A Bloody Bore

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

“Saw,” if you recall, was the story of a nut job named Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) who devised absurdly complex death traps for his victims. His twisted ambition, borrowed from “Se7en,” was to impart moral lessons with extreme force and facile irony. His true raison d’etre, however, was to give two young Australian cineastes a pretext for splattering the images and ideas of every horror movie they’d ever seen – all of them, from the look of it – up on the screen.

The movie was stupid, disgusting, ridiculous, and completely preposterous. But it was also a hoot, thanks to the unhinged enthusiasm of director James Wan and his co-writer, Leigh Whannell.Watching the movie somersault through its twists, turns, and revolting reversals, you could almost hear them hyping it up behind the scenes: Dude, let’s do this! Awesome! Now how about that! Dude, you rock! And remember that thing from “The People Under the Stairs? We should totally do something like that! Totally. Dude, for real, our movie is going to be amazing …

A dumb movie deliriously executed, “Saw” proved a hit. Exactly one year later, the inevitable follow-up arrives in time for Halloween. “Saw II” was rushed into production without the participation of Mr.Wan, who’s now finishing up something called “Silence.” But Mr. Whannell is back as co-writer with a new director, Darren Lynn Bousman, and is further credited as executive producer.

Knowing all this, we can hazard that Mr. Wan was the spark that lit up the imaginative dross of “Saw.” Cuz dude, the sequel sucks.

“Saw II” is stupid, disgusting, ridiculous, and completely preposterous. All to be expected. What disappoints is how boring it all is, what a grueling grind to the grind house. Adolescent pulp ecstasy kept the original tolerable, almost infectious. With the gonzo gone, all that’s left is tricked-up exploitation.

Witlessly convoluted, the story finds Jigsaw setting in motion another gauntlet of fiendish devices, double crosses, and icky comeuppance. This time he’s keen on baiting a corrupt police detective (Donnie Wahlberg), which entails snaring his son, together with a half-dozen ex-cons, in a boobytrapped house.

Whatever pleasure there’s to be had here depends on plot surprise and gore. I’ll spare you a description of both, but special mention needs to be made for one deplorable detail. When does an exploitation flick cross the line from enjoyably vile to repellently so? “Saw II” answers the question by styling a character to resemble a Holocaust victim, stuffing him in an oven, turning on the gas, then lingering on his agonized screams.

This atrocious conceit is too blatant to be inadvertent. Given subtext, skill, or even just a sense of humor, the true horror head can tolerate almost any transgression. Yet the sequence, as thoughtless and ahistorical as everything else in the movie, plays out as just another torture trope. Unconscionable. Everything else is forgettable.

***

The cruelties in “Three … Extremes,” an omnibus of Asian horror films, are almost exclusively inflicted on women. The directors are all men. In “Dumplings,” Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan tells the story of a back-alley abortionist who makes restorative snacks out of fetuses, and the pathetically vain woman who gobbles them down to unexpected results. With “Cut,” Korea’s Park Chanwook delights in stringing up a sniveling pianist in piano wire and chopping off her fingers. Next to all this, the burning alive of a young girl in “Box,” from Japan’s Takashi Miike, is almost charming.

“Dumplings” generates a certain amount of interest from the tension between the beauty of its filmmaking and the ugliness of its story. The cinematographer is the great Christopher Doyle (lenser of “Hero” and the films of Wong Kar Wai), and the movie is as much his as Mr. Chan’s. When Qing (Mirian Yeung) pays a visit to Mei (Bai Ling) to sample her secret recipes, it’s the scene’s color and texture that captivate.

As usual, Mr. Park aims to wow with “Cut,” another shallow, hyperbolic revenge flick from the maker of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy.” More is always less in a Park project, and from the tired meta-movie hijinks of the opening scene, to the outrageous Versace decor, to the swaggering camerawork and hysterical performances, “Cut” establishes his status as Asia’s most vapid virtuoso.

A disgruntled extra breaks into the home of a successful filmmaker and ties him to the wall with a huge length of rubber rope. Why rubber? Because it’s cool.The director’s agonized wife is strung up with wire at her piano, like a puppet being extravagantly tortured. Why the absurdly overwrought trap? Because it’s cool.A little girl sits on the couch. The extra “picked her up” on the way over. If the director can bring himself to strangle her, thus proving he’s not too nice a guy (which seems to be the psycho’s main beef),his wife can keep the rest of her fingers.

Intense nastiness is doled out on everyone before these arbitrary atrocities fades to black. Will Mr. Park ever back up his sniggering stylistics with an ounce of substance? That’d be cool.

If you suffer “Cut” through to the end, stick around for “Box,” which manages to evoke a dreamy, unnerving atmosphere before wrapping things up with a regrettable freak show gimmick.

Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) is a chic, depressive novelist who’s taken to holing up in a Spartan office of unfathomable dimensions.The hallway is frequented by a little girl who enjoys levitating, spookily, in dim lit corners. This, we soon learn, is Kyoko’s dead sister. Long ago, they danced side by side in a weird theatrical act situated on a snow-swept mountain plain. One day, sibling rivalry took a grim turn, and Kyoko has been haunted by her memories ever since.

But are they memories, dreams, or hallucinations? “Box” sustains its ambiguities just this side of maddening, thanks to Mr. Miike’s visual elan. The spastic Lynchian surrealism of his recent “Gozu” and “Izo” has been tempered by cool, creeping minimalism: Think J-horror through a looking glass designed by Jil Sander. The unfortunate sub-“Twilight Zone” twist of a finale exits “Three … Extremes” on a miscalculation that’s characteristic, alas, of this omnibusted project.


The New York Sun

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