Saw Review

This may come as a shock to you, as it did to many of my friends but prior to preparing for this review I had never seen a single film in the Saw series. It just never really appealed to me. Everyone always talks of these films as if they're made entirely to gross people out, which has never struck me as good horror. Horror should be creepy, blood and gore isn't creepy it's just bloody and gruesome. However I decided that since Saw V is being released this Halloween I would give the series a try. Well, at least the first film.

The film's plot begins with two men waking up inside of a bathroom. They are chained to the walls and there is a corpse in the centre of the room. Through the use of flashbacks we as an audience are given the characters backgrounds and gradually told they have been captured by the infamous “Jigsaw”, a serial killer who uses traps made in a style that Batman's Joker (See The Killing Joke for an example of these “fun houses”) would be proud of in order to make his “victims” better themselves after they realise how precious life is.

Which would be a great plot set-up, unfortunately there is nothing else to the plot. At all. You never find out the identity of Jigsaw, the trap plays out like it's meant to and character development never really advances beyond the archetypes of “I'm dying”, “I need to save my family” or “Jigsaw told me to do it”. Although I must admit that there is a sort off sick pleasure in watching Jigsaw's trap work properly.

There isn't actually that much gore in Saw. The film tries very hard to create tension by hinting at the violence that could happen, and attempting to make Jigsaw a formidable figure and on some levels it achieves these things. There are one or two genuinely scary scenes, sadly they're often overshadowed by the predictability of the traps or the fact that Jigsaw is a rip off of The Joker in every single way possible.

Don't get me wrong Saw is enjoyable, if only to marvel at how well people manage to rip off Batman, it just isn't scary. The hint that something gory is going to happen isn't enough to make me stay up all night with the lights on, one particaularly gruesome scene won't haunt me forever, to put it simply horror needs to be creepy! This can only be achieved through the use of long haired children!

I'm going to go watch Japanese horror and sulk now.

7/10