Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Saw V

Forgot to post this earlier. Saw V was by no means a great movie. It is also by no means the worst movie I've ever seen. Half of the movie, the group of people being tortured, was terribly written and more forced than necessary. The part about the cop being Jigsaw's successor wasn't bad, although as someone mentioned to me the two cops in this movie looked way too similar, and was more of a throwback to the first two movies which I think were the best of the series. Saw III and Saw IV were the worst of the series and this one is right in the middle. If they put this one after Saw II and gave it a rewrite it would have made a pretty damn good trilogy. The whole series went downhill after they changed the writer and director.

As far as the concept of "Torture porn" I'm not really sure why it is so popular recently. I think in general the level of violence in movies has increased at the same rate as violence on basic cable or in the media. Once you start desensitizing people to certain levels of violence, which has been steadily happening for a while now, to make as big an impact with it you have to kick it up a notch. That is all this "torture porn" is doing. Action movies that had excessive violence used to be rated X and sometimes NC-17, a rating we don't see much anymore because the industry doesn't want to be exclusive. Some movies today are even edited to make them PG-13 when they have no business being there. I've seen too many movies recently that have been butchered and made "appropriate" just so they can make more money off of younger viewers seeing it in theaters.

I do admit the way the horror genre has shifted to the torture concept is odd. Then again no more odd than the slasher concept that came before it. In general the horror genre goes through phases and I think that torture is the current one. I personally hope it doesn't stick around as long as slasher did but who knows. The other thing that has led to this is the lack of good stories or plot in today's movies. Torture porn as they call it lends itself to this lack of good writing. I'm not saying all of these movies have no plot or story, some of them do and are well written, but it is a rare thing. I really can't say why this particular idea of torture has become so popular in cinema today, but I can say this is not the best time for the horror genre.

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