saw v

Is it me, or does it feel like the saw series has been going on forever?

In reality, the first film came out in 2004 and they've been releasing 1 new one each year since then. Saw 5 was therefore last year's entry in the series.

I came quite late to the saw series - I obviously knew about them, but I hadn't seen any of them until fairly recently. I think part of this was because of that label of being 'torture porn'.

I mean, it's a brutally descriptive label and I'm not sure I fancied the idea of watching torture done in an appealing way. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy a good horror movie and torture is a suitably horrendous thing to feature in a horror movie, it was just that porn tag that made it seem like something I wouldn't like.

However, a while back I thought I might as well find out what they were really like, so I put them on my rental list. Now sometimes, the way the rental list works there's a real risk of getting the films out of order, but I was lucky enough to get them in order, and also to get them in fairly quick succession.

So in other words, I watched 1, 2, 3 and 4 in order and within a short space of time. As it turned out, I think this helped quite a bit, because the torture porn label was not quite accurate.

What I mean is that the films turned out to have much more in the way of story than I'd anticipated. The torture was actually a result of the bad guy putting people into lethal games where generally they (or someone important to them) had to endure some sort of physical pain in order to win the game. If they lost, then they (or the someone else) would be killed in generally quite nasty ways.

So to start with, the central gimmick of the film is already pretty complicated. Normally the central core of these horror franchises is quite simple, but here you have an interesting basic premise - I mean, as Jigsaw himself points out, he never actually kills people, unlike every other killer in these horror films.

Also, as the series progressed there were more than a few twists that actually worked and it was revealed that there was a proper back-story and that there were accomplices and copycats and all sorts. They also tended to play about with the timelines, so sometimes it turned out you'd seen things in non-chronological order, of things you thought were simultaneous were actually far apart.

It was also pretty much the case that everyone that died was - how to put it? Deserving? Generally, these people were nasty criminals or had escaped justice or whatever. And in Jigsaw's traps they also had a genuine chance - if they did what they had to and what they were told to, then they would survive.

However, this seemed to change in the fourth film - some of the people that got killed were not given a chance, or they did not really deserve to die. Or at the least, the justifications changed gear - where previously they, I dunno, got away with a hit-and-run, in 4 some of the people were being punished for things like not getting over their grief. Also, some of the traps became fiendishly complicated, or over-complicated.

Unfortunately, 5 seems to continue this trend. Some of the people in the traps haven't necessarily done anything particularly bad. There's a world of difference between someone who escaped justice for a proper crime and simply not doing what Jigsaw says.

On the upside, the plot of 5 is simpler than it was in 4, where it became incredibly complicated. Unfortunately, this simplicity is also at the expense of it being interesting. Although it reveals a bit more depth and gives some back-story, the problem is that this back-story isn't hugely interesting.

What doesn't help either is that the franchise is now almost totally impenetrable to the outsider. I mean, given the gap between me watching this film and 4, I was rather lost myself, and I've seen all the films.

The only real saver is that the actual traps themselves are still as good as ever (well, excepting that aspect of fairness).