Saw III

Ugh. What happened here? While every Saw movie is supposed to be gruesome and boring, I thought they were also all meant to contain a moral or philosophical message of some kind, twisted as the messages may be. Here? Nothing. Just tons of death. I saw this movie in theaters three years ago, and while I'm usually pretty good (in other words, unaffected whatsoever) when it comes to blood and gore on screen, there was one particular ten minute segment in which a man finds himself drowning in liquefied pig carcasses and then the movie segues into a graphic bout of brain surgery with a power drill. Blech. No thank you. This movie wasn't terrible, but at this point, there's no denying that Saw has ceased to be a series that cares about anything other than graphic and brutal torture and murder scenes. These are fine when combined with memorable plots and characters, and some of the all time memorable movie scenes involve torture or murder to an extent. But when it's just torture and murder for the sake of torture and murder, and no substance accompanies any of it, what's the point? The coolest part of this movie - and it was a novelty at best - was seeing Braveheart's Robert the Bruce as a down-on-his-luck angry suburban dad. I'm not positive about this, but I think that every character in the film with any speaking role whatsoever ends up dead, except for good old Robert. And this includes the torturous murder of one man who had no speaking part. Among the dead, of course, are Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda. So it seems safe to assume the series is over at this point, right? Wrong! The sixth film has just hit theaters and films seven and eight have already been confirmed. What the fuck? Now, I've always been a completionist (somebody who must own all of a series if he owns part of it), but this is patently absurd. Eight films and counting in this shitty series that was undoubtedly "done" by film number three? Are the next five films prequels? Sequels? Does Jigsaw manage to come back to life in the future films? I just don't get it, and I probably never will. Legend has it that Saw IV, the last one I own, is the worst film of the series to date. I gleefully anticipate watching it, hopefully as soon as tonight. After all, it's Halloween, and if I wait just one more day, I'll never have an excuse to view it again for another 364 days.