Rated R for slasher violence, sexuality, nudity, and some dated race humor. While everything might be considered tame compared to what the sequels would spawn, there's no denying that there is some truly horrifying shots in this movie. It's a sleepaway camp murder spree. It's not for the faint of heart.
DIRECTOR: Sean S. Cunningham I know! How basic, right? I went from not being into spooky season to kind of getting excited. And then, for a Friday the 13th to come around in October. Here's the scoop: I loved the original Friday the 13th. I used to watch it all the time. But something happened and I stopped rewatching Friday the 13th. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I don't rewatch movies as much as I used to because there are so many movies out there that I'll never have time to see. But this was an opportunity. This lifestyle has opened a door that was an unexpected treat. I was able to watch Friday the 13th quasi-fresh. See, I still knew that Mrs. Voorhees was the killer in the first one. I still remember how Kevin Bacon dies. I also remember Jason jumping out of the lake. But the other stuff? It's kind of fresh. Do you understand the happy accident that I got to enjoy? I love the first Friday the 13th. I mean, I was also able to be a little more objective about it this time, but it's still a pretty great horror movie. The one thing I never realized is that it is an inversion of Psycho. I mean, it's right there. Listen, I know I have to be last coming to the party on this one. But since this is my blog, I'm going to explore the concept to death. Also, it's the basis of this blog and it's going to give me content. And Lord knows that people be loving content. I'm actually playing the soundtrack right now. It's a thing I do to remember the different parts. (Why am i explaining myself to you?) Anyway, the Bernard Herrmann score? Harry Manfredini probably owes him a couple of bucks. Not the whole thing. But there's an active decision being made. See, I love Psycho. It's great. Hitchcock offers his audience a terrifying premise and then gives us something even better with the twist. The notion of Norman's mother murdering people at the hotel is a scary concept. The reveal, that Norman is the killer while embodying Mother's essence is better. The only problem is that we are starved from the one thing that we were promised: a showdown with Mother. Now, obviously the Friday the 13th sequels don't exist yet. The notion of hockey mask Jason won't show up for a couple more movies. But Cunningham is doing the same thing that Hitchcock is doing: manipulating expectations. There is an assumption that the killer is a big burly man. I mean, I said I would be critical of this movie now that I have some distance from my obsession with this movie. But it also only makes sense that the killer was a hulking mass, not an old lady. But when Friday the 13th is watched in conjunction with Psycho, it pays off the promise of the first movie while maintaining the same twist. We get to see what it is like for a scary grandma to be killing everyone. And, honestly, it's probably more realistic than it deserves to be. Instead of being this unstoppable grandmother, you can kind of, just, push her over. Yeah, that makes you really wonder how she managed to dispatch everyone earlier. Because I want the movie to be a functional film, I employ my suspension of disbelief. In most of the film, she uses the element of surprise to kill people real quick. But when she attacks Alice, for some reason, she feels the need to reveal her entire backstory. I keep hearing that people aren't really into Friday the 13th. Why am I alone in the like for this franchise? Like many of the horror franchises, the series goes off the rails pretty quick. But I'll take Friday the 13th and Halloween over Nightmare on Elm Street any day. I feel odd waxing poetic about this, but there's something kind of fun about the slasher movie than something supernatural. I mean, don't get me wrong. A good vampire or zombie movie is super fun. I'll always be down for watching The Lost Boys or Night of the Living Dead. But there's something so basic about a summer camp slasher movie that is fun. Part of it comes from the fact that we're almost meant to instantly bond with archetypes. Yeah, it's not good filmmaking in the grand scheme of things. But there's this notion that we almost become friends with this group of intense personalities. I know that Friday the 13th is not the first summer camp film. But I also think that it may serve as the bible for other summer camp horror movies. Cunningham is giving us a bit of a shortcut into figuring out the dynamics of the people at the camp. Because these characters are thrown into a group of strangers, we too are meeting them as strangers. And thank goodness that they're all extroverted or else that wouldn't be very fun. What is interesting is that this is the movie that also establishes the morality rules that horror movies are so infamous for. Mrs. Voorhees doesn't necessarily hate teenagers. She hates teenagers who are so overwhelmed by their own vices that they let her poor boy drown in Crystal Lake. It's why Randy talks about no sex, drugs, or alcohol in Scream. A lot of it stems from Mrs. Voorhees's revenge plot and her skewed sense of morality in keeping the camp closed. Now, I love this. I think it is a great storyline. But I also love that Mrs. Voorhees kind of just ignores her own rules because she's full on bananas. (Also, tied to Psycho where she has that D.I.D. because "Kill her, Mommy") Annie never shows up at the camp. She's picked up by Mrs. Voorhees (also, very cool with just hitchhiking. Totally Killer should have discussed that one) and goes into this message of how she would be the ideal camp counselor. She talks about her love for kids and how she was going to do this for a living one day. And then Mrs. Voorhees kills her real bad. Like, real bad. Now, this is the moment that I have a hard time settling. Ignoring the fact that it doesn't align with Mrs. Voorhees's entire worldview of what camp counselors are about, Annie has a pretty good idea that Mrs. Voorhees is coming after her. She jumps out of the car. Sure, she has car-jumping damage. But she could take out an old lady. She's really running from Jason in that moment. But I want this movie to work, so I'm going to give her points saying that she's inherently non-violent and predisposed to flight instead of fight. Still, poor Annie, right? She makes no sense because she's wired to be the ultimate final girl. After all, Alice does drink and play Strip Monopoly. Just because she's good at Strip Monopoly doesn't mean that she's the paragon of virtue. She just has that subjective goodness. Now that I think about it, it is really weird that this movie becomes about Jason as an adult murdering counselors later. I mean, the movie's last two minutes introduce the idea that Jason might be in that lake, killing people. But even in that narrative, the Jason she sees / dreams is a kid. Where is the jump where not only is her potential hallucination true, but also that Jason grew up in between sequences? I mean, sure. This could have been a very different franchise had it been a deformed little dead kid murdering people over and over. But still, I'm just going to have to bow out here because I'm not going to be talking about the sequels any time soon. As much as I love the first movie, I have no desire to watch the sequels. It's not that I wouldn't have a good time with them. But I also know that there's going to be a sense of diminshing returns coupled with the knowledge that there are a billion great movies out there. You might be shocked about that argument considering that I'm going to be writing about Plan 9 from Outer Space pretty soon. But that at least will have some context.
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Rated R for blood, death, cannibalism, and rape. A PG-13 rating might be the best thing for Tim Burton because it forces him to be creative with his macabre humor. But giving him carte blanche feels exploitative. The sheer amount of times we had to watch the corpses break their necks from the chute was to the point of being absurd. Yeah, this is a hard R.
DIRECTOR: Tim Burton I'll tell you why I watched this. We watched Schmigadoon season two and I wanted to get all of the Sweeney Todd references. Also, it aligned with my spooky season expectations, so that was pretty nice for me. But, man, I forgot that I was the one guy on the planet who didn't worship at the altar of Tim Burton. Honestly, I wanted to think that this movie was good. But I'm apparently in the anti-camp for this film. I'm the guy who loves Les Miserables and not this, despite the fact that they kind of share a cast. Why? Why was I so bored? There is this thing I have to admit. Maybe my expectations were too high. I mean, this is Stephen Sondheim. This is the grand daddy of musical theatre. I normally think that I would worship at the feet of Sondheim. Then I Googled "Stephen Sondheim musicals" and found out that I only really like a select few of Sondheim's musicals. This is a a me thing. Please, I acknowledge and bow to his genius. It's just that, Sweeney Todd, completely divorced from the film version of the play, didn't really do anything for me. In fact, the Schmigadoon / Schmicago version of Sweeney Todd was way more compelling than the version that I saw here. There's nothing really fun about this movie. I think the macabre works in juxtaposition. Tim Burton actually cut his teeth on the initial version of Sweeney Todd by having stuff like Edward Scissorhands and The Addams Family. We laugh at stuff like Beetlejuice because the contrast between the dark and morose with vanilla society is what makes the concept entertaining. Sweeney Todd is just over the top violence and sadness without actual character development. Maybe that's what really bugs me. The story starts in medias res. Benjamin Barker, while not named Sweeney Todd, has adopted the mantle of the character. He's already bitter and vengeful with the loss of his wife and child. He comes into the story morose and looking for blood. A lot of the story is just him sitting around a room, hyping himself up for the murder of Judge Turpin. He's even given the opportunity to do so and squanders it. It feels like a lot of the movie is a stall tactic. The most interesting element of the story is the shift to cannibalism by Mrs. Lovett and that becomes the most fascinating combination. I don't know why Barker would just be cool with cannibalism and his choices in murder is bewildering. But this is where the movie starts for me. And the thing is, a lot of this is squandered. I know that this story is based on a Penny Dreadful. I can't say that I've read the original. I don't know the ins and outs. But the fact that this guy goes from a revenge story to Sweeney Todd just murdering willy-nilly and feeding people to society makes the hero not a hero. I'm not saying that you need to ahve a moral character as your protagonist. I actually really like morally bankrupt characters as my protagonist. But this is a story that is meant to be hinged in sympathy. Benjamin Barker is only sympathetic in flashback. We have no complexity in the decisions that are made throughout the story. He's so go-with-the-flow, to the point where cannibalism isn't even a morally grey area for him, that there is nothing to weep for. He's just sad all the time. Now, I like Johnny Depp in a lot of things and I don't really know the musical or past productions for this show, but he's just so flat affect in this. He's talking about how life is just weaponized misery and trash, but that doesn't make him sympathetic. I kind of just wish that there was this moral complication with the whole thing. The thing is, there's this opportunity right there. Toby and Mrs. Lovett have this weird connection in the story where she's put through the moral gauntlet. She grows closer to Toby and that's interesting when she decides to lock him up in the meat room (there's a word for that exists; I just don't know what it is right now). (What's her endgame, by the way? He would just be in there forever?) But Toby is around Todd the entire time. He is an opportunity for redemption and second chances. The jump from actual father to found father is right there and how does this movie not make that decision? Toby is this kid who goes from being a street hustler to exhibiting genuine gratitude to these two monsters. How does that not tug at the heartstrings and give the protagonists something to consider? Think about this. Imagine this was the movie. Toby thanks Todd for taking him in. Todd, in his bloodlust, is covered in gore. Toby doesn't care. He is just happy to have a father figure who doesn't take advantage of him. Todd looks himself in the mirror and washes himself clean. Toby is cleaning Todd's razors. He swipes the air, mirroring Todd's precise cuts and Todd is horrified by what he has become. It is in that moment he spies Judge Turpin. He has this opportunity to murder the man who destroyed his life. He spares Turpin, which allows Turpin to discover Todd's true nature. In doing so, he kills Toby and Todd is given this morally complex story. But instead, we get his tragic tale of Todd murdering his wife. There was this era in comics (and I'm definitely not on Estes Kefauver's side in this) where horror comics modeled themselves after Penny Dreadfuls. There was this tragic ending that revolved around self-destruction. Sweeney Todd is no exception to this. He ends up killing his wife, who he does not recognize because she is homeless and mad. It's effective, but it's also kind of fake. We don't really get to know anything about her. When it's revealed that she's Mrs. Barker, there is this reveal equivalent of "huh". There's no resonance because we know so little about this character. I know the movie has to be a rushed version of the story because we know that Mrs. Lovett knows about the beggar woman. She knew that Mrs. Barker wasn't dead, but Mrs. Lovett wishes for a future. The movie has to do a lot of "tell, not show", leaving that emotional connection a little barren. I never get the notion that Sweeney Todd is warming up to Mrs. Lovett in any way beyond symbiosis. I want to like that twist, but it earnestly has no emotional resonance with me. I can't help but thinking that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street would make a good double-feature with The Phantom of the Opera in the worst way possible. There are these moments where characters make absolutely absurd choices and I have a hard time connecting with any of the characters. If anything, these are movies that love filming the gothic and being incredibly melodramatic. I know that people like this movie and don't like Phantom, which boggles my mind because they're the same movie to me. I'm not saying you should like Phantom. I thought that musical was pretty abysmal as well. It's just that I don't get why this movie is so good. Maybe we're not all that used to the blending of gore and musical. I know that there are other movies out there, like Repo! The Genetic Opera that touch on stuff that Sweeney Todd touches on. But this is indulgant Tim Burton at maybe his worst. I don't like Tim Burton on a good day (for the most part. I kind of like Batman Returns and Big Fish). But this is distilled Tim Burton. This is no one saying "no". I wanted to like it, but it kind of is just empty show for me. Rated R for Saw style killings, although this one has far more of a Se7en / Silence of the Lambs vibe than the other movies. This might be the least gory of the bunch, but that doesn't mean that it isn't extremely gory. There's some brutal stuff. There's also some language that these movies tend to have. But you do know that the two big actors in this movie are Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson? Yeah, there's going to be some f-bombs. R.
DIRECTOR: Darren Lynn Bousman Like, I'm done for a while on these Saw movies, right? I know that I'm probably not going to see Saw X in the theaters, so that means I get to take a break and say that I'm mostly caught up. If you think that I'm goign to knock out a bunch of those early Saw movies again because I want to finish it for the blog, you're mostly wrong. There's a part of me that wants to just be a completionist and say that I have a blog for every Saw movie on this page. But there's also a bigger part of me who got excited for Spooky Season for the first time in years when he figured out that there are curated lists of horror classics that I haven't seen. So, yeah, I don't need to rewatch Saw I-V. But speaking of Saw I-V, this is directed by Darren Lynn Bousman? The same Darren Lynn Bousman who made some of the worst entries in the series? How is that possible? Is none of this Bousman's fault? Do you give him a budget, talented actors, and probably time to make a movie and he returns something fairly solid. Sure, I know that, for some reason, Spiral was a quasi-passion project for Chris Rock. Maybe Rock had some influence. But I also am applauding for studios understanding that people can't do things on the cheap all of the time. While I can't say that Spiral is one of those movies that is going to change society or even exist outside of the context of Saw, it's not a bad movie. Predictable, yes. Exploitative, yes. Bad, probably not. Again, I keep evaluating these movies contextually. For a Saw movie, I'll even say it's good. But it is also a painful reminder that the guy who made the majority of the bad Saw movies made this one and it looks pretty solid. This is a movie that could have existed in theaters without the Saw name attached to it. I mean, it's almost weirder that it is a Saw movie. I read the background on how this movie was made in a Variety or a New York Times article. (For a guy who teaches English and makes a huge hullaballoo about this, I'm being really bad about citing my sources.) Chris Rock was at LionsGate. He saw the properties that they had and was interested in doing something with Saw. If you took away some of the gore and some of the world building, this is a movie that could have stood on its own two feet as just a dark cop thriller. It's like how Die Hard with a Vengeance wasn't originally a Die Hard movie. Studios need to respect that, even though something could be made without the resources or the time, it probably shouldn't be. I don't want to gush about this movie because, honestly, it was just fine. Again, it's all about context. I felt starved for good content with the Saw movies I was watching. I know. No one made me do it. I wasn't hate watching them. Read my thoughts on Jigsaw. I wanted these movies to be good. Spiral's biggest problem is that it is incredibly predictable. I thought someone spoiled it for me a while ago by telling me "it was the cop". Okay, everyone's a cop, so I'm giving myself the win about figuring out who the killer was in this movie. Although I was also a little disappointed that my answer for the killer was slightly better. (I pulled a Scream and made it two killers. I had Angie as the second killer because she was able to pull a lot more strings than Schenk. That's honestly a pretty frustrating plothole in the story, Schenk getting himself connected to Zeke.) But Schenk is telegraphed pretty hard in this movie. It's in one of the moments that just highlights him as a character. If you have a small moment where you give away your cell phone, regardless of reason, that guy did it. (For the most part. That phone still came into play in Scream 3, even if it wasn't taken by the killer.) But also, there's some meta analysis that is a bit too non-diagetic and you couldn't hold against Zeke. The biggest one is that this is a Saw movie. This franchise loves showing you people getting ripped apart and put into games. If there's a body of a major character and we didn't see that person "play a game", that person's not dead. The first thing I thought is that you can't identify someone by a tattoo in these movies. Did I know that Schenk was the witness's kid? Nope. I think the motive always requires a leap of faith that is the burden of the screenwriter. I always forgive myself when it comes down to the why of the whole thing. In real life, when I have a suspect, I'm trying to find a way to piece together a backstory using resources. The writer doesn't really feel the need to expound on details. With the case of Schenk, in the smallest way there's a bit of a retcon. Zeke saw a kid at the shooting and bonded with him (in a weird way that involved him whispering. Was his partner ready to kill a kid?). We never saw that moment in the story. I can't help but thinking that this movie is a bit reminiscent of Batman: Hush. Hush was this really well made Batman comic by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee. Unfortunately, it's criminally predictable. We're talking about a character in depth that we've never talked about before and he's the big bad guy we're looking for? Yeah, that is a bit on the nose for me. I'm not quite sure what Schenk's big final reveal and plan was with Zeke's dad. I get that Zeke's dad was a corrupt cop. It makes sense that this new killer would want to torture him because he was a corrupt cop. That's the focus of the whole movie. But Schenk says that he made Zeke the center of the spiral (maybe I made that phrase up because it should have been used in the movie) because he wanted Zeke as a partner. I'm 90% sure that Zeke is playing along when he says that he'll help Schenk in the future, but let's pretend that he was dead serious. I mean, that's why Schenk is doing all this. It's why he offers Zeke a way out. After all, Schenk shouldn't hate Zeke. Zeke is the example of what police officers should be compared to what they are. He's the inspiration for Schenk. Do you think hanging up Zeke's dad is going to be the thing that brings him to your side? Also, it's a test to see if Zeke is really on your side? But the game that he gives Zeke is a one-bullet save-your-dad-or-kill-me scenario. Where is the partnership on that thing? How is that a loyalty thing? Both answers imply that Zeke is still trying to arrest Schenk? Now that I'm thinking about it, why Jigsaw? I get that there's the hidden figure who is killing corrupt cops. I like that he's using the masks and the pig heads are on brand. But the games make almost no sense. Jigsaw used games to make people appreciate their lives. (That is still something I still don't understand, but I can shut my brain off enough to say, "Whatever".) Schenk doesn't want them to escape. Often, his games (which was similar to the traps in the later Saw movies) were based on word play. For example, "Or will you throw away the key" meaning that the key was in the trash can the entire time. The guy was dead pretty quickly. I'm wildly confused about the fingers being ripped off. He lost his fingers AND he got electrocuted. Why go through all of that work? The point was to send body parts by courier to the cops. It seems like a lot of work and technical knowhow to do all that. You could have tortured them in really banal ways and then sent the stuff in the mail. Having a secret degree in mechanical engineering isn't necessary to be a scary serial killer. Oh my goodness, I can't believe I didn't take two seconds to write about this. I actually hit publish. Hopefully, I get this in before anyone actually reads this. (Guaranteed. No one reads these things.) How can I ignore that this is political as heck and I love it. I'm doing a professional development Masterclass taught by David Mamet about drama. One of his first lessons, which rubbed me the wrong way (but Mamet is smarter than I am, so take that into consideration), is the fact that drama shouldn't be made to be political. That's a pretty privileged statement. Do I think that Spiral: From the Book of Saw, the ninth movie in the franchise, is political. Absolutely. Do I think it is as political as some of the articles I read on the movie believe it to be? No. I do think that the ending, of police bursting in and killing a Black man who is strung up to the wall is saying something. I do think that there's commentary on the Thin Blue Line in the movie. But Zeke is our avatar. I may not be Black, but as the protagonist, Zeke's philosophy is what we should be. He fights corruption where he can and bears the weight of an oppressive system on his back. But Schenk's work is appalling to us; it is appalling to him. Again, Spiral isn't a great work of art. But it started with a political statement and then made entertainment out of it. It proves that you can do both. Also, Glengarry Glen Ross is anti-Capitalist as the day is long. Regardless, I applaud this for being the first Saw movie that was fun. Chris Rock was right. There's no reason that these movies shouldn't be fun. Yeah, there's still gross out stuff. But the most upsetting part about the format of these movies that people only smiled in Saw movies because the creativity of the manslaughter. Instead, I enjoyed Zeke being a person. I enjoyed that the comedy led to characterization. Some of it was hamfisted, sure. But that goes a long way to making a movie watchable. Rated R for Saw related violence. You should know the reputation that these movies have. They are often brutality for brutality's sake. It's more of a commentary on me that I'm watching these movies and writing about them. But these movies pride themselves in as much intense gore as they can offer. Some people like this kind of stuff, but it is the content that make a movie R. I guess there's language as well.
DIRECTORS: Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig This movie is going to get such a boost because it was following Saw: The Final Chapter. I can't even imagine how to wirte about this movie objectively. Saw: The Final Chapter is such a low-point in cinema. It is the inevitable result of a studio throwing less and less money into a franchise and expecting returns. I mean, there's almost a certain amount of sympathy to the franchise up to that point. One of the key things driving the franchise was that it was a guaranteed horror movie every year for seven years. There had to be a point of diminishing returns when you make a movie yearly. (Okay, Woody Allen did it for the portion of his life when he wasn't appropriately cancelled. But there are a lot of Woody Allen stinkers in there too.) But Jigsaw almost just gets points for treating a Saw movie like a movie. If I had seen this movie without having just seen Saw 3D, I would have railed that this might be a soulless horror movie that didn't make a lot of sense. But that's not how things played out. I mean, I'm trying to step out and say that it is pretty soulless and it made almost no sense in terms of logic. But I'll tell you this: it might be the second best Saw movie up to this point. That doesn't make it a good movie. It just means that the Saw franchise is always just asking a bit too much from its audience. I must also confess that this movie was kind of spoiled for me accidentally. I already knew that this movie was in flashback. Actually, when I was watching it, I was surprised that they claimed that John Kramer was dead because only half the movie is in flashback. (My brain quickly started piecing together the twist of only half the movie is in flashback, which only kind of makes sense.) But it seems like the Spierig Brothers genuniely cared about making a good Saw movie. Sure, a lot of it is the money. But there's a certain degree of crafting. I'm sure that there was a reputation to overcome and the Spierig did everything that they could to move past the reputation that the previous films did. I mean, Saw 3D was the low point in the franchise and that had two kinda / sorta big celebrities in it. This one has no celebrities and feels so much more polished than the previous movies. But the movie is kind of dumb, right? Like, when this movie is actually going and you can move past the fact that it looks a lot prettier than the other movies, it is kind of dumb, right? I know that the reviews and the metacritic score are higher. But they're still pretty low. I mean, one of the plans wouldn't have worked, but I'm still going to point out from a the "try" perspective. The movie takes place mostly in a barn. There are five people who are captured in that room and they have to escape a creepy barn that is trying to kill them. Initially, they're all chained to walls and are being brought closer and closer to death until the chain releases them. Now, from a directing perspective, I get it. (Maybe cinematography is the term I should be using.) The Spierigs decide to use the barn locale to have a fake magic hour the entire movie. Sunlight bursts in through the slats of the barn the entire movie. Okay. That works. It looks relay cool. But the victims are trying to escape this place, right? Why are they taking crowbars to big metal doors? Why wouldn't you just put your weight against one of these gapped boards and escape that way. Now, at one point, Eleanor (?) takes a crowbar to the No Exit door and is captured by Pigman. Okay, that scans. It means that they shoudn't be able to escape regardless because the killer is watching the entire time. But there are three of them in this room at one point. If they all take a different plank, wouldn't they just be able to escape? It just seems like these characters make the dumbest choices to make the story proceed forward. I also have that same complaint that I had with the previous movies. Why are people so eager to play the tapes that Jigsaw leaves for them. That's when the trials start. Every time. Every time they hit a button, a trial starts. There's one puzzle in here that starts with them already being pulled and it ends with the tape being played. (Note: what if Mitch never hit the tape? All of that planning would have gone to pot?) Stop going out of your way to do these things. Also, Jigsaw is getting borderline psychic. Logan goes after the "No Exit" door. The other two scream, "It's a trap". He ignores them, gets caught in the trap. But there's a good scenario where Logan listens to them and doesn't fall into the trap. The entire puzzle is based on someone falling into the trap when, realistically, no one would fall for that. Rated R for a stupid amount of brutality coupled with some harsh language. There are some jump scares in the movie and I know that's a button that people don't like getting pushed. I don't mind jump scares so much as just the gore for the sake of gore. Really, I can safely say that there's nothing redeeming in watching a Saw sequel, so you at least know what you signed up for. R.
DIRECTOR: Kevin Greutert Why? I don't like these movies! I don't. I liked the first Saw way more than I thought I would. I thought that the franchise might Fast and Furious its way into my heart. Do you know what? These movies are straight trash. Mind you, I just read that the consensus is that this is the worst in the franchise. I'm really validated by that takeaway because I don't know what I was going to do about Jigsaw, Spiral: From the Book of Saw. or Saw X. But people hate this movie and, no offense to people who probably worked very hard making it, they're kind of right. Studios have weird logic. 20th Century Fox thought that Deadpool was going to be a bomb, so they cut the budget midfilming. When that movie proved to be the most lucrative thing that they had going, they threw all of the money at Deadpool 2. Not Lionsgate. Oh no. They took a movie made on the cheap. That movie made them a ton of money. They then made them on the cheaper because "why spend money"? I know that technically this is a 3D movie, which in my money has to cost a lot more. It does not look like it cost a lot more. Most television looks better than this movie. This looks like someone self-financed the film and then stocked the movie with all of his little buddies. There's nothing really good about this movie. All the budget went into begging Cary Elwes to come back for very little of this movie, despite the fact that his character is instrumental to this franchise. I'm going to talk about Cary Elwes at some point in this blog, right? I hope I am because I have thoughts. But this is barely a movie. Henson down the hall just showed me a Christian version of Saw called The Redeemer. Slow down, he showed me a trailer and dared me to watch it. I don't watch movies because I want them to be bad. (Although I am planning on watching Plan 9 from Outer Space because I want to watch Ed Wood.) But there's almost nothing in this movie that actually qualifies it to be a cinematic release. Ignoring the fact that it visually looks terrible and that the actors are almost cast exclusively from GettyImages for being stock archetypes, the movie almost ignores what little goodwill that the franchise has loosely gained. Listen, Saw movies tend to be manipulative. But one thing that has always kind of been the case is the final act. You kind of sit through this torture porn (which I know a lot of people really sign up for) to get to the final game. The final game, from what I remember, has tended to be an exercise in misdirection. We think we're looking at one thing and then we get another. Jigsaw will always have the one up on us and everything tends to get recontextualized. Saw 3D really tried pulling this card. But there was nothing in the chamber, which is funny because the movie is billed as "The Final Chapter". You would think that there would be bold moves and decisions made about the franchise. Maybe there would be a promise that there could be no more Saw movies. After all, one of the few noble things that Saw has done is keep the film non-supernatural. I dare not use the word "grounded" because there are some truly outlandish elements. But this final sequence? One of the key tenets of the franchise, which I will begrudgingly allow the understanding that Detective Mark Hoffman (whom I will probably refer to as Mark Brandanowitz because of his lack of chemistry. My apologies to both actors.) doesn't always care about the rules, is that Jigsaw is making people care about their lives. This one really stretches the imagination on that one. Brandanowitz (see?!) just slaughters a bunch of cops for his own needs. Also, those cops are doing the things that John Kramer wanted. They should be out there giving their all to stopping a murderer. That's part of the central irony of Saw. In the case of Bobby, there's something to be said. I can see Jigsaw really getting mad at someone manipulating victims for the sake of profit and success. That's on brand. But almost everyone else? Why are they being put in these traps. There are two specific victims that I want to stress in terms of "What's the logic?" Now, before you scream "Brandanowitz Jigsaw! Doesn't count!" Nope. The flashback shows John planning these murders. Sorry. Let's talk about Joyce really quickly. I get why she's in the trap. She's motivation for Bobby. But this is just fridging a character. Jigsaw states that Joyce saw the light of Jigsaw's message, even if it came from a dishonest place. So why is Joyce in this trap? The point of Jigsaw is to make people appreciate their lives by putting them into mutilating traps that would encourage them to question the stupid stuff. Joyce learned from Jigsaw and basically became a follower of this mentality. Don't murder her. Okay, maybe there was a scenario where Bobby figured out a way to get her out. After all, there is an element of risk and assumption that people wouldn't be able to get through these horrific traps. It's what makes a movie, after all. But Jigsaw gives Bobby a trap based on what he said in the past. He went on these talk shows and said that he put hooks in his pectoral muscles and was lifted from the floor. Jigsaw creates the trap he describes and is even dubious in his voice message, implying that pectoral muscles wouldn't be able to suspend a grown man. Sure enough, Bobby goes through the trap. His pectoral muscles snap. Joyce burns to death. Now, if there was a way to get her out of that, I would say "Okay, I can shut my brain off." But as is established, that doesn't really work out that way. It's going against the very nature of the story. Then there's the part that I want to laugh at. Guy wakes up in a car. He's superglued to the seat. Beneath the wheel of the suspended car is a lady's face. Behind him is a guy chained to the back of the car. There's a guy in front of him chained to a door. Guy hits tape. "You and your friends are racists." What is that writing? Okay, Jigsaw should absolutely kill racists. But is that the story at all? Okay, the racists all die. Thumbs up on that front. But let's pretend that the racist, despite the fact that he gave his all to escape, actually pulled the lever in time to escape. Would he stop being racist? If anything, he would just accuse Jigsaw of being a dem and then become a bigger racist. I don't see a scenario where he would take this introspective journey about his choices in life. No. There was a guy who was a lib who kidnapped him. He told him to stop being conservative. That dude overpowered that weak lib's trap and would probably go out and hunt other libs. I've lived in America for a long time. That's how things would play out. Nope. I call shannanigans real hard. And now: Cary Elwes. I almost just closed this up because I'm having difficulty writing this blog entry. There's all kinds of noise and I don't like this movie. Cary Elwes looks like he hates the Saw movies. I liked the first Saw movie, as previously stated. But even in that movie, I felt like Cary Elwes was slumming it. He looked like he hated every minute of that filming, despite the fact that Saw was apparently a fun independent film. (I read something about how hard it was to film that movie because of budget stuff.) I thought the same thing about Michael Douglas in Ant-Man. But Michael Douglas quickly learned that this was his way back into the spotlight. Cary Elwes, still feels like he's slumming it. He just hates every second of this movie. Understandably. But even more so, his character makes no sense in this movie. There's retconning and then there's this. I know that one of the characters (Amanda?) was a survivor who became Jigsaw's accomplice. Okay. That's fine. But that was very clear with what (for the sake of simplicity) Amanda was in charge of. But Cary Elwes was nowhere near the rest of the movies. Also, like it really implied that Cary Elwes's character died. I know. "Implied." Fine. But you can't have a glorified cameo be a key plot point. I know that Cary Elwes is not Jigsaw, right? It's not like he's this guy who has committed to making a bunch of these movies. And sure, Jigsaw and Saw X are both prequels. Spiral is a spin-off. But that reveal is dumb. But potential points...maybe Saw 3D is actually the final chapter. If everything else is a prequel, maybe this is the one franchise that actually closed the door (no pun intended) on the series. Sure, there are other movies, but they aren't technically sequels. Either way, that ending is unearned and a deus ex machina (only replace "God" with "Disdainful Cary Elwes"). Nothing is earned in this movie. It just ends. It. Just. Ends. I know that Final Chapters in these franchises aren't always the best movies. Some of you are howling over Friday the 13th. But this is an all time low. This movie is so bad. It's so bad. It's barely a movie. Thank God that people swear that these movies get better. It's not like the reviews, shy of Saw X, are anything to write home about. But they aren't 9% approval ratings. This is a movie deserving of shame. G rated and I'm pretty sure that's an okay...waitaminute! Isn't there a whole section about "nose candy"? Is that "nose candy" just cocaine? Also, isn't one of the funnier gags when the Tramp accidentally takes a bunch of this nose candy and loses his mind, Cocaine Bear-style? Still, G rating, I guess.
DIRECTOR: Charles Chaplin It's spooky season! What am I doing writing about Charlie Chaplin? That's a loaded question. First, I think the obsession with spooky season has completely killed my love for spooky season. I don't want to be the spooky season grump, but it's the way my mind is wandering. Secondly, I was finishing a unit on the Early American studio system and Mark Sennett, so I had to show them an example of ur-slapstick. It's one of those movies that I absolutely should have written about before this time, but my stupid obsession with rules and completeness probably put the kibosh on that. Chaplin always is a vibe check for me. Like how I feel with writing (especially today!), there are times that I really want to write and there are times when writing seems like the greatest burden imaginable. With the case of Chaplin, I want to watch all of Chaplin. My mental understanding is "I like all of the Chaplin I see. I'm sure it holds up." The emotional understanding is, "I'm not in the mood." It's weird. It makes no sense and I need to get that checked out because I have a lot more Chaplin to get through. But Modern Times reminds me how much I like Chaplin. In terms of the feels, I'm more of a The Kid fan myself. That is a movie with a concrete narrative and a character that is worth getting behind. With Modern Times, there is a narrative, but it is more loose than The Kid. If anything, Chaplin sets up a lot more vignettes and gags and then ties it together with a narrative framework. I mean, it works because I'm about to gush over this movie. But the analytical part of me really can't get by me. I'm watching the sausage get made and I can't stop thinking about it. Do you know why I keep thinking about it? I've seen Modern Times a handful of times. I remember images and gags from the movie, but I didn't remember that this was an anti-capitalism story that also had a romantic foundation. Nope. I remember the Tramp going through the gears and I remember the blindfolded rollerskating scene. It's because those set pieces exist almost as a complilation of short films, similar to that of Mr. Bean. I'm going to say that my hippie-dippie liberal nonsense loves the heck out of this movie. If you told my 12-18 year old self that I would find the plight of the worker, especially during the Great Depression, the most fascinating part of American history (or at least close to the Cold War), I would scoff at you. This was something that was so off my privileged radar that I found tales of survival in a capitalist wasteland exhausting. But I start my American Lit class teaching Of Mice and Men and secretly want to hang out in this part of history forever. Perhaps it is the fact that the survivors of the Great Depression were able to distinguish between the traps of extreme capitalism and the notion of attaching that to America that really resonates with me. Okay, it was the artists who were doing that. But there's this parallel that I see with America today that I keep jumping back to when it comes to the Great Depression. Watching Chaplin's Tramp navigate through the lowest eschelons of society in an attempt to make a living reminds me the value of art as a time to take the pulse of a society in need to medical / economic salvation. Modern Times goes hard too. I mean, it's always funny. Good art shows up when society starts to crumble because the one thing that people need during this time is something to bond over while having something entertaining. While Karl Marx proclaimed that religion was the "opiate of the masses", I know that entertainment has been placed in a similar camp. But Modern Times might be the film that kind of proves that entertainment doesn't have to try to be apolitical (there is no such thing!) while appealing to notions of simultaneous education and entertainment. I know that not all of my students found Modern Times to be perfect. I got some genuine laughs, so I know that there's at least debate about the quality of the film. But Modern Times, taking into account that comedy is subjective, is honestly very funny. Comedy relies often on the suspense that comes out of dramatic irony. The more you watch a movie, while the dramatic irony is the same, the suspense is lessened because we know when the "bang" is going to come. But I'm a guy who has seen this movie a handful of times. Why am I still laughing? I think that comes down to craftsmanship. I was getting really mad at my Wifi connection during my favorite scene. I had to bring in my Criterion DVD (I had to throw that it was the Criterion in there. Why? Because my brain wouldn't let me not put that.) to show off that scene unbroken. Logically, I remember how close the Tramp gets to the edge of the floor. I know it. But I still held my breath. I still had that cathartic moment when his blindfold is taken off, despite the fact that it has been seared in my head. Very few movies get me to laugh that way over and over again. Why? Magic tricks are less impressive after each viewing. But with the sheer daring-do of Chaplin in Modern Times, he still got me. As much as I replay that image of him skating in my head, somehow Chaplin gets even closer to the edge than I remember. It's really very impressive. I know that we don't have the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd anymore, but I can't see why no one has pulled this card closer. Maybe it is that special effects and OSHA regulations have taken the danger out of any scene viewed (note: they absolutely should). But watching Modern Times, all I can think is "How the heck did he do this?" But back to politics! Yay, politics! (Also, 12-to-18 year old me would roll my eyes at politics while 40-year-old me wants to burn the system down.) PG-13 for action fantasy violence. I keep using my currently nine-year-old son as my litmus for how upsetting things are for kids. (He's a sensitive soul.) He got really scared at the even-concept of Red Witches, so that was a no-go. He kept protesting watching the movie, but he also might have been the one who had the most fun with the movie besides me. He was earnestly invested when everyone else discovered Instagram Reels. There's also some language.
DIRECTORS: John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein Do you know how much I want to learn to play Dungeons & Dragons? It's got a billion rules. It takes forever to play and you need to have consistent gameplaying friends. That doesn't exist for me, nor will it exist for me. I have played dumbed down versions of D&D and loved it. I have one student in particular who really goes into savant mode when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. While I might not know this very complicated game, I can say that Dungeons & Dragons did the best thing that it possibly could do: it made this incredibly nerdy thing incredibly fun for an audience. There was another Dungeons & Dragons movie, if I remember. I think both versions of Dungeons & Dragons might be interesting artifacts reflecting the eras they were in. Honestly, you can just read the studios behind both movies and what the expectations were when making these movies. I'm incredibly glad to live in an era where studios get that movies need to be fun and to let people get a little nerdy with their concepts. It's funny because I honestly don't think you need a ton of knowledge of what D&D is when entering this movie. Heck, you don't even need to know that it is a game. We live in a post Lord of the Rings world. We can thank J.R.R. Tolkien for doing the heavy lifting when it comes to getting audiences prepped for a Dungeons & Dragons movie because this movie is aesthetically very Lord of the Rings but culturally the anti-Lord of the Rings. It's no secret that Tolkien was a linguist and a world-builder first and a storyteller second. His stories are gold and I don't want to take anything away from him. But Tolkien enjoyed letting you know all of the nuances of the world. Honor Among Thieves does not do that. While we have a fairly hamfisted exposition about the role of this mythical world, the film wisely has the attitude of "just go with it." Whoever was the dungeonmaster of this world made the world rich, but that is almost arbitrary. The place feels lived in, but none of that matters beyond the fact that the film asks you to put your trust in its settings. Ed and Holga have to walk the map to get back home? Okay. I'll believe you that it can be done. There's a lot of that. We have no real idea of how grand the world of Honor Among Thieves is and that's okay. I keep saying these seemingly insulting things, but these are all elements that are pluses for the film. Because this is an adaptation of a concept, there's almost no need to really feel tied to the source material because the source material in itself is fluid. Instead, we get the idea that Honor Among Thieves is trying to grasp the soul of the game. We are given archetypes that feel like character classes from the game. They are given a standard quest (to get back Ed's daughter) and to overthrow a traitor. Because we have a need to have a character arc, we're going to throw a bunch of storytelling elements that allow for our protagonists to go through character changes. It's just solid storytelling. I can't believe I'm advocating for the movie's fluff because it is absolute fluff, but that works. Chris Pine is playing Chris Pine. I was able to trick my son (yes, the one with the sensitive soul) back to Star Trek because he's basically playing James T. Kirk the bard. I can almost smell the execs behind the scenes of this movie hoping that Honor Among Thieves will be the start of a Dungeons & Dragons franchise that they can spinoff time and again. As much as that should make me roll my eyes, Honor Among Thieves does exactly that. The first movie in a franchise should be simple and fun. It is all about establishing tone for the series and that's what this movie does. It's the sequel that is meant to complicate things. It's why I like Back to the Future Part II as my favorite (hot take!) of the series. The first movie, as complicated as it might be, is fundamentally about a boy learning who his parents are. The complicated plot and character dynamics really ramp up in the sequel and that's what a sequel is for. Once the setting and the tone is there, you can play. But for a first movie, we get that these people need to know each other and have some flaws. Can Chris Pine only play these characters? Listen, I love Chris Pine. I'm surprised I'm not seeing him in more stuff. But this is a guy who is all charisma and that's a good thing. On paper, this is a movie about Ed, whose cockiness and self-assuredness has brought him nothing but misery. But that sounds bleak and despairing. Instead, we have a guy who says he's miserable. We even understand that he's full of regret. But none of that is going to stop him from having a good time on this mission. Like Star Trek, he's placed in a leadership role where people treat him like a buffoon until they realize that he's mostly right about things. It's funny, because there is a character arc to both Ed and James T. Kirk. It's just that the arc is far more subtle. He never fundamentally changes his behavior from an outward perspective. When Ed is confessing to his daughter that he's been a bad dad, his behavior really hasn't changed. He's still a thief. He still relies on his overabundance of confidence and planning that has made him the character that he is today. He's just secretly penitent about these things. (Okay, not so secretly. We know that he's penitent because he told us that he is. It's just weird that his actions don't necessarily reflect that sense of guilt.) I was just told that this movie did poorly. I never know these things when I first have a baby. To me, all movies are doing fine and they jump to streaming so quickly that I didn't know that these movies didn't do great. But there's a bummer here because this movie opens a lot of doors. Don't get me wrong. I think that Honor Among Thieves is a great standalone movie. In fact, there's almost something Firefly-ish about the whole thing. These characters are so likable that I'm sure that there's probably a certain degree of fan outrage that we'll not see these characters in more adventures. But I do want to see the door that was opened in terms of exploring the concept of magic. Simon is this character that seems like he has a wealth of backstory that is ready to be explored. That might be the biggest problem with the archetype thing that I gushed over earlier. Simon, at this point in the story, is the sorcerer. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
May 2024
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