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It was a Friday Night in Crestwood at about 1am when Saw 3 had just ended. The theater was quiet as everyone departed to their cars. I noticed no excitement, enjoyment, or positive buzz in the air. I heard lots of comments from people stating how gross the film was, how disgusting the film was, and how it was too much. Does this sound like a good Friday night out to you? No. I have never seen a movie theater so quiet before in my life. They were even more vocal during The Dukes of Hazard than Saw 3. Now I realize everyone's theater experience is different. I have had certain friends tell me their theater was buzzing and living it up. But my question is when did torture become entertainment? Now I'm not naive enough to say that horror films should not have violence and kills since that is a big part of what makes horror films. To ask horror films to stop killing people is similar to asking dramas to stop making you cry. Their goal is to scare you, to kill people, and to make you scream. If they are not succeeding with their goals, they are not doing their job. But was anyone actually scared during Saw 3? I don't consider barfing and being disgusted scary. It is more unnecessary and tedious. It seems that everyone is just sitting around thinking of ways to tear off limbs in creative fashion. Anyone can do gross out horror or disgusting things, and I mean anyone. I can prance around naked and people will be grossed out. People can eat worms and be grossed out. On the same token anyone can cut someone up in a movie and make you go "eww." It does not take any talent, creativity, or uniqueness to perform such feats. I can come up with ways to do gross out things in my sleep as can anyone. I can put in a movie that someone gets their foot stuck in a blender and it gets mashed. It will gross you out, right? But did it take talent for me to come up with that? No. Horror movies today are confusing gross out horror with intense, emotional, and jacked up horror. Which along with "fun" horror is the best kind of horror. Gross out horror is like the guy at the circus who eats the head off a chicken. No fun for the chicken, no fun for us, and no fun for the guy. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about as Saw 3 made 34 million dollars this weekend and people for the most part seem to enjoy gross out horror. It is only short term money though as eventually people will have seen everything they could have seen from horror films. After you have seen someone lose their head 100 times, it kind of loses the affect doesn't it? Horror fans are picky and if you don't satisfy them, they won't come back. I'm starting to think pretty soon horror films will be straight up NC-17 as they will want to show as much gore and disgusting things as they can. They can only slip films like Hostel and Saw 3 under the radar for so long. Eventually the MPAA will start handing out NC-17 ratings and the studios will accept that rating. When will the horror genre step back and start coming with characters instead of gore? They need to give us characters that will scare us over some guy who says nothing and is a mute. Remember the film Se7en? Of course you do. That is one of the scariest films of all time because of Kevin Spacey's performance. It makes all the grisly and disturbing things we see that much more graphic because we see the man who is performing these acts, he has something to say, and he is pure evil. Is Jigsaw really that scary? Is Amanda really that scary? Nah, not really. A human being performing an act of graphic nature is more scary than any monster or creature Hollywood could come up with. Need I mention Frank Booth from Blue Velvet? Scary as hell. Gore does not scare people, people scare people. Hollywood needs to put their minds together and come up with some scary people and then think about the gore. You can have your gore all you want. You can splatter the screen red for all I care. But before you do that give us someone that will really scare the crap out of us. Seeing uninteresting and tedious characters torture other uninteresting and tedious characters is just torture for the sake of torture. I don't like that. It is not a lot of fun to watch and is really rather sick. Give us a method to the madness. Give us some old fashioned Hollywood theory. I love me some logic. I can always rent the Faces of Death series if I want to see people killed off and have no investment in them.
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