Saw, this year's Halloween treat from Tinseltown, is a puzzle piece in which the pieces happen to be body parts. Surgeon Cary Elwes and slacker Leigh Whannell (who penned the script) wake up chained to the walls of a grimy basement; with only a corpse and two hacksaws by way of company, the men are instructed to kill one another if they want to get out alive. Unusually extreme for the American cinema, James Wan's film is one of those breakout low-budget horrors - like the Canadian sci-fi Cube or last year's Dead End - where the lack of star names ensures the viewer never quite knows what's going to happen, only that there's likely to be a nasty surprise around every corner. Morbidly ingenious plotting suggests Whannell and Wan simply sat down, one dark night, and thought up the most ghastly things a person could see and experience, most notably a serial killer who's all the more terrifying for offering every last one of his victims a choice between life and death.
(The Sunday Telegraph, October 2004)
No comments:
Post a Comment