Word: horror
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...Jigsaw's lair, Jeff must go through several torture tests to prove he can forgive those who wronged him. In an apparently unrelated "B" story, Jigsaw has kidnaped Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), a doctor, to see if she can relieve the pain of his brain tumor. For those who think horror movies aren't brain surgery, they're wrong. This one is. The goriest of the film's ewww scenes has Lynn power-drilling into Jigsaw's cranium and removing...
...sequels, is within hailing distance of a masterpiece. A mind game like this requires good actors to give it heft and plausibility. I'm not asking for today's equivalents of Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, the stars of the Sleuth movie, but there's more to acting, even horror movie acting, than screaming in agony and shouting in rage. Whannel (who is charm personified when chatting about the film on the DVD featurette) and Elwes can't manage the crucial middle range of emotions the two men have to feel in the moments when they're not trying...
...ransacks another horror subgenre, the old-dark-house movie, in which eight or ten people are trapped somewhere and one by one they're killed off. Agatha Christie made this plot famous in her novel Ten Little Niggers, known as Ten Little Indians in the U.S. and filmed in 1944 as And Then There Were None. The second Saw repeats characters and torture implements (the reverse bear trap) from the first one. How many variations on body-piercing and self-puncturing can there be before the audience tires of the repetition, or gets exasperated and shouts, "You've been punk...
...curious omission in all three films is ... sex. Horror movies love to tantalize their (mostly male) viewers with images of lust, the better to punish it. It's a weirdly anti-life streak that runs through most vampire movies, where one dies, or becomes undead, with a single love bite; death those movies say, is a sexually transmitted disease. Even the non-supernatural horror films, from Psycho to Halloween to Hostel, tend to begin with young people having sex-play, then kill them off. Hostel, whose first 40 mins. are a-groan with luscious young women, eventually turns to more...
...that may be a minority opinion. The Regal audience loved the movie, applauding vigorously at the end and chattering happily on the escalators that led them out of the theater and onto the city street at 2 a.m. New York used to scare people; once it was its own horror movie. Now it's just a playground, where the coolest, most scariest rides are in the plexes. People go inside to have a game played on them...