost killed a guy.

I hope this guy got a nice spot on Jay Leno and a lawsuit settlement with the city police force after this.

But hey, I get it. It’s tough fighting a guy who has the foresight to tie some guns to the roof JUST IN CASE some cops happen to be chasing him down that specific hallway, with a trip wire designed to shoot the guns automatically if someone runs into it. Wow, that is specific.

I just hope he didn’t forget to take the wire down when the owner of the warehouse or someone came to inspect it. “Hey, Jigsaw Killer, I’m here to install your wireless internAAAAAGGGGHHH!” *splat*

Tragic. But what’s even more tragic, is that the Jigsaw Killer seems to think wearing a robe more befitting of a female Marvel Comics villain is scary somehow. Dude, you look like Todd MacFarlane’s conception of the grim reaper. It’s not at all effective!

Back in the dirty old nasty bathroom, Gordon receives a call from his family at gunpoint, and they tell him Adam has known him the whole time and is lying about some things. This prompts a long flashback that tells the story of how Gordon got captured in the first place. Apparently while trying to call his family, he got snatched by a man wearing a pig mask – not on the all-time manliest ways to get kidnapped.

Is there a reason for the pig mask? I mean, wouldn’t any mask technically work? Personally I would like to see this mask on the kidnapper next time:

Some people tell me there are very distinct reasons I’m not in the horror movie making business. I never know what they’re talking about.

So yeah, I guess we get quite a lot of gunshots, wrestling and running around after that as Gordon is under the impression that Zepp has murdered his family. He then undergoes the fascinating and nuanced style of acting commonly known as “which accent do I have?” Really it’s been sort of a problem all movie, but here it just gets to staggering levels of silliness: basically Elwes does this thing where he gets angry and starts shouting like a drunken maniac, but then when he gets sad a few seconds later, he talks like a prissy little girl afraid to miss her first day of school.

The emotion is real, but the way he’s conveying it is just so silly. It totally throws off what should be a very tense moment. I mean jeez, the only way he could get even more melodramatic would be to do something totally over-exaggerated like cutting off his own foo---

Oh. Well. Erm. Hmmm.

I guess if I said this scene wasn’t effective, I’d be lying to you. It really was very shocking the first time I saw it, all those years ago when I was a kid. It did its job and established the horrible price Gordon paid for his indiscretions, namely being so apathetic about his family. And now he’s literally lost a foot for his family in the end. The problem here is that the character development wasn’t deep enough to really make this as effective as it maybe could’ve been, but even so, I don’t think the film was ever intended to be a character study or anything. It works for what it is.

Then Gordon crawls to the dead body, grabs the gun and shoots Adam in the shoulder. All I can think here is how funny it would be if this bathroom was actually in use and had just been abandoned for the weekend. Maybe it’s the bathroom of some corporate building. Then the janitor comes in Monday morning and finds…well…

Yeah.

After Gordon crawls off to be doomed to appear in the last movie in the series too (SPOILERS!!!111!!), Adam is bleeding to death and looking for a key in Zepp’s pockets to unlock his chains. However, he just finds a tape recorder in there that reveals Zepp was never the Jigsaw Killer at all. But you know who IS the Jigsaw Killer? That dead body on the floor the whole time!

This scene, where he gets up, is probably the best in the whole movie – most of the movie’s flaws are completely redeemed by scenes like this, as well as the ending climax in general. Good shit.

Through some snappy flashbacks, we establish that the Jigsaw Killer’s real name is John and he was the patient Zepp got made fun of for connecting to earlier. Apparently John has an inoperable brain tumor and thus wants to show people how much they don’t appreciate their lives, teaching them “lessons” through sick torture games where they have to fight to survive. Man, cancer can make people do some bizarre things!

He tells Adam the key to the chains was in the bathtub, which flushed down the drain as soon as Adam woke up and accidentally unplugged the tub. Whoops! Then Jigsaw leaves Adam in the dark to die, saying “Game over,” and that’s it – we close out on the credits with Adam screaming over top.

So that’s Saw. It has its moments, and while I don’t love it like I once did, it’s still pretty decent overall. The main problems it has are that it’s just too shallow to really reach the kind of depth it’s going for. It’s trying to tell a story about people who don’t appreciate their lives learning lessons. But I don’t know, I don’t really get a sense that these people would ever really learn anything from these. Shawnee Smith’s character did, but what the hell did hers have to do with drug addiction anyway? She has to cut open some guy’s stomach to get a bear trap off her head? C’mon. The one in the second movie about the syringes was a better representation of that, even if it was a lot dumber than what we got here. Mostly these “lessons” just come off as needlessly complex.

That’s the other problem: it’s just too convoluted. All these different variables, the elaborate set-ups, the traps…it’s fun, sure, but it doesn’t really instill fear in me. It’s too far-removed from reality to ever really feel like “gee, that could happen to me.” Which is the most important thing in any horror movie, bar none. The closest it gets is just the scenes where the people are unsuspectingly awaiting kidnapping in the dark of their homes, which isn’t the bulk of the movie.

I enjoyed the “one room” scenes with Whannel and Elwes the most, as those were by far the most original scenes, and the ones the movie should’ve focused on more – Danny Glover’s cop character got far too much screentime in comparison, and the story with the kidnapped mother and daughter wasn’t all that interesting. The Whannel/Elwes scenes were cool because, like I said, seeing them figure out why they were there was cool. The chemistry they had on screen was pretty good and their characters were the most interesting ones in the movie.

So this is still the best Saw movie. It’s got a sort of underground charm to it that the others did not have. It’s just ironic to me that this movie, which was so refreshing for being an underground, bloody horror film in an age of corporate sell-outs and “ironic” attempts at pleasing the mainstream, quickly turned into exactly what it was fighting against with the sequels. The sequels all got less and less interesting because the traps were harder to get out of and the films became less about storytelling and more about the amount of plot twists crammed in per scene. And as such, they got less entertaining over time.

But at least we have this one. It may not have influenced horror’s most honorable subset of films, but it did make a mark and at the time, it was important. Entertaining if nothing else.

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