You didn’t think a little thing like a hiatus would stop me from celebrating the entire month of Halloween, did you? My tradition of a yearly October event lives on with Saw-mhain, a pun that works best if you know Irish/Gaeilge. Oh yes, the syllable break of Samhain (SAH-win) is Sa-mhain, because fuck you, that’s why. Gaeilge is a bastard language.
Anyway, remember the Saw movies? Sure hope so since the tenth one is hitting theaters right now. Holy shit! That’s more than you would expect! But not so much that they fill up all of October, so expect a few Hostel movies sprinkled in. Now, let’s talk about the franchise that churned out a movie every October for 7 straight years.
The first film opens with Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Mr. Cary Elwes) and Adam (co-writer Mr. Leigh Whannell) waking up in a filthy bathroom chained to opposite walls. There’s a dead body holding a gun in the middle of the room, but don’t worry about that, it certainly won’t come up later. Each has a tape, and using a tape recorder held by the 100% dead body reveals the gist of the trap they’re in: if Lawrence doesn’t kill Adam by 6:00, his family will be killed. This reminds the doctor of the Jigsaw killer, a man who technically speaking doesn’t kill his victims, but instead puts them in puzzle traps where more often than not they die. One example victim was a one-time wrist cutter, so he’s trapped in a room where he has to go through razor wire to escape (he does not escape). Another is a man who faked an illness and is doused in a flammable jelly, having been left a candle to try and find hidden on the walls the combination to a safe that contains the antidote to the slow-acting poison coursing through his veins. There’s also broken glass on the floor, cause fuck that guy especially, I guess. But one person who did survive was Amanda (Shawnee Smith), a former drug addict who manages to get the key to the reverse bear trap attached to her head–one of the more iconic traps in the franchise–by cutting it out of a dead guy’s stomach. Except the guy wasn’t dead! Well, at least she’s glad to be alive and isn’t traumatized beyond sanity or anything.
Back to Dr. Gordon and Adam, the secrets they’ve been keeping from one another are eventually revealed: Adam was hired to take pictures of Lawrence, having been hired by an ex-cop, David Tapp (Danny Glover), who was convinced the doctor was the real Jigsaw and responsible for the death of his partner (Ken Leung). It also turns out Lawrence was having an affair, so that happened. But 6:00 comes with Adam still alive, so it’s time for Jigsaw to kill Gordon’s family. The villain is revealed to be Zep (Michael Emerson), an orderly at Lawrence’s hospital, but he’s kind of inept and Gordon’s wife and child escape as Tapp bursts in and tries to save the day. He does not, but fearing his family has been killed, Lawrence cuts off his leg to escape the chain and shoots Adam. Zep comes in to kill Gordon for failing–it’s the rules, after all–but Adam was just shot in the shoulder and manages to tackle and beat Zep to death. As the bleeding doctor crawls away hoping to get help, Adam finds another tape recorder on Zep’s body. Turns out he wasn’t the mastermind and instead was just a pawn, getting used by… the dead body in the middle of the room, who it turns out was alive the whole time! That’s John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a terminal cancer patient who was previously under Lawrence’s care. Kramer leaves Adam chained up, telling him where the key to his chains are, but due to some poor planning it had gone down the drain at the beginning of the film. The movie ends with Adam screaming.
Iconic, really. The reveal that Jigsaw was the dead body the whole time is generally regarded as one of the better horror movie twists. Cary Elwes gives a haunting performance of a man driven to cut his own leg off to save his family–I’m sure he got away and we’ll definitely not see him in any sequels. And while this is not the only film in the franchise to be co-written by James Wan, it is the only one he directed (not including the short film of the same name). Wan has what I consider a hilarious assortment of films under his belt, ranging from Insidious and Malignant to Furious 7 and Aquaman. Horror, Fast and Furious movies, and superheroes? James, I love you!
Praise aside, man, Jigsaw sure is a petty fucker. The man creates these elaborate traps that will 9 times out of 10 kill the victim, all to… make them appreciate life? But my dude, you’re just an asshole. The guy in the razor wire trap is said to have cut his wrists on one occasion. Sure, he may have done it more than once and it’s implied that it was bad enough that he went to the hospital–where Kramer most likely learned about him–but that’s an extreme punishment for a man who was at least once suicidally depressed. And while that’s thematic–he cut himself once and now has to cut himself multiple times–what about the guy who faked an illness burning to death? Or a a reverse bear trap for druggie Amanda? Spoilers for the Saw II, but surviving these traps apparently leads the few survivors becoming so traumatized they become villains themselves. And that’s kind of the undercurrent, right? Jigsaw is this mastermind who plans every detail, but he’s just a petty and vindictive bully lashing out at the world because he’s dying. He has his reasons for doing all this, but they’re just excuses. There are better ways to make people appreciate life–you just want to watch people kill themselves. What a jerk.
Next: Saw II (2005)
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