j123vt_99

Never have watched any of the saw movies but have always been interested in the commercials as they show these Rube Goldberg type machines that kill people which sounds kind of cool. I'm not a big horror fan movie and hate movies like the Ring or the Grudge that have creepy kids that talk in a wierd voice or morph into a spider (or whatever)... Does Saw have that type of stuff or is it just a lot of fake blood and guts?

dadaluholla

Its just a lot of neat traps and gore. Not really scary at all.

OldBoy

it didn't make me

BravesMG

It's not scary at all really, more tense. But the tension is all in the traps, so it's more anticipating the gore than being scared of anything.

RichC2

Not scary, more mental tension (first movie) and gore (sequels) than anything. Having just rewatched the first two, I was sort of impressed with how restrained the original actually was in contrast to the follow-ups.

Spiderbite

Not scary, just gorey.

GoldenJCJ

Not scary. IMO, the best thing the saw movies have going for them is 1. The creativity of the traps that kill the people, and 2. the way all the movies tie into one another. The sequels aren't stand alone films but rather a twist on the film before it.

I've only seen 1 - 3, so I really need to get going on 4 and 5. they're not great films by any stretch but they're pretty darn imaginitive in their execution (pun intended).

fumanstan

Agree with everyone else, more tension and anticipation of the traps then scary.

Groucho

Agreed about the tension and suspense. Hitchcock would have loved these movies.

AGuyNamedMike

Really? You don't think he would have considered them almost pornographic with the mayhem so lavishly splashed across the screen, nothing left to the imagination?

Oh wait, it's Groucho.

asianxcore

The only thing remotely scary about the Saw series is:

islandclaws

They aren't scary to me in the least, but a few of the films do have some pretty nasty traps that even had a hardened horror junkie like myself cringing. I suppose that counts for something.

riley_dude

I don't think Hitchcock would have cared for these remotely. After the first movie, there is nothing scary or tense about them.
It's torture porn.

Michael T Hudson

brainee

Give the first one a shot. As mentioned by someone else here, it's not nearly as gory as its reputation. It actually has an interesting story/premise, rather than just being a torture/gore movie (the way a number of people seem to mistakenly think). Instead of movies like Ring and Grudge, it fits more in the category with movies like Seven and Silence of the Lambs. It's nowhere near as good as those movies (for me, the story had holes and some acting moments fell flat), but I'd still give it an overall "thumbs up".

I found the series to have diminishing returns after that. While each following movie had enough of a wrinkle/twist to keep my interest, the emphasis did seem to shift to just coming up with gruesome traps. I haven't seen 4 or 5 (that's where they are now, right?), and from what I've read I'm not particularly anxious to.

Mordred

They were so scary I wet myself. Don't watch with the lights off!

RichC2

4 was incredibly bad, it should have stopped at 3 or taken a completely different route than it did.

Matthew Chmiel

1) Saw II
2) Saw III
3) Saw
4) Saw V
5) Saw IV

Not that big of a fan of the original, but I dig the direction Bousman took it in II and III. When the new writers came on board for IV, the film took a massive nose dive.

Saw V, while better, was more of 90 minutes trying to explain what happened in IV.

LickTheABCs

Torture Porn is easily* the dumbest sub-genre name ever created. The people who created it clearly have never seen actual porn. Or for that matter actual torture. That's as retarded as the whole "Splat Pack" thing.

*OK, not easiest. J-Horror is strong competition.

brainee

At least J-Horror makes sense. It's horror ... from J(apan). Besides, if anything should be called torture porn, it's underground movies like "Guinea Pig" and "August Underground". Certainly not movies like "Saw" and "Hostel".

fumanstan

Then how will baracine be able to describe the content of The Dark Knight?

LickTheABCs

Or they could call it, I dunno.. Horror.

Abob Teff

I've used the Hitchcock comparison before -- but only for the first one. And this thread is helping to prove that point. Hitchcock was a master at making you remember things that didn't happen or that you didn't see. The first Saw film really was not gory at all ... it has very gruesome -- but you did not actually see much of the gore (which makes it a much stronger film in my opinion).

I'll also vote for "diminishing returns" as the series goes on. The second was an decent sequel, but each one takes a step down. In this regard, they are kind of like the Bond films -- in that very few of them started with an idea for the plot. Watching the docs on many of the Bond films revealed that many of them began with a location, an idea for a stunt, or an idea for a Bond girl. The Saw films seem simply to spring from the Rube Goldberg devices.

tylergfoster

I hate the term "torture porn". It is generally applied by those who have never watched the entirety of any of the movies in question. It is the epitome of an outsider's opinion: anyone who actually watches the films in question, like the Saw movies, has their own reasoning, but to those who don't care to see the films, they just look like a string of torture scenes. Certainly there are people who go to the Saw films for the kills, but I think that's true of almost any horror movie.

I like watching the Saw movies on a Friday the 13th level, and mainly I like that I feel (with the exception of this last one) that the filmmakers are excited and invested in pleasing their core audience with a cool twist and some clever traps.

But they're definitely not scary. Not at all.

As far as gore goes, The first one is briefly gory during the "reverse bear trap" scene and at the end. The second is not very gory at all (the "glass box" is extremely bloody, but not gory). The third opens with probably the most painful scene of all five movies, has a very real looking surgery bit and a lot of really fake other stuff, and a meat-machine scene might make you hurl for reasons other than gore. The fourth opens with more medical gore, and is pretty splatter-tastic all the way through. The fifth has a lot of blood but isn't too terrible until the last ten or so minutes.

Thrush

But aren't horror movies supposed to suspenseful and I dunno, scary?

While I thought the 1st saw had an interesting setup. I sort of got bored with it by the 3rd act. And the sub genre its created seems derivative and even more boring.