"Back in 2004, I sat stone-faced as a Midnight Madness audience was whipped into a frenzy over the first 'Saw.' Was I missing something?"
No.
(Great write-up, though; perhaps I too am missing something, but bless you for sitting through the rest of the Saw films for us to find out vicariously. A friend in middle school with me at the time brought Saw over to watch with me on DVD. It was his favorite movie of the year — and it certainly was not mine. Our friendship did not last much longer.)
Sep 27, 2023·edited Sep 27, 2023Liked by Scott Tobias
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)
This reminds me of my reaction to Ryûhei Kitamura’s VERSUS when I caught a festival screening of it a couple decades back. The program booklet made it sound like the most gonzo, breathlessly entertaining yakuza/zombie movie ever and I gritted my teeth through its entire two-hour running time. I made note of Kitamura’s name so I could steer clear of anything else he directed. The one exception to that was GODZILLA: FINAL WARS.
Man, VERSUS. Picked up a bootleg of this at a comic convention back in the day, having heard nothing but feverish hype. Cut to two hours of a camera spinning around in circles in the fucking woods.
Craig, was that at SIFF by chance, a midnight screening at the Egyptian? If so, I was there too, and the diminishing enthusiasm of the audience as it slogged on matched my own....
I was at the mentioned Sundance midnight screening and have two distinct memories (and a general memory of the audience's enthusiasm). The first is how LOUD they cranked up the sound, so that the metal soundtrack that accompanies one infamous scene was just as painful for my head as the reverse bear trap on screen; the other is the audience's collective gasp when the body gets up revealing one final nonsensical twist. I assume like me they also were about halfway home when they went "...wait a minute, what?"
For me, Saw was one of those movies that, while I wouldn't say I actually liked it, was such a fun and memorable theatrical experience that it almost didn't matter. The line readings elicited howls of laughter from my mostly college-aged crowd, and so did the pile-up of late-game twists. That said, I'm still kind of surprised that it spawned such a long-running series, and I've never felt compelled to check out any of the sequels.
Oh man, I still remember watching this the first time and just thinking it was the dumbest shit imaginable. I expect my tastes have changed a little since then, and I've been toying with revisiting it, but all I remember is the acting being awful, and the direction just kept getting in the way of what was actually mildly interesting. (Phone Booth is a great example, and one of many reasons I can never get on board the "Joel Schumacher was actually good" train.) As someone who likes a lot of different stupid horror franchises, this one has just never sat right with me; i think it's Jigsaw's smugness, which the movies themselves seem to agree with. I like what Wan has done since then, so maybe I should give this one another try, but maybe also life is too short.
Yeah buddy I think you had this one pegged the first time. Give it two stars for in media res urgency of the beginning/premise, but the absurd plot twists and plot holes (too many to name, but let's menton how Jigsaw gets shot in the back with a shotgun and doesn't seem to be affected, for reasons never explained), unnecessary subplots and sideplots, and horrible Cary Elwes acting cannot be overcome.
Do I remember the movie well? Yes I do. But that can't be the only criterion to evaluate a film. After all, I remember most of the really bad days in my life very well!
I have some fondness for the first couple of Saw movies, mostly because of the context of the viewings. Saw III was the first R rated film I snuck into with some friends. Our mothers foolishly thought we wanted to see Casino Royale a second time. Looking back, I kinda wish I had gone to see Casino Royale a second time.
I never did watch any of the Saw movies after Saw III and haven't revisited the series since 2006/07. After this write-up I'm tempted to throw Saw into the October movie line-up.
I watched Saw in the movie theater when it came out, I guess because there was so much hype for it and also because it was twenty years ago. :) The thing I remember best about this film is how much I laughed. It was funnier than most comedies! Danny Glover in particular, playing the nutjob cop so over the top that I couldn't help but laugh. And the ridiculous closeups of Cary Elwes...I don't know. I think you had to be there. I wasn't the only one laughing, either...
There are a lot of laughs in the movie, not all of them intentional. Reading back on the production history again, there were all kinds of issues created by the low budget and compressed schedule, particularly Glover's, and they couldn't do much more than two takes per scene. I think you can see that effect on the performances.
Reading through the IMDB trivia, it's remarkable how quickly they shot this movie and also how efficiently they filmed the actors -- it's all two days, three days, one day, etc. Every time I read about people doing the best they can under dire/pressured circumstances, I think back to that great moment in one of my all-time favorite movies, Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. He knows he's cooked with the heavenly judges, so he says the only thing in his very thin arsenal of offernings: "I'll do the best I can." He says it so often that by the end, he doesn't even have to say it. "Yes, we know. You'll do the best you can." :)
I've never seen Saw, since from everything I've read it doesn't seem like my thing. For a second I misread that as Donald Glover playing a ridiculously over the top cop, and I was almost in. Netflix pitch: any movie or series in any genre where Donald Glover plays an insane cop, even if it's just for 5 minutes.
Thanks for this piece. I saw the original on release and never watched another one. I went in with whatever enthusiasm I would have had back then and left hating it and hating Whannell in particular. (My spikier Internet-addicted 2000s self said some really regrettably shitty things about him back then.)
In the meantime, I've come to respect both of them. Wan because he really has a feel for great pulp that harmonizes with the stuff that excited me when I was young. Whannell mainly because he's fun in Insidious and I thought Invisible Man was the exact right way to reboot a classic. Plus this: "they knew I disliked the film and were quite magnanimous about it anyway" seems to align with everything I know about them and why waste time hating on people who seem to be basically decent dudes?
But I've always clung to my disdain for the original Saw.
It's hard to break in when you're an absolute nobody with no connections. It seems petty to resent someone for managing to kick that door in, whether you hate their initial work or not. It's not like they sat down and figured out how to profit off of a population craving blood after a terrorist attack. I also can't hate anything that became Tobin Bell or Shawnee Smith's retirement fund.
But related to something you mentioned, I still can't stand Eli Roth.
My ex-girlfriend was really into horror films and had a fondness for torture porn. I ended up watching the first four “Saw” films with her (as well as both “Hostel” flicks) before I finally said I had enough. I thought the first installment was reasonably good, and I actually referred to it as the poor-man’s “Se7en” cause its oppressively dismal tone reminded me of the earlier film. Wouldn’t mind checking it out again just as you did.
Your initial reactions pretty much mirror mine. I saw it at a sneak preview in Atlanta with Wan and Whannel in attendance. As soon as the movie was over, I slipped out, not fully trusting myself not to derail the Q&A.
For all the credit it gets for starting torture porn (and based almost solely on my having reading Wikipedia summaries and IMDb parents' guides), the SAW traps never really "torture" their victims. If they do it's more the psychological kind and it seems like as it went on they started aping from HOSTEL etc rather than the other way around.
There's a really great book i found in college while doing a paper called 9/11 In Horror that had a segment on SAW as it relates to torture and surveillance, I don't remember what exactly it said but I've been wanting to get it again so i can read it fully instead of having to skim.
"Back in 2004, I sat stone-faced as a Midnight Madness audience was whipped into a frenzy over the first 'Saw.' Was I missing something?"
No.
(Great write-up, though; perhaps I too am missing something, but bless you for sitting through the rest of the Saw films for us to find out vicariously. A friend in middle school with me at the time brought Saw over to watch with me on DVD. It was his favorite movie of the year — and it certainly was not mine. Our friendship did not last much longer.)
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)
This reminds me of my reaction to Ryûhei Kitamura’s VERSUS when I caught a festival screening of it a couple decades back. The program booklet made it sound like the most gonzo, breathlessly entertaining yakuza/zombie movie ever and I gritted my teeth through its entire two-hour running time. I made note of Kitamura’s name so I could steer clear of anything else he directed. The one exception to that was GODZILLA: FINAL WARS.
Kitamura was a staple of Midnight Madness screenings for a while, which is how I saw VERSUS. Completely agree with you on him.
Man, VERSUS. Picked up a bootleg of this at a comic convention back in the day, having heard nothing but feverish hype. Cut to two hours of a camera spinning around in circles in the fucking woods.
Craig, was that at SIFF by chance, a midnight screening at the Egyptian? If so, I was there too, and the diminishing enthusiasm of the audience as it slogged on matched my own....
This was at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema (as it was called at the time). The screening was at International House.
that ending though......
Hit me. Good or bad? To me, it’s crazy/nonsensical but pleasing.
I've only seen it once, but I thought the body in the room having been a living person the whole time was the stupidest, least believable ending
I think you're exactly right.
But it's also the thing that makes the movie.
Which was (and really is since I never watched it again) a movie I hated.
But that ending had to happen.
I was at the mentioned Sundance midnight screening and have two distinct memories (and a general memory of the audience's enthusiasm). The first is how LOUD they cranked up the sound, so that the metal soundtrack that accompanies one infamous scene was just as painful for my head as the reverse bear trap on screen; the other is the audience's collective gasp when the body gets up revealing one final nonsensical twist. I assume like me they also were about halfway home when they went "...wait a minute, what?"
For me, Saw was one of those movies that, while I wouldn't say I actually liked it, was such a fun and memorable theatrical experience that it almost didn't matter. The line readings elicited howls of laughter from my mostly college-aged crowd, and so did the pile-up of late-game twists. That said, I'm still kind of surprised that it spawned such a long-running series, and I've never felt compelled to check out any of the sequels.
Oh man, I still remember watching this the first time and just thinking it was the dumbest shit imaginable. I expect my tastes have changed a little since then, and I've been toying with revisiting it, but all I remember is the acting being awful, and the direction just kept getting in the way of what was actually mildly interesting. (Phone Booth is a great example, and one of many reasons I can never get on board the "Joel Schumacher was actually good" train.) As someone who likes a lot of different stupid horror franchises, this one has just never sat right with me; i think it's Jigsaw's smugness, which the movies themselves seem to agree with. I like what Wan has done since then, so maybe I should give this one another try, but maybe also life is too short.
Yeah buddy I think you had this one pegged the first time. Give it two stars for in media res urgency of the beginning/premise, but the absurd plot twists and plot holes (too many to name, but let's menton how Jigsaw gets shot in the back with a shotgun and doesn't seem to be affected, for reasons never explained), unnecessary subplots and sideplots, and horrible Cary Elwes acting cannot be overcome.
Do I remember the movie well? Yes I do. But that can't be the only criterion to evaluate a film. After all, I remember most of the really bad days in my life very well!
I have some fondness for the first couple of Saw movies, mostly because of the context of the viewings. Saw III was the first R rated film I snuck into with some friends. Our mothers foolishly thought we wanted to see Casino Royale a second time. Looking back, I kinda wish I had gone to see Casino Royale a second time.
I never did watch any of the Saw movies after Saw III and haven't revisited the series since 2006/07. After this write-up I'm tempted to throw Saw into the October movie line-up.
I watched Saw in the movie theater when it came out, I guess because there was so much hype for it and also because it was twenty years ago. :) The thing I remember best about this film is how much I laughed. It was funnier than most comedies! Danny Glover in particular, playing the nutjob cop so over the top that I couldn't help but laugh. And the ridiculous closeups of Cary Elwes...I don't know. I think you had to be there. I wasn't the only one laughing, either...
There are a lot of laughs in the movie, not all of them intentional. Reading back on the production history again, there were all kinds of issues created by the low budget and compressed schedule, particularly Glover's, and they couldn't do much more than two takes per scene. I think you can see that effect on the performances.
Reading through the IMDB trivia, it's remarkable how quickly they shot this movie and also how efficiently they filmed the actors -- it's all two days, three days, one day, etc. Every time I read about people doing the best they can under dire/pressured circumstances, I think back to that great moment in one of my all-time favorite movies, Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life. He knows he's cooked with the heavenly judges, so he says the only thing in his very thin arsenal of offernings: "I'll do the best I can." He says it so often that by the end, he doesn't even have to say it. "Yes, we know. You'll do the best you can." :)
I've never seen Saw, since from everything I've read it doesn't seem like my thing. For a second I misread that as Donald Glover playing a ridiculously over the top cop, and I was almost in. Netflix pitch: any movie or series in any genre where Donald Glover plays an insane cop, even if it's just for 5 minutes.
Have you ever seen Mystery Team? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1237838/reference/ It's my favorite era of Donald Glover -- very much in the silly Community mold.
I did, and I enjoyed it a lot!
At the time, it didn't help that I was watching Danny Glover slum it for a paycheck (sometimes in fast motion). He deserved and deserves better.
Thanks for this piece. I saw the original on release and never watched another one. I went in with whatever enthusiasm I would have had back then and left hating it and hating Whannell in particular. (My spikier Internet-addicted 2000s self said some really regrettably shitty things about him back then.)
In the meantime, I've come to respect both of them. Wan because he really has a feel for great pulp that harmonizes with the stuff that excited me when I was young. Whannell mainly because he's fun in Insidious and I thought Invisible Man was the exact right way to reboot a classic. Plus this: "they knew I disliked the film and were quite magnanimous about it anyway" seems to align with everything I know about them and why waste time hating on people who seem to be basically decent dudes?
But I've always clung to my disdain for the original Saw.
It's hard to break in when you're an absolute nobody with no connections. It seems petty to resent someone for managing to kick that door in, whether you hate their initial work or not. It's not like they sat down and figured out how to profit off of a population craving blood after a terrorist attack. I also can't hate anything that became Tobin Bell or Shawnee Smith's retirement fund.
But related to something you mentioned, I still can't stand Eli Roth.
But...after all these years...do you consider it...SEEN. *hello zepp plays*
My ex-girlfriend was really into horror films and had a fondness for torture porn. I ended up watching the first four “Saw” films with her (as well as both “Hostel” flicks) before I finally said I had enough. I thought the first installment was reasonably good, and I actually referred to it as the poor-man’s “Se7en” cause its oppressively dismal tone reminded me of the earlier film. Wouldn’t mind checking it out again just as you did.
Your initial reactions pretty much mirror mine. I saw it at a sneak preview in Atlanta with Wan and Whannel in attendance. As soon as the movie was over, I slipped out, not fully trusting myself not to derail the Q&A.
For all the credit it gets for starting torture porn (and based almost solely on my having reading Wikipedia summaries and IMDb parents' guides), the SAW traps never really "torture" their victims. If they do it's more the psychological kind and it seems like as it went on they started aping from HOSTEL etc rather than the other way around.
There's a really great book i found in college while doing a paper called 9/11 In Horror that had a segment on SAW as it relates to torture and surveillance, I don't remember what exactly it said but I've been wanting to get it again so i can read it fully instead of having to skim.