Saw III

Posted by Tanos on Sat 28 Oct 06, 4:42 PM

Tags: films

It's been Gross-out Film Week here in the House of Tanos, with DVD showings of Hostel, Saw, Saw II and then the opening night of Saw III at the cinema yesterday. Saw III wins the prize though.

Hostel deserves a mention in passing, as a low budget horror thriller, in which hapless back-packers are lured into the clutches of a murder-for-pay operation: cue scenes of victims cuffed or strapped into metal chairs to be set upon with a mixture of medical instruments and DIY tools. The whistling in the trolley-of-bodies scene (reproduced on the soundtrack of the official website) is something I still think about when wheeling bits of furniture around in the cellars here. However, I found the story a bit predictable first time round, and there is a definite lack of female victims. (The one exception proves the rule, since she's only really shown afterwards.)

The original Saw film was a lot cleverer: a main story featuring two shackled guys deciding whether to use saws to escape - saws that can cut ankles but not steel - and a series of flash backs to set-piece dilemmas, Seven-style, in which victims must reject their flawed past lives to survive. There are big twists along the way, and layers of each character are pealed away by the situation created by the killer-with-a-purpose "Jigsaw" (And we even get a female victim in one of the set-pieces.)

Saw II had a group of victims trying to escape together, at turns helping, bullying and fighting each other. I didn't think it was a clever as the first, but there's a huge payoff at the end that adds a lot of depth to the character of Jigsaw.

So Saw III now. To be honest, I was expecting more of the same, and the team cunningly leads you down that road for the first couple of set-pieces. But that's not at all where the film is going: it's really about Jigsaw and his new apprentice, and a lot of their backstory is filled out by flashbacks to the previous films where we learn how they set things up in the background.

There are the twists and turns as we've been led to expect from the series, we get a good look at Jigsaw's development lab full of drawings and prototypes of his (very BDSM-like) devices, and my patience is rewarded with a naked female victim, hanging by her wrists, shivering and begging in a walk-in freezer: I think that's pretty much the first time I can remember a scene like that in such a high-profile film.

Edited Sun 23 Nov 08, 9:06 PM by Tanos

(I welcome comments and feedback, although I don't guarantee to show them all and they won't appear immediately. My contact details page provides other ways of getting in touch.)