Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A guy wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize. There’s a large bear trap affixed to his face with some sort of clockwork around it. He’s tied to a chair in one of the worst dumps you can imagine wearing a death helmet, freaking out as he gains consciousness, and after a moment of some screaming, a television turns on in front of him. The puppet face on the TV turns, and the voice of serial torturer Jigsaw says “I want to play a game.”
You’ve heard it before, I’m sure. The ‘Saw’ series is notorious for this exact scene, over and over again, each time with more sadistic traps than the last. And every year, on Halloween, a movie comes out with enough of them to make a decent person sick to their stomach. But this year, there’s a double feature of sorts – not only does a new ‘Saw’ film come out for the sixth consecutive year, but a video game is being released.
Nothing that’s been shown in the game’s footage is anything new to the series. Reaching through a bunch of used syringes to get to a key? The bear trap thing? Being stalked by someone in a pig mask and a red robe? We’ve seen it all before in your movies, you imbeciles. When you base your series’ success on how well you can shock and amaze people with how screwed up you are, recycling your old ideas are a fast way to kill the interest in your series.
What do you do in the ‘Saw’ video game? The answer is “not a whole lot.” What I’ve seen of the game from its trailers and game play videos doesn’t add up to much. It seems like someone’s taken ‘Silent Hill 2’ and removed anything that was good from it, instead replacing all the surrealism and horror with a sense of urgency and a bunch of pointless, undue sadism. It’s like survival horror for Amish toddlers.
When a series capitalizes on making people cringe, there’s only so far you can go before it becomes overdone. Logically, they should have stopped around the time they had the idea to make a sequel to the first movie. Instead, in the classic tradition of ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street’, the films blend together with some vague semblance of plot, and the only thing that matters is that every year there’s something gory to look at. Is that really something to look forward to on an annual basis – watching people die in new ways, each year more insane and over-the-top than the last?
Even if the point of the films was to desensitize people, the writers and producers and directors should be doing it in a way that makes at least a little sense. You can scare people better when you’re doing things that might actually happen to them. An old man designing ornate traps from rusted metal and used syringes? You might as well be afraid of the Bogeyman. Reality is stranger than fiction, and oftentimes scarier.
The only thing that really unnerves me anymore is that people still flock to this trash. Every year the makers get enough sales to keep making them. It boggles the mind.
The only logical conclusion is that there is no point. The movies and games following ‘Saw’ have no point at all. It’s violent pornography, and that’s really it. We don’t need a game, or any more of these damn movies.
Please, do humanity a favor – don’t see the movie, and don’t play the game. Read a book or something.