Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
I find myself exhausted by the Saw franchise. Don’t get me wrong; the first movie is genuinely good and unique in a lot of ways. It looks like it’s going to be a torture porn movie, but it is actually a disturbing psychological horror. From that first movie, though, the franchise has devolved into little more than excuses to put people in terrible situations and murder them for the thrill of the audience. That’s great if that’s all you want, but I get tired of it pretty quickly. So when Saw IV showed up on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew eventually I’d have to dip my toes back into this particular sewage plant, and here we are.
If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of the franchise, the story is that a cancer patient named John Kramer (Tobin Bell), nicknamed Jigsaw, who finds people who he thinks no longer appreciate the gift of life that they have been given. He traps them and puts them into deathtraps where they have to fight to stay alive, typically having to go through something terribly painful (and often nasty) to survive. Those who live now have (he says) an appreciation for the life they have. Those who fail have a puzzle piece-shaped bit of skin removed from their body, representing that “missing piece” of the person—a survival instinct.
