Review of Saw (2004) by Riren — 06 Mar 2007

Saw figures most horror-goers don't care about characters, and so it leaps straight to doing inhumane things to them. It's an interesting inversion of the slasher movie; where Jason or Myers have teens running in terror, pursuing with some deadly weapon, here almost every character is trapped and subjected to some awful game.

In fact, the killer is the only one who is really chased in Saw. It's gruesome soul is quite shocking, and its ending is one of the best (if bleakest) in modern horror. It would just be nice if we liked some of the characters before they were subjected to Jigsaw's mindgames (and bodygames), or if Jigsaw didn't preach at us quite so much - two problems the sequels neglected to fix.

But for a stand-alone first picture, Saw is a stand out.