Saw is such a pile of rubbish in almost every way. The opening premise and set-up had a ton of potential, but they destroyed any chance they had at building actual suspense when they decided to inter-cut an incredibly trite and silly police procedural into the film. Danny Glover acts like he hit his head on the way to make the film, as he fumbles around glassy-eyed, talking to himself throughout the film. Just when tension starts to build, we cut away to some of the most banal and boring dialogue and situations I have seen in any film. Add to this the moronic writer, Leigh Whannel, who insisted on playing one of the leads. This guy is THE WORST actor I have ever seen. Ever. I wonder how many times they had to shoot each of his scenes. The only thing he can do is whine in a high pitched voice. His screenwriting consists of having a character do something, then having another character yell while it is going on so as to make sure we know it is happening, then cutting to two flatfeet cops describing another instance of something happening while we see a flashback within a flashback of the event they are talking about. It's like show and tell in Kindegarten.
I really think if they had just stayed in the room with the two men, revealing clues to the viewer as they were found, this film could have been pretty damn good. Alas, the creators must have started with that idea, but when they only ended up with a 20 minute film, they decided to attach a detective story to the film. This effectively destroys the claustrophobic tension they managed to build in the opening moments.
Alas, what do amateur film makers do when they get stuck trying to figure out how to expose facts in their film?
FLASHBACKS
Silly, boilerplate flashbacks or silly Rube Goldberg devices attached to characters that just don't matter. Oh, some junkie had to claw a key out of some dudes tummy? WHO CARES? Who is this chick? We don't care about these random people! They have nothing to do with the characters in the film; they don't move the story along in anyway. The scenes are just tacked on to shock the audience out of their interminable boredom. Also, they are set up in some of the worst, cheapest sets I have ever seen in a film. Actually, there aren't any sets, just dark rooms with trash on the floor and some piles of barbed wire.
Finally we get to the film's twist ending, which is pure nonsense, hamstringing any sort of MO the alleged killer or...errr...trap setting guy could have had. Why are we shown several people who apparently don't respect life enough, caught in traps, and then given a very specific reason as to why, only to have that reason not apply to the two people who are actually important characters in the film? The twist is absolutely incoherent in every way. It's a cheap gag meant to surprise the audience, nothing more. It changes nothing that has come before, makes us re-evaluate nothing, and instead of making the audience want to rewatch the film in a new light, like say,
The Usual Suspects or
The Sixth Sense, it instead made me want to head directly to the bar to fire shots of vodka down my throat at high speed in an effort to forget what I had just seen.
I will say, there is some damn good comedy in the film. The scene during which Dr. Gordon is yelling into his cell phone is HILARIOUS. It is so poorly done, that I am bent in half laughing with tears coming out of my eyes by the time he gets to sentence two in the scene. The trouble is, the scene is not meant to be comedic in nature.
Last but not least, I abhor the incredibly terrible editing in this film. The spastic camera moves and super choppy edits don't build tension, they destroy it. This is a director unsure of his skills, so he just "fixes it in post".
Say, let's get back on topic, which was slasher films. Saw is just not a slasher film, by any stretch of the oimagination. I would call it a splatter film or perhaps torture porn.
Best Slasher film:
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
By the by - The Slasher film was popularized in the 70s, not the 80s, with the above film and 1978's
Halloween.