Saw
Another high concept film that spawns a franchise of inferior self-ripoffs. Not the gorefest the series is known about.
Most of the things the series is known for is already there, from the very beginning. There’s also other horror staples, the scene with the flash in the “dark” suffers from shitty lighting (lifted from Silence of the Lambs). It should be actually dark and see only flashes, they went for the avant garde but chickened out at the last minute.
This doesn’t reach psychological horror levels, but it is an interesting character study filled with twists and turns that I managed to leave unspoiled all these years.
After 15 minutes of the high concept, it turns into a regular Seven ripoff for a while, without characters to develop. But that is not enough to quench the ADHD, so there’s a bunch of other vignettes, to further develop the original guys in the locked room. Make up your damn mind, which ones are the main characters?
The camera work is already wonky trying to confuse the viewers, but you can chalk it up to young people showing off.
A kinda nuts cast too. The Princess Bride dude, the Lethal Weapon guy, the Person of Interest co-protagonist, Dina “Starship Troopers” Mayer, Ken Leung (from Person of Interest too!), the cameo from The Island.
Leigh Whannell has an annoying voice, and Cary Elwes cannot drop that upper class affectation. Incredible.
It’s no masterpiece, but it’s watchable. Superior to Final Destination, at least the OG.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.