Wow, the SAW franchise is just awful (horror marathon rant)

cayman shen

Master Member
I'm a big horror movie fan, but somehow I'd missed the SAW sequels. I thought the first one was a MOAR XTREME1!!!1!!!! ripoff of Se7en, but watchable, if you can get past the heavy color filtering and spastic editing that mark it as a millennial horror flick. This year, as part of my annual October horror movie marathon, I decided to catch up by seeing the sequels.

Ugh. Hyperactive camerawork and editing, cheesy videogame/reality show challenges, soap opera flashbacks, that damn green filter over everything that wasn't blue filtered, and the RELENTLESS PREACHINESS. If I had to sit through one more "you wasted your life" sermon I was going to start doing heroin just to spite the writers.

Fortunately I've seen some great flicks this marathon, including Hostel (how had I never seen that?!), the Babadook, and the original Black Christmas, which was OUTSTANDING. Hell, I liked Scream Blacula Scream better than SAW, and 75% of that movie was people dancing. I may rent It Follows tomorrow to cleanse my palate of this SAW tripe.
 
I thought the first one was a fairly decent horror/mystery movie. After that it is all just torture porn.
 
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I thought the first was was a fairly decent horror/mystery movie. After that it is all just torture porn.

Mostly agreed. I did enjoy the first quite a bit, and it was certainly diminishing returns from there on out. The third one sits above the other sequels for me though, I think maybe it's just a better made movie than the rest. And the brain surgery scene is pretty amazing.
 
I don't mind "torture porn." I think body horror is a legit genre, and I'm okay with watching horror movies that focus on suffering. My problem with SAW isn't that the movies are "torture porn" just that they're BAD torture porn. Boring, contrived, pandering, slick, overcooked, bland torture porn.
 
I love the first one because it's so bare, it's more a thriller than anything, but the sequels are trash. There were some gags that did give me a chuckle in the later ones but they are across-the-board awful. I will say that the later three movies did tie together better than the first half (as contrived and convoluted as it was).
 
"Saw" the first, and hated it... but really liked the second one... the one with Wahlberg. That's 2 right?

yeah I thought it was kinda cool... and it makes sense that it felt different than the other saw movies, since it wasn't written as one originally.

As I remember reading, it was a script that landed about the same time the first was hitting big. So they told the screenwriter they would buy his torture house, "Cube" rip off, if he changed it into a SAW movie.

and he did.

and I liked it.
 
I liked the first one - the one with "Dread Pirate Roberts".
Had a kinda Hitchcock/EdgarAllenPoe vibe to it.

Never bothered with the sequels.
Looked too "torture pr0n" for my tastes.
 
The 1st one was an interesting idea, but like almost all horror films (for me) the writing falls apart eventually and I'm "out" of the story by the 3rd act. My daughter wants to do a horror movie marathon this year, but I'm having a hard time coming up with 5 that are "good" films in general. Even the classics that I enjoyed as a kid now seem like poorly made films unfortunately, I can handle the 1st few Elm Street film but only for the laughs.
 
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