I've decided to watch more Saw movies...
As a giant wimp who didn't start watching much horror until the 2010s, I have a big gore/slasher hole in my film knowledge. I have made up a lot of lost ground over the last decade, but the Saw movies are still a blind spot for me. When I was in high school and college, they were notorious for over-the-top, exploitative gore. At least... that was the impression they gave off!
Last November, I watched Saw for the first time. I did this specifically so that I could see the unofficial Saw parody musical, which I completely failed to blog about because I got distracted by Thanksgiving. Here is a trailer which gives away quite a lot about the production. If you're planning to someday see it, I'd avoid watching this at all so you can just be surprised by how some of the onstage gore effects work:
Anyway! I watched Saw so that I could see this musical, and I ended up liking the original film a lot. It has some deranged performances [laudatory]. It was also way less gory than its marketing had led me to believe. Saw's gore punctuates the move in a tremendously silly, fun, and effective way, so I didn't mind it at all. It reminded me a lot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre - that's another movie I'd been led to believe was insanely gory, despite containing only a very few restrained and situationally effective violent bits. I feel like I've been tricked by movie marketing several times in this precise way - relatively tame horror movies using the threat of disturbing violence so effectively in their plots and in their marketing that they acquire an overblown reputation. Funny how often it happens!!
I watched Saw II recently and, once again, it's way the hell lighter on gore than I expected. Though there's more if it than in the first movie, it's kind of pedestrian. There are a couple scenes which I imagine certain people would find very disturbing for phobia reasons, but in the end I came away certain that I'd once again been tricked by other teenagers when this movie came out in 2005. I could have seen it back then! It wasn't gory enough to have scared me particularly bad at the time!
I found the characters mostly pretty forgettable, and the writing indifferent, but it's got a good twist, and the editing was extremely funny. It has the kind of frenetic, very 2000s-y fast-paced editing my husband and I like to call "Tony Scott editing" - basically it's edited like the 2010 runaway train thriller Unstoppable. I love the editing in Unstoppable. Saw II is full of extremely funny overly-tricksome cuts and shit. I loved that.
I also loved how the whole thing looked like an over-the-top fantasy of grime. That's an aesthetic I associate very strongly with the 2000s - a complete fascination with absolutely rancid bathrooms and impossibly nasty grime. I can't even begin to analyze that, but it was certainly a trend in videogames and movies at the time. I find it nostalgic!!
With two Saw movies in a row barely ranking on my gore-o-meter, I've decided to watch as many of the others as I can handle. Saw is one of those franchises that a lot of my Letterboxd friends have watched ALL of. I've been watching my friends and acquaintances act as Saw franchise connoisseurs for years. I have a good idea of what I'm getting into. And I'm curious to see how long they stay not-that-gory!