Tonight Lime and I stopped in at the DVD-room and watched a movie. I urged her for us to start in on the mammoth Lord of the Rings Extended Edition series, but she didn’t feel like it and ended up asking the woman who words there for a recommendation.
The woman, who recommended the excellent Save The Green Planet to us a while back (read about that here), told us that SAW was an excellent film. So we took her word for it, though I had some misgivings. “Isn’t this a serial killer movie?”
“No,” the girl replied to the translation of the question.
I don’t know how Korean define the term “serial killer”, but maybe it’s just too mundane for the sick mind behind this story. All I can say is that I feel slightly damaged after having watched the movie. I mean it, I feel emotionally hurt by it, more than a little sick to my stomach, and generally not good. I’ll be fine tomorrow, I suppose, but the movie was certainly not a pleasant experience. It made Tarantino look like a kids’ moviemaker, and made the movie Seven look like a weak, milky bedtime story.
Do as you like, for it may not affect you, but my advice is: if presented with the chance to avoid it, do not see this movie. It’s strange for me to say that, since I tend not to mind gore, or scary stuff. Ghosts, man, those really turn my crank. I love a good scary story. I do not love something that feels sick, literally mentally sick. The story in this movie was all about the shock. The characters were all so weak, their roles so interchangeable. Everyone’s nasty, everyone’s crappy, everyone’s got death an inch away.
That’s fine with me. But there was something else, something horribly twisted, going on inside this movie. It was as if the evil of the madman was glorious somehow. It was as if he was almost justified. Maybe it was because he wins. Nah, wait, I think it was the bit where the man cut off his own foot with a rusty hacksaw, thinking his family dead.
If I were you, I wouldn’t see this movie. There are films that will not leave you feeling as if some tender part within you has been damaged, and why would you want that feeling, anyway? Pass it over. It’s not worth paying to get hurt in one of the few soft, delicate spaces left inside your mind.