261 Days of Horror, Day 39: Saw III
Feb. 22nd, 2007 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiSaw III. 2006. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Written by Leigh Whannell. Released by Lion's Gate.
I don't know why I did this to myself. I mean, I watched* the first Saw last fall, and thought it was one of the lousiest wastes of celluloid not to feature Tim Allen**. The second one was a touch better, featuring a mild rip-off of Cube and fewer agonizingly stupid and insulting plot twists. The third film in a trilogy, as noted in Scream 3, is the one that turns the original assumptions on their heads, and makes you view the earlier films in a different light. By that standard, Saw III fails, as the first film still blows. By any other standard, Saw III also fails, as it's a heaping pile of suck buried beneath another heaping pile of suck, without any of the mitigating factors that made the second movie only a slight pile of suck.
I'm not going into a blow-by-blow here, as I can't bear the thought of summarizing the finer details of two "trapped in a house with a madman thanks to almost malevolently awful screenwriters" movies in two days. And no one sees Saw movies for the plot, anyway (unless the target audience consists entirely of people who listen to the Art Bell show and/or who buy extended warranties at Best Buy). The only thing people care about is Jigsaw's nasty death traps which essentially require the victims to torture themselves to death, allowing the killer to convince himself that he's morally not an assmonkey, but some sort of sick "guru" to his victims. So let's see what we have here:
Our first victim wakes up with a bunch of chains pieced through his skin in a room with a bomb. If he doesn't tip out all of the chains in time, he goes boom. He doesn't, therefore he booms (as opposed to simply passing away from blood loss, shock, or the nasty infection the chains are likely to bring).
The next victim is Detective Kerry, played by the always-gorgeous Dina Meyer. Having survived the first two movies, she gets kidnapped here (more on the stupidity of that later), and wakes up with a set of jagged blades pulling at her ribcage. She's informed that if she doesn't reach into the vat of acid and get the key out in time, she'll have her ribcage shredded. Kerry, being a brave little toaster, manages to get the key out while pretty much destroying her hand. She gets the lock open with about ten seconds to spare, only to realize that she didn't actually free herself from the deathtrap! *gasp* So even though she "won," she dies anyway.
Then there are the three who die because Jigsaw is "testing" a man named Jeff:
Danica is dangling naked (and already weak from cold and pain) in a walk-in freezer***, and Jeff has to find the key to free her before the water being sprayed on her turns her into a popsicle. He fails.
Judge Halden actually survives his death trap. He's chained at the bottom of a pit, and above him, giant pig carcasses are shredded by spinning blades, nearly drowning him. Jeff manages to complete his task (burning his dead son's possessions), and frees the pig-gut covered judge just in time.
Finally, there's Tim. He's in the most bizarre device in the entire series, a crucifix designed to spin each limb and the neck up to 180 degrees. As the machine slowly breaks each limb, Jeff is given the task of getting the key from a chamber without setting off the gun inside. He fails, but the bullet misses him and blows off the head of Judge Halden instead. Jeff's too late to stop the device from then spinning Tim's head around and killing him.
And finally, there's Lynn, who is forced to wear a collar made of shotgun shells. It's tied to a heart monitor on Jigsaw, and when Jeff kills the villain, the shells are shot off, blowing her face off.
You want a plot? So do I. We get two things that might, if you smoked enough crack, be called "plotlines." Jeff is being tested because he hasn't gotten over the DUI incident in which Tim ran over Jeff's little boy. So he has to forgive Danica (the witness who failed to testify), Halden (who gave a light sentence), and Tim (the driver) before he can even rescue them. In the other plotline, Lynn, a doctor, is kidnapped so that she can perform emergency brain surgery on Jigsaw, who has been dying of a brain tumor for years now, judging by the first movie and how long everything since then must have taken. We also get lots of flashbacks throughout to Jigsaw and his little helper, Amanda. Eventually, we learn that Lynn and Jeff are married! And she's been cheating on him! A clusterfuck of a fight ensues, with both Lynn and Amanda getting shot (the latter fatally, the former not so much so, at least until the shotgun collar kills her), and Jigsaw getting his neck sliced open by a circular saw blade****. As Jigsaw and Lynn die, we learn that Jeff's (and Lynn's) daughter has also been kidnapped, and that Jeff will have to play another game to save her. And we fade to credits.
Saw III is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. With more stupid on top. We get the silliness of a cop knowing that there's an intruder in her house filming her turning her back to the door. We get a doctor kidnapped from a busy hospital's locker room without anyone seeing her. We get the world's most lingering brain tumor. We get flashbacks with Donnie Wahlberg that still don't resolve his storyline from the second movie. We get some sort of ludicrous attempt to frame Jigsaw as a hero because he leaves an out for his victims (while Amanda refuses to, which is why the detective dies). Of course, his "outs" in the previous movies -- the blade to cut off Cary Elwes's foot, the key that sank down the drain, the blade trap in the second movie, the immolation trap in the first one -- are often technicalities at best, and in the first movie, he was fine with having a man kill an innocent woman and daughter (not to mention the cops he offed).
Plus, where the hell does he get that many dead pigs?
If the writing (by Saw and Saw 2 scribe Leigh Whannell, a million of whom, if seated at a million typewriters, could not possibly write Hamlet) is bad, the direction is worse. Darren Lynn Bousman, who turned his vast experience as a production assistant on Van Wilder into the Saw 2 and Saw III directing gigs, has never met a camera angle that he liked for more than three seconds. During Detective Kerry's murder scene, I really believe that the director just attached cameras to the backs of ferrets and had them run around, capturing the footage. I shudder at the thought that there was actually forethought involved in how bad the scene looks. In fact, the only times the cameras ever stay motionless is when we get lingering shots of the occasional dead body or two.
The cast is mostly talentless, although they could simply be baffled at the ludicrous "twists" in the plot. Even solid performers like Dina Meyer (who I'll gladly watch in almost anything, up to and including Wild Things 3) and killers Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith can't do much here, and the rest of the cast simply sleepwalk (or scream, as it were) their way through their lines.
Bad horror can annoy or amuse me, depending on exactly how a director fails. But bad horror that compounds its sins by treating the audience like a group of idiots has no place in my DVD collection, and few series have consistently insulted horror fans like the Saw movies.
*"saw," if you prefer.
**Yes, I liked Galaxy Quest and the two Toy Story movies. But Joe Somebody, the three Santa Clause flicks, the entire run of Home Improvement, and (especially) Zoom have all been scientifically proven to be signs of the apocalypse. And don't get me started on his stand-up act.
***Because a survey of all ten fans of this series has found that they all masturbated to that Hustler cover with the woman in a meat grinder.
****Yes, they couldn't even manage to give us the irony of killing him with a jigsaw.
I don't know why I did this to myself. I mean, I watched* the first Saw last fall, and thought it was one of the lousiest wastes of celluloid not to feature Tim Allen**. The second one was a touch better, featuring a mild rip-off of Cube and fewer agonizingly stupid and insulting plot twists. The third film in a trilogy, as noted in Scream 3, is the one that turns the original assumptions on their heads, and makes you view the earlier films in a different light. By that standard, Saw III fails, as the first film still blows. By any other standard, Saw III also fails, as it's a heaping pile of suck buried beneath another heaping pile of suck, without any of the mitigating factors that made the second movie only a slight pile of suck.
I'm not going into a blow-by-blow here, as I can't bear the thought of summarizing the finer details of two "trapped in a house with a madman thanks to almost malevolently awful screenwriters" movies in two days. And no one sees Saw movies for the plot, anyway (unless the target audience consists entirely of people who listen to the Art Bell show and/or who buy extended warranties at Best Buy). The only thing people care about is Jigsaw's nasty death traps which essentially require the victims to torture themselves to death, allowing the killer to convince himself that he's morally not an assmonkey, but some sort of sick "guru" to his victims. So let's see what we have here:
Our first victim wakes up with a bunch of chains pieced through his skin in a room with a bomb. If he doesn't tip out all of the chains in time, he goes boom. He doesn't, therefore he booms (as opposed to simply passing away from blood loss, shock, or the nasty infection the chains are likely to bring).
The next victim is Detective Kerry, played by the always-gorgeous Dina Meyer. Having survived the first two movies, she gets kidnapped here (more on the stupidity of that later), and wakes up with a set of jagged blades pulling at her ribcage. She's informed that if she doesn't reach into the vat of acid and get the key out in time, she'll have her ribcage shredded. Kerry, being a brave little toaster, manages to get the key out while pretty much destroying her hand. She gets the lock open with about ten seconds to spare, only to realize that she didn't actually free herself from the deathtrap! *gasp* So even though she "won," she dies anyway.
Then there are the three who die because Jigsaw is "testing" a man named Jeff:
Danica is dangling naked (and already weak from cold and pain) in a walk-in freezer***, and Jeff has to find the key to free her before the water being sprayed on her turns her into a popsicle. He fails.
Judge Halden actually survives his death trap. He's chained at the bottom of a pit, and above him, giant pig carcasses are shredded by spinning blades, nearly drowning him. Jeff manages to complete his task (burning his dead son's possessions), and frees the pig-gut covered judge just in time.
Finally, there's Tim. He's in the most bizarre device in the entire series, a crucifix designed to spin each limb and the neck up to 180 degrees. As the machine slowly breaks each limb, Jeff is given the task of getting the key from a chamber without setting off the gun inside. He fails, but the bullet misses him and blows off the head of Judge Halden instead. Jeff's too late to stop the device from then spinning Tim's head around and killing him.
And finally, there's Lynn, who is forced to wear a collar made of shotgun shells. It's tied to a heart monitor on Jigsaw, and when Jeff kills the villain, the shells are shot off, blowing her face off.
You want a plot? So do I. We get two things that might, if you smoked enough crack, be called "plotlines." Jeff is being tested because he hasn't gotten over the DUI incident in which Tim ran over Jeff's little boy. So he has to forgive Danica (the witness who failed to testify), Halden (who gave a light sentence), and Tim (the driver) before he can even rescue them. In the other plotline, Lynn, a doctor, is kidnapped so that she can perform emergency brain surgery on Jigsaw, who has been dying of a brain tumor for years now, judging by the first movie and how long everything since then must have taken. We also get lots of flashbacks throughout to Jigsaw and his little helper, Amanda. Eventually, we learn that Lynn and Jeff are married! And she's been cheating on him! A clusterfuck of a fight ensues, with both Lynn and Amanda getting shot (the latter fatally, the former not so much so, at least until the shotgun collar kills her), and Jigsaw getting his neck sliced open by a circular saw blade****. As Jigsaw and Lynn die, we learn that Jeff's (and Lynn's) daughter has also been kidnapped, and that Jeff will have to play another game to save her. And we fade to credits.
Saw III is stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. With more stupid on top. We get the silliness of a cop knowing that there's an intruder in her house filming her turning her back to the door. We get a doctor kidnapped from a busy hospital's locker room without anyone seeing her. We get the world's most lingering brain tumor. We get flashbacks with Donnie Wahlberg that still don't resolve his storyline from the second movie. We get some sort of ludicrous attempt to frame Jigsaw as a hero because he leaves an out for his victims (while Amanda refuses to, which is why the detective dies). Of course, his "outs" in the previous movies -- the blade to cut off Cary Elwes's foot, the key that sank down the drain, the blade trap in the second movie, the immolation trap in the first one -- are often technicalities at best, and in the first movie, he was fine with having a man kill an innocent woman and daughter (not to mention the cops he offed).
Plus, where the hell does he get that many dead pigs?
If the writing (by Saw and Saw 2 scribe Leigh Whannell, a million of whom, if seated at a million typewriters, could not possibly write Hamlet) is bad, the direction is worse. Darren Lynn Bousman, who turned his vast experience as a production assistant on Van Wilder into the Saw 2 and Saw III directing gigs, has never met a camera angle that he liked for more than three seconds. During Detective Kerry's murder scene, I really believe that the director just attached cameras to the backs of ferrets and had them run around, capturing the footage. I shudder at the thought that there was actually forethought involved in how bad the scene looks. In fact, the only times the cameras ever stay motionless is when we get lingering shots of the occasional dead body or two.
The cast is mostly talentless, although they could simply be baffled at the ludicrous "twists" in the plot. Even solid performers like Dina Meyer (who I'll gladly watch in almost anything, up to and including Wild Things 3) and killers Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith can't do much here, and the rest of the cast simply sleepwalk (or scream, as it were) their way through their lines.
Bad horror can annoy or amuse me, depending on exactly how a director fails. But bad horror that compounds its sins by treating the audience like a group of idiots has no place in my DVD collection, and few series have consistently insulted horror fans like the Saw movies.
*"saw," if you prefer.
**Yes, I liked Galaxy Quest and the two Toy Story movies. But Joe Somebody, the three Santa Clause flicks, the entire run of Home Improvement, and (especially) Zoom have all been scientifically proven to be signs of the apocalypse. And don't get me started on his stand-up act.
***Because a survey of all ten fans of this series has found that they all masturbated to that Hustler cover with the woman in a meat grinder.
****Yes, they couldn't even manage to give us the irony of killing him with a jigsaw.