Homework Movies Saw Series (2004 - 2011)

"I want to play a game."

Sitting in a dark room, sometimes the lights flicker on and there are puzzles to solve on the walls with clues to the next puzzle. This is what it takes for me to get ready to watch this series of movies known as Saw. In 2004 Director James Wan and Writer/Actor Leigh Whannell began a journey with their franchise starting entry into the life and death of reported serial killer named Jigsaw, played by Tobin Bell in every film in the series. Over the next 7 years at Halloween you came to expect to see a Saw movie coming out depicting some sort of violence carried out by it's own victims.

Each of the subsequent movies connects victims and their killers to another "Game" or sequence of events in the previous movies until the Final Chapter, where after several months of investigation, the accomplice to Jigsaw's masterminded crimes of imprisonment and torture is put down, not by the law, but to the other "rehabilitated" persons under the tutelage of Jigsaw is complete.

From the drug users, adulterous doctors to the criminal judge that didn't give a criminal a worthy sentence for murder, no one that has a disregard for human life is without reprieve. By the time we get to the fourth installment of the series, we learn that on top of an inoperable cancer, Jigsaw and his wife lost their child due to one of the first victims in the puzzle that Jigsaw devised. With a death sentence like cancer, you get the impression that Jigsaw wants to see people living their lives with better intentions.

From a business standpoint, these movies made Lionsgate a very large amount of money. The 1st movie was made for only 1.2 Million dollars and grossed over 55 million in America alone. Built on a good business model, the series was made on a very limited budget and was released during a season where it was expected to do well and it didn't disappoint. From beginning to end the series gave just enough information to get the audience interested and left enough time between movies to keep them waiting, salivating for more.

"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance"

That statement describes the fans of this series as much as it is a quote from John BKA Jigsaw to one of his disciples of torture. From the first movie to the second, there was a huge following for each movie afterward. Audiences bought tickets and waited in lines for hours before the movies started during the Halloween season in costume some times. It wasn't hare to tell the victims from the mastermind. A lot less blood on the Jigsaw characters than the slashed up people waiting to see the films.

The movies we watched this week were mostly slick bigger budgeted Horror films that gave the studios that produced them an edge for the youth market. Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead takes the original Night of the Living Dead and the 70's movie of the same name and combined them for one big blockbuster. Even seeing the zombie that was pregnant give birth to a zombie baby was unpleasant, but not scary.

Homework Movie - The Wolf Man (1940)

The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney, Jr. is one of the Universal Pictures legendary monster movies from the 1940's. As a morality tale of promiscuity, this movie begins with a young man returning home to live and then he takes notice of a woman that is already betrothed to another. After finding this out, Larry still continues to pursue her even after being attacked by a wolf, stirring up panic in the gypsy camp that foretold of danger.

I enjoy the classic horror films when they began to use special FX makeup because they were so primitive and yet they still horrified people of the day because it was something they had never seen before, and only read about. Noticing the different camera setups for the transformation is something that nowadays we see because we are so tech savvy that it's obvious. Although there are only a handful of scenes with the monster makeup, they really used them the their advantage and were careful to only have one or maybe two others in the scene with the Wolf Man.

Of the early morality tales, The Wolf Man was the least upfront about the sexuality that is the nature of the beast. With Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Spencer Tracey was overly devious when it came to women. In the movie Cat People, Irene Reed was afraid of stories from her home culture about turning into a cat person once intimate with a man. These were warnings to young people to keep from being promiscuous out of marriage.