A Heritage Damaged

Rating: 7/10 (16 June 2013)

Two men wake up in an empty room and finds themselves being manipulated in to playing a sadistic game by a mysterious character called Jigsaw
Looking at the above short summary you can how easy it is to pitch to the Hollywood studios . Yes I know SAW started out as an Australian short film by director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell but even so the premise alone is enough to intrigue the most cynical studio boss and make them want to develop it in to a feature length movie . It's easy to forget but the original SAW was marketed as a smart thriller with a twist ending and certainly my own reaction on seeing it was " Wow I never expected that " . This was very much an era inspired by THE SIXTH SENSE where films sometimes liked to surprise an audience . Despite the often graphic violence seen in this movie it's the shock twist at the end that led to the film gaining very good word of mouth on its initial release
The problem is that once you know the twist ending it doesn't really stand up to repeat viewings . Worse than that the original SAW's reputation has been greatly damaged by the large amount of sequels that followed it . None of them really concerned themselves with cerebral plotting and most of them concerned themselves with a function of continuity that would see yet another sequel set up . Perhaps worst of all each sequel tried to out do its predecessor by the amount of gore on offer . Indeed the phrase " Torture porn " became more and more increasingly used with the franchise and it's difficult to defend the later films from this which lurched from one gory set piece to another featuring a terrified victim suffering a cruel and graphic death
SAW was a film that succeeded as a gory mainstream thriller when it was released in 2004 . It's easy to dismiss it just another horror film but that's to ignore and sadly forget that it had a market outside the normal teen horror crowd . It's also a film that suffers from having a franchise started after it which has damaged its heritage