| SAW |
 2004 - USADirector: James Wan
- Reviewed by Jennifer
Imagine my disappointment when I checked the marquee last December and found Tax playing on three screens. Tax? What the hell is Tax? I fumbled for my glasses. Oh. Ray, Ray, and Saw. Well still, no reason to buy a ticket. Funnily enough, Saw really is quite taxing. Like the characters, you find yourself thrown into an elaborately terrifying situation with no warning and no chance for escape. Lawrence (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) wake up chained to the pipes in a dilapidated bathroom. They find instructions for Lawrence to kill Adam by 6:00 p.m. or else, and locate two flimsy saws thoughtfully tucked into the toilet tank. There is a sudden frenzy of sawing followed by instant defeat. Alas, these are really cheap saws. "He doesn't want us to cut through our chains!" cries Lawrence, pausing long enough for me to mock him with, "He wants us to cut through our feet!" And then Lawrence finishes, "He wants us to cut through our feet!" Ooh. Well that was weird. Characters in movies almost never say what you think they will verbatim. After that I decided not to mess around with Saw. This movie means business. Lawrence and Adam are victims of a man who constructs elaborate traps and leaves his subjects to escape or die trying. He chooses morally wayward individuals, and attempts to teach them the value of life. Gee, what an upstanding citizen! The killings are staged like grizzly games with strict rules that must be followed to the letter. The killer and the movie play upon everyone's deepest fears and slowly spin a web of paranoia. Wait, is that guy in on it too? Can I trust him? Is that detective really a detective? Couple that with some seriously freaky images, and you've got two kinds of scary: the "Boo!" kind that startles you, and the kind that does permanent psychological damage. There's a masked figure riding a man-sized tricycle, a guy draped in a sheet emerging from a little girl's closet, and the killer himself crawling from the shadows clad in a red and black cloak, wearing a white mask, and evoking the scariest of smooth criminals, Michael Jackson. I expected Saw to be kind of low-budget and base, yet somehow it excels in the genre of sick horror. I don't remember the last time a movie made me jump in my seat, but Saw succeeded more than once. Cary Elwes is somehow unnerving in this role, but I found the presence of Danny Glover and Shawnee Smith oddly comforting. At least there are a few familiar faces in this freak show. The Mothman Prophecies and Signs may have kept me from sleeping, but I don't remember a movie ever giving me nightmares. Saw did the trick. I awoke at 2 a.m. from a dream of being pursued through a pitch black forest by a slow and stealthy stalker. As I lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to clear my head, I couldn't help wishing I'd watched something wholesome like Halloween instead. |
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