Works as a parody of the genre, but not as a legitimate thriller.

Rating: Null/10 (31 March 2005)

Thanks to my public library, I was able to see "Saw" on DVD and, while I am glad I saw it, I could not recommend it to any of my friends. The plot is simple -- people are abducted and placed in a position of grave danger where they have a very limited time to do something drastic to avoid their own death. The "something drastic" may involve killing someone else. The main of the story deals with two men who awake and find they are chained on opposite sides of a very dirty room with the dirtiest toilet in North America, and have a few hours to do something about it. Clues are given and the men discover two hack saws hidden in the toilet tank, the saws that give the movie its name. Little of the movie is terrifying, the visuals are mostly disgusting. After it was over, and I thought about it, the only reason to see this movie is to experience the agony of the various characters. There are no sympathetic characters so I didn't care that much what happened to them.
SPOILERS. At the end we find that the real fiend has been lying in a bloody mess in the room imprisoning the two chained men, witnessing their grief first hand. He was a cancer patient (we see him briefly initially) of the doctor (Cary Elwes) and this was his revenge, to have the doctor saw off his foot to escape from the chains and save his own life and his wife and child who had been held captive. The plot is a bit more complex than that, but twists were added simply to keep the viewers guessing. This quote from the critic Ebert's review is telling, "A movie that conceals the identity of a killer is of a lower order, in general, than one that actually deals with him as a character. "