BTW, said producers are now telling the mainstream media that Saw VII (we real fans refuse to call it Saw 3D) will indeed be the last of the series. The USA Today item also has a couple of points which raise my ire:
The film was re-edited and submitted six times to the Motion Picture Association of America to bring it from an NC-17 to an R rating.
"I'm surprised we got it," says producer Mark Burg. "It's more violent than any of them. But it's in 3-D, it answers all the questions, it comes full circle. We have the goods on this one."
He couldn't say the same thing about the franchise's sixth installment, which earned $28 million last year, roughly half the take of its most recent predecessors.
While also earning the best reviews since the original; making it on to at least a few "best of the year" lists, and not all at horror-movie sites. I know, I've been coming back to that theme since Saw VI opened last year.
It's because I think VI director Kevin Greutert made a film he can genuinely be proud of, and I hate to see it getting the blame for the downturn in the series' earnings.
...family groups accused the franchise of giving rise to "torture porn" films that relish punishing their victims, especially women.
Sigh...okay, the "torture porn" thing. I refer you, again, to this article:
...the Saw movies actually contain less torture than most horror movies, in that most of the excruciating pain is self-inflicted by the characters. John "Jigsaw" Kramer (Tobin Bell), the bogeyman of the series, places his victims in death traps that are usually fast-acting and can only be stopped by an act of self-mutilation or the murder of another person. These are definitely nasty things to do to someone, but they're quick and are done out of a deranged kind of philanthropy—Jigsaw believes those who survive will be stronger people for it—as opposed to the prolonged interrogations we usually associate with torture today.
As for the victims being especially, women, it should be noted that the first Saw is one of the only horror movies in which not a single woman is killed. And the rest of the films are remarkably fair-minded about which sex is to be tested.
For every woman thrown into a pit of dirty hypodermic needles (which she survives, BTW) or getting her arms stuck in a box booby-trapped with razors (she doesn't), there's a man who has to climb inside a working furnace or gets his head blown off by a gun attached to the peephole in a door.
(All those examples, BTW, come from Saw II...should you want to rent it)
But at least, the article does give franchise star Tobin Bell the last word:
"It's a free country," says Bell, who plays Jigsaw. "If people don't want to look at certain things, they shouldn't go. The people who don't go to films were more upset than the horror fans."
Exactly. I know for a fact that hearing or reading a description of a Saw film (or even looking at the posters) is a lot more upsetting than actually going to one.
The way I know that is that my idea of the films, gleaned from that, upset me a lot more before I'd actually seen them. When I did, I became a fan (you may have noticed).
Those fans, Tobin says, are the only ones who matter. "You can say what you want about it, but Saw fans have loved and supported it every year. We must have been doing something right."
And that's why he is our man...
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