News > Saw is "perfect for Middle Managers"

Written by John Lichman

So, did you, uh, see Saw over the weekend? Maybe you teetered on whether you should totter. Could you have possibly been on edge? Have I run out of stupid puns?

Well, the answer to all of the above is yes–if the Box Office is anything to go by. But if it's Halloween, that means it's also time for another look at how Saw showcases the "torture porn" genre and how it rose from the ashes of 70s sploitation. 

Grady Hendrix takes a look at the numbing of culture–but not numbing to violence. Just, how the Saw franchise is just really boring:

At a mind-numbing 108 minutes, the movie will transform viewers into blockheads, allowing oral surgeons to perform even longer and more complicated procedures on them. The Saw films represent the flagship series in the "person tied to a chair and tortured" horror genre (see also: Hostel, Captivity, The Passion of the Christ). In each of the Saw movies, someone wakes up in a room with a clockwork deathtrap a) strapped to their face, b) strapped to their neck, c) stuck through their flesh with hooks. An overachieving handyman named Jigsaw informs them that they have a limited amount of time to find a hidden key before the deathtrap is sprung. The key is usually hidden somewhere inaccessible, like at the bottom of a jar of flesh-eating acid, deep inside a pit of dirty hypodermic needles, or in someone else's stomach. The goal is to make these poor saps appreciate their lives by forcing them to do something completely gross and painful. Think of it as Dr. Phil meets Fear Factor.

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The Saw movies don't just celebrate traps; they are traps: Fans are lured in with the promise of gore, but they find themselves stuck in their seats, subjected to Jigsaw's endless stream of numbing pseudo-profundities. For many, the most unbearable movie moment of 2005 was a woman's eye being plucked out in Eli Roth's Hostel. For me it was watching one of the New Kids on the Block and the star of Decoys 2: Alien Seduction debate the meaning of life in Saw II. The idea that, in an act of brand loyalty, millions of people are going to line up this weekend and pay money to get a lecture on personal commitment and productivity from a puppet is so horrible, so degrading to the human spirit, that I have to close my eyes and look away. It's absolute torture.