I've grown to consider myself a fan of the series, even as I wouldn't consider any individual entry to be quality cinema. (The splattery anti-medical/industrial-complex polemic SAW VI comes closest to genuinely good.)
The thing is... I watched them all in succession back in 2017 in preparation to see JIGSAW (which I wanted to give a shot …
I've grown to consider myself a fan of the series, even as I wouldn't consider any individual entry to be quality cinema. (The splattery anti-medical/industrial-complex polemic SAW VI comes closest to genuinely good.)
The thing is... I watched them all in succession back in 2017 in preparation to see JIGSAW (which I wanted to give a shot because I keep hoping the Speirig brothers have a great film in them). And it turns out they're the horror-cinema equivalent of Underberg - taken a little bit at a time, they're awful... but taken all together at once? They're a damn hoot, an inexhaustibly goofy ALL MY CHILDREN for gorehounds. That's the true legacy of SAW, the real value of what the sequels expanded upon - not the ever-increasing focus on "torture porn" but the hilariously escalating insanity of its plot machinations.
Are the films good? Not really. Will I be at SAW X opening day? Fuck yeah I will.
Even when I talked to Wan/Whannell, they joked that they'd lost track of the mythology-- even Whannell, whose association with the series continued a little after the first one.
A friend of mine just got the first 7 in a Blu-Ray pack for $4, figured that was worth it for sure. We've watched the first six (he's done all of them, I'm one behind at this point), and you're totally right: They are individually terrible (the first one is the only one that feels like a real movie), but together, they mush into a greenish brownish gray slurry of Project Mayhem level social commentary melded with deviously rude traps created by an 8th grader, and I mean all that as positively as I can.
The sixth entry is my favorite because, even though it's so poorly shot ("it looks like a porno, my friend's partner said), it makes a shithead insurance adjuster look someone in the eye, shout "IT'S THE POLICY! IT'S NOT ME, IT'S THE POLICY" and then push the button to kill them. It's blunt force satire, and I'm here for it.
The other notable thing are the Highlander level transitions in the third entry.
(Yes, there is a part of me that revels in finding the glitter in the piles of shit)
I've grown to consider myself a fan of the series, even as I wouldn't consider any individual entry to be quality cinema. (The splattery anti-medical/industrial-complex polemic SAW VI comes closest to genuinely good.)
The thing is... I watched them all in succession back in 2017 in preparation to see JIGSAW (which I wanted to give a shot because I keep hoping the Speirig brothers have a great film in them). And it turns out they're the horror-cinema equivalent of Underberg - taken a little bit at a time, they're awful... but taken all together at once? They're a damn hoot, an inexhaustibly goofy ALL MY CHILDREN for gorehounds. That's the true legacy of SAW, the real value of what the sequels expanded upon - not the ever-increasing focus on "torture porn" but the hilariously escalating insanity of its plot machinations.
Are the films good? Not really. Will I be at SAW X opening day? Fuck yeah I will.
Even when I talked to Wan/Whannell, they joked that they'd lost track of the mythology-- even Whannell, whose association with the series continued a little after the first one.
A friend of mine just got the first 7 in a Blu-Ray pack for $4, figured that was worth it for sure. We've watched the first six (he's done all of them, I'm one behind at this point), and you're totally right: They are individually terrible (the first one is the only one that feels like a real movie), but together, they mush into a greenish brownish gray slurry of Project Mayhem level social commentary melded with deviously rude traps created by an 8th grader, and I mean all that as positively as I can.
The sixth entry is my favorite because, even though it's so poorly shot ("it looks like a porno, my friend's partner said), it makes a shithead insurance adjuster look someone in the eye, shout "IT'S THE POLICY! IT'S NOT ME, IT'S THE POLICY" and then push the button to kill them. It's blunt force satire, and I'm here for it.
The other notable thing are the Highlander level transitions in the third entry.
(Yes, there is a part of me that revels in finding the glitter in the piles of shit)