A garage sale of ideas

Rating: 4/10 (11 June 2017)

'Saw' (2004), begins with the high concept of 'imagine finding yourself with your ankle chained to a wall. Someone else on the opposite side of the room is in the same predicament. Items scattered around the room include a pistol with one bullet, a tape recorder, and two hacksaws that won't cut through the stainless steel chains, but would do a reasonable job on your ankle.'
Adam and Lawrence are the two men who are chained, both opposites in temperament (but that will change), and each are given instructions via a cassette recorder on how to escape. Adam, a photographer, gets the message "...what do voyeurs see when they look in the mirror?" And that he must escape the room, while Lawrence is told to kill Adam before a certain time, or his family will die.
A flashback reveals Detectives Tapp and Sing unwisely go and investigate a warehouse without a warrant and without telling anyone. Sing is fatally killed in a trip wire trap; a very 'Giallo' sequence. Tapp, now disgraced, obsessively wallpapers his apartment with news clippings in the style of Se7en (1995), whilst independently (a Dario Argento/Giallo concept) attempting to stop the mastermind behind the 'game.' Saw is padded with flashbacks to prop up the films running time to feature length.
A 'garage sale' of ideas from possibly every film the writers and director have ever seen; the grime and toilet of 'Trainspotting' (1996), 'Evil Dead Trap's' camera flash sequence, a man finds himself in a 'Suspiria' like room of barbed wire, the 'reverse bear trap' business fans often compare to Edgar Allan Poe who is 'Suspiria' director Dario Argento's favourite author, and this is where we first see the puppet 'Jigsaw' who is reminiscent of those in Argento's 'Four Flies On Grey Velvet' and 'Deep Red'. There is an autopsy on a drugged man, reminiscent of both Argento's 'Opera' and Takashi Miike's 'Audition', and 'Audition' obviously influences the climax. The multiple twist endings require a suspension of disbelief as it goes into 'look how clever am I' The Usual Suspects (1995) twists for their own sake, that you don't want to think about too much less the thread fall apart.
The Saw creators do give credit where credit is due; "A lot of people have said that Saw is similar in tone to Se7en but the biggest influence wasn't a recent Hollywood thriller at all, it was the work of Dario Argento from the seventies," stated the director Wan.
With dreadful performances (and I feel the need to give special mention to Cary Elwes and Danny Glover, who if they didn't should have received 'Razzie' awards), Saw surpassed all expectations, becoming one of the most profitable horror films since 1996's Scream by Wes Craven.
I was never a fan of the jokey, not serious, just laughs and scares of the Scream school; but I am even less of a fan of 'torture porn,' of which this is hardly the worst, but it's the germ of the idea that started with Evil Dead Trap and lead to such dross as Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), and Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film (2010). Films that are not clever or original, not frightening, they assaulting the senses rather than seducing them.