Movie-Suicide Sunday: Saw

Late September, 2004: I moved to Chicago when I transferred to Columbia College. Living in the dorms right next to the Red Line and armed with an unlimited transit pass, I took the L everywhere.

Not long into my time there did I happen to notice a new giant ad across the tracks on the far tunnel wall. Ads advertising some presumably-Halloween-related movie called Saw. All us film snobs were quick to point out how it'd be easy to get tangled in discussions about the movie. "I saw Saw." "You saw what?" "Saw." "Saw what?" "Saw Saw." "What?"

Flash forward five years later. Saw VI is about to hit theaters, and, along with such fare like Hostel, the genre known as "torture porn" is pretty reliable year-round but especially in late fall.

And, like any good film snob, I have seen none of these films.

Thus: Suicide-Movie Sunday presents - at the risk of nightmares, heebity-jeebities, and partial post-traumatic stress disorder - the one, the original...

Saw.

Let us begin:

Already I nearly jumped at the flash-cut "LGF" logo.

Funny to think that, as a film from '04, many consider this "old."

Surprised to see, once the lights came on in this Shitty Room, there are two white guys and no ethnicity as proscribed by genre norms.

I know there have probably been countless films like this, but the strangers-locked-in-a-place movie type strangely intrigue me. See also: my obsession with watching all three movies in the Cube series in two days.

I also hate it when there are lines like "This is the first dead body I've seen in real life." That's a sort of impossible statement to make when you're in a movie.

Nerd alert: By the gravel in his voice, it'd be much more interesting if the doctor was played by Solid Snake.

And, like the Cube movies, there's the assumption that they're in the Mysterious Place for a Purpose.

Maybe things have changed so much in five years that I find the movie moving rather slowly given what I expected from its pace. That, or it takes Adam a long fucking time to correctly throw his shirt.

I always love that, in movies, when people rewind tapes, they always find the exact spot they're looking for.

Unrelated: I couldn't swing the Netflix for Sunday, so I downloaded a pirate of this. I'm amazed that the most common torrent for a five-year-old movie is still a watermarked leak from Lions Gate Entertainment that just happens to go black-and-white during said watermark.

For a movie this length, that was an extremely-long flashback/exposition sequence. And now we're back in the Shitty Room... and now we're back in Flashback Land.

Maybe I had this thought all wrong and it's really going to go Reservoir Dogs-style on me and stay in the room and just leave for flashbacks.

Strange that on Netflix's listing for Saw VI, it's semi-marketed as being made by the same editor as the five prior Saw films.

As interesting as this B-line about Danny Glover's Cop Guy, I want to get back in the Shitty Room. I guess this is well-paced, since we just came back to said Room.

Apparently a hospital parking garage can be inside a barn.

Why can't these guys correctly toss stuff around that small room? They always end up tossing stuff in the corner instead of directly to each other.

Ah, a sign of the times being made in '04: Flashback Adam is listening to a CD player instead of an iPod. Then again, this film has strangely made a solid effort to avoid dating itself, so maybe it's just to throw me off the scent.

And like 2/3 Movie Suicides, I've invariably started enjoying this. And, like the Cube series, I might waste a week watching Saw II through V, if only for the sake of completion.

(As for prior parking-lot-in-a-barn comment, it wasn't a hospital, so it's excused.)

There's so much dialog that this would probably make a decent play.

It's 1:22 into the film and I think we're on the fifth climax.

Creative use of stretching the budget: undercranked car-chase shots that don't need to show the road.

Am I a bad person for wanting to see the doctor cut his foot off? Also: Since when can a guy with no foot not hop on one foot? He's just crawling around!

I have to give this credit to this film: the first twist ending I've been genuinely surprised by in a long time. Also: Points for ending on it instead of dragging out some sort of denouement.

Ha! And Netflix thought I'd only give this 1.2 stars!