Savior Gaming

The ultimate anti-thesis to Michael Myers and the suspenseful bloodless Halloween, we get Friday the 13th by the writer of Last House on the Left, Sean Cunningham. It’s bloody, it’s goofy, and had Kevin fucking Bacon getting killed by that nice lady who was on Murder She Wrote a couple times. What more can you really ask for, on top of having your effects done by the legendary Tom Savini at that; what more could you ask for?

Gather round young people while Uncle Torsten tells you all the story of Camp Blood- and trust me, it’s in every damn Friday movie all the way down the line: long ago a young boy drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. His name was Jason. He was swimming out by himself, alone and drowned. The counselors were off boning each other while he drowned. The Camp shut down for many years until someone bought it and here’s where we begin. We have a group of young adult counselors that come early to set up. Ok, I can’t remember any of there names but I know a mysterious creepy fuck kills them one by one. One gets a ax to the face, another gets a pencil through the eye, and Kevin Bacon’s impressive death where he gets an arrow through his neck from under the bed. When were down to one girl left, nice old Betsy Palmer comes along. I’m saying this now, she is amazing as Pamela Voorhees, the deceased Jason’s distraught mother. She reveals that she’s the killer in revenge for poor Jason and that she is batshit insane. The girl fights Betsy and with some crappy slow motion, gets her head hacked off by a machete. The girl is off in a canoe, going merrily down the lake when Jason’s corpse springs out of the water and gets her!…but it was a dream. Oops.

Friday the 13th is a fun slasher movie that started a pop culture phenomenon and set the slasher standard for the modern day. The first is probably my favorite of the series. I had a few good laughs with the counselors whacky antics and Crazy Ralph spurting nonsense about the death curse of Crystal Lake. The kills are cool and memorably gory. Again, Betsy Palmer steals the show in such a small amount of screen time, being, sweet, crazy, and threatening all at once. I wouldn’t call it scary as much as a good party movie with friends. As always thank you and keep tuning in as I go through the whole saga of Jason Voorhees for our little Halloween special.

So Saw became a hit and of course we got a sequel, this time directed by Darren Lynn Bousmann who a couple years later would direct one of my favorite movies ever, Repo The Genetic Opera. Bousmann would do Saw 2-4.

Saw 2 picks up with detective Eric Matthews (no relation to Boy meets World, and yes I hear that question a bit if it’s the same guy. No.) investigating the Jigsaw killings with his team. Right off the bat we see his life is in shambles, broke, alone and his son Daniel hates his ass. He’s bitter with a violent temper. Suddenly his son goes missing when Matthews gets a huge break in the case; him and his team crack down on Jigsaw’s location and come by dying John Kramer, Jigsaw in the flesh. The cops quickly discover the means of Jigsaw’s game when they see the videos of a group of people trapped in a house full of nerve gas and horrific traps guarding the antidotes that will keep them alive. Daniel is among the group, and Amanda, original survivor of Jigsaw. Game is simple, Matthews just has to talk to John and he’ll find his son. We learn why John is dying and where his obsession of making people appreciate life comes from while were asked “What’s the cure for cancer?”…and in the end, we find his answer of immortality through his apprentice (I won’t spoil it until Saw 3 review).

I’d say Saw 2 is the last of the great Saw films, but even then I can see the flaws of the series beginning to show. Saw 2 is much gorier and the traps remain interesting and startling but I cared way less about the people going into them. Messed up part is, the only character I actually sympathized with and actually rooted for was Jigsaw. Matthews was a dick most of the time and seriously, all the stupid bastard had to do is talk. And he fucked it up, which becomes a common thread. Jigsaw talks, no one listens. At least here it’s a little vague, where in 5 Jigsaw’s instructions are so ridiculously blunt you almost want to jump into a deathtrap to avoid the stupidity. Saw 2 is a fine sequel. Thank you for joining and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

I feel I had to talk about the second huge horror phenomenon of my youth, The Blair Witch Project… well, how about in the same breath I talk about the sequel that most people hated but it was my favorite of the three.

Blair Witch 2 takes place few months after the movie for Blair Witch Project comes out and the world is taken by storm. Going on the film being real, people flock to Burkittsville Maryland to quench there thirst for Blair Witch lore. Our main characters Jeff, Kim, Stephen, Tristan, and Erika are part of a tour going through the woods. It’s lead by Jeff, who in the beginning we learn spent some time in the funny farm. Kim is the goth chick that may or may not psychic shit going on. Stephen and Tristan are writing a Blair Witch; Tristan is pregnant as hell. Erika is an actual wichan. So they go into the woods and scare some other people away from there shit. They drink and smoke some grass and…ORGY! Tristan has a really warped dream that leads to her miscarriage; snow of there destroyed book twirl around them in the morning and Jeff’s tapes are found in under the remnants of a old wall. No one has any idea what happened. They go to Jeff’s loft with the tapes and try to figure out what the hell happened. Meanwhile, they are being haunted by strange, creepy things they bring back with them and by the end it makes us ask if the witch was real or these fuckers were just crazy…

As horror sequels go, it’s really not bad. The score and some of the imagery mash really well together. Tristan’s dream of drowning the baby, the drowned rotted girl walking backwards, some of the video shit is legitimately creepy. What hurts the movie is sometimes the acting can be goofy and a couple of times the scares seem to backfire and crap on itself, like the electric chair flash. A cool feature is the little video at the very end that tells you about the hidden stuff in the movie with the clues where to find it later. As I said in my list of 5 fun horror sequels, me and my oldest friend had a lot of fun with it as kids but there’s some creepy parts with it. As always, thank you and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Anyone want to play a game as I dig into the Saw movies per Savior’s request? No, well shit. Saw is a crazy huge modern low budget that spawned eight movies, two video games, and arguably the film that helped kick off the “gorno”  phase of horror films in the early-mid 2000’s.

Saw is the story of Dr Lawrence Gordon and a dude named Adam who wake up chained by a foot in a dingy bathroom with a dead body, a few strange clues, and a hack saw and are basically left to piece together what’s going on. Gordon recounts the stories he’s heard of the “Jigsaw Killer”, this killer that drops people into deranged and disturbing deathtraps they have to overcome or die. The most famous example of this is the first survivor we encounter, Amanda. A druggie, she awakens with with a strong, rusty metal contraption wired into her mouth that will pretty much break her head apart like a reverse bear trap; her salvation rest in the stomach of her past cellmate and with a a couple minutes to decide she has to cut him open to get the key before dying. We also join two cops on Jigsaw’s trail as they question Gordon, sure he is the culprit. Another player in this game takes Gordon’s family hostage and it is him left with the saw and the choice, how far will he go to survive?

Saw, as a standalone film is pretty solid. It was one of the earliest, if not the first movie James Wan ever did, and you can tell the man who would later give us the modern classics Insidious and The Conjuring has talent; he is one of my favorite directors today. Stylistically it’s interesting. The traps are interesting and actually pretty realistic which adds to the creep factor. Tobin Bell’s voice is iconic now for Jigsaw and the first time you hear his voice with the puppet it’s fucking creepy, I can’t lie. The ending of the movie is actually pretty cleaver and punctuated perfectly by a great score. The only real flaw I can say is sometimes it feels slow and essentially, yes half of the movie is two dudes talking in a filthy bathroom.  I’d recommend it. Thank you as always and may the gaming gods bring you glory.