#10: Starship Poopers
Treehouse of Horror IX
October 25, 1998

When Maggie loses her baby legs and sprouts a crop of writhing tentacles, it’s revealed that Homer isn’t her father at all. The secret truth is that Marge had been abducted and inseminated by Kang, a drooling space octopus.

Marge: I can’t believe it. Jerry Springer didn’t solve our conflict.
Lisa: And now he’s dead.

Hilarious.

#9: Dial “Z” for Zombies
Treehouse of Horror III
October 29, 1992

Bart and Lisa, as have so many children before them, inadvertently raise the dead and unleash a horde of brain-starved zombies on Springfield. Once the undead masses threaten to overtake the town, it’s up to the kids to cast the spell that will send them back to their graves–but not before Homer has a courageous showdown at the book depository.

Aside from being a great Simpsons episode, it’s a lot better than George Romero’s last two Dead movies, too.

#8: Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace
Treehouse of Horror VI
October 29, 1995

It’s a parody of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Groundskeeper Willie taking the place of Freddy Krueger and killing children in their dreams. Like Krueger, he’s taking revenge on the children of the people who burned him to death; unlike Krueger, he was burned not because he was a child murderer but because nobody really cared when he got set on fire.

It also has the following excellent line from Principal Skinner: “Children, I couldn’t help monitoring your conversation. There’s no mystery about Willie. Why, he simply disappeared. Now, let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.”

#7: The Devil and Homer Simpson
Treehouse of Horror IV
October 28, 1993

#6: Time and Punishment
Treehouse of Horror V
October 30, 1994

This sequence is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “A Sound of Thunder.” You know the one; it’s the story that taught us all that if you travel back in time and so much as bend a blade of grass, you will fuck everything up for sure. So don’t do it!

Unfortunately, Homer Simpson is the one traveling through time in this case—an ability he develops after accidentally jamming his hand in a toaster—so, in terms of preserving the timeline as we’ve known it, the outlook is none too good. With each trip into the past, he inadvertently does some measure of damage that changes everything about the world he comes from. At one point he finds himself in a world where Ned Flanders is the unquestioned lord and master of the universe; another time he is an ant-sized Homer plagued by a gargantuan Bart and Lisa.

Each time he finds his reality destroyed, he again travels to the prehistoric past in attempt to set things right. In typical Homer fashion, he fails each time. Once he squashes a bug, once he kills some dinosaurs, and on one particularly memorable occasion he sits down on a fish, squeezing the life out of it and prompting him to deliver one of the greatest lines in the whole history of The Simpsons: “Oh, I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish.”

 #5: The Homega Man
Treehouse of Horror VIII
October 26, 1997

Thanks to those cheese eating surrender monkeys the French, a neutron bomb detonates on Springfield, leaving Homer apparently the last man alive. After surveying the corpse-filled town, he proceeds to do many of the things you and I would do if we knew we could behave however we liked without fear of consequences: he sees movies, dances naked in a church, etc.

#4: Terror at 5 1/2 Feet
Treehouse of Horror IV
October 28, 1993

In a parody of what is arguably the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone, Bart sees a monster on the side of his school bus, tearing it apart.

#3: Citizen Kang
Treehouse of Horror VII
October 27, 1996

Though more dated than any other single thing on The Simpsons, tied in as it is to a specific moment in time, “Citizen Kang” is so hilarious that it is every bit as worth watching now as it was when it was timely.

The 1996 Presidential election is only a few days away, and space aliens Kang and Kodos put into motion a sinister plot to take over the world: they abduct candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and assume their identities through bio-duplication!

Personal favorite line, from Kang: “We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us.”

#2: Bart Simpson’s Dracula
Treehouse of Horror IV
October 28, 1993

Mr. Burns is a vampire! Maybe he will bite you and turn you into a vampire! And he has a Super Fun Happy Slide in his house! Watch out for that!

#1: The Shinning
Treehouse of Horror V
October 30, 1994

Oh, holy cow is this one great. As the title would lead you to guess, this segment is a parody of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film version of The Shining. The most impressive thing about this little cartoon is that it manages to hit every pertinent point of the two hour film, distilling it down to its very essence in just seven minutes. But even if you’ve never seen the movie from which this draws its inspiration, there is plenty here for you to enjoy.

The story in a nutshell: Homer is hired on as the winter caretaker for a hotel Mr. Burns owns, and he brings his family with him. The hotel is full of spooks and haints, and they do all they can to make Homer go crazy and kill his family. Adding to the ghosts’ influence is the fact that the hotel is completely devoid of all beer and cable TV, and it’s this more than anything else that pushes Homer over the edge.

And when he goes over the edge, he does so in absolutely marvelous form. Homer’s freakouts are some of the most comical things mankind has yet unleashed upon the world. Homer screams and jibbers while contorting his face and body into positions so bizarre they make me get down on my knees and give thanks to the heavens for the fact that animation exists. He goes from one comical pose to the next, each more hilariously improbable than the last, leaving the viewer laughing so hard he wets not just his pants but the pants of several people nearby.

Halloween H20—despite having a premise that immediately sends up red flags—turned out to be a pretty awesome movie. In fact, it is easily the best of the Halloween sequels. Sure, it discarded the continuity established in movies 4, 5 and 6, but the promise that was shown by the pretty good Halloween 4 was squandered by 5 and 6 anyway so I wasn’t too sad about that. Things came full circle, Laurie Strode became the hunter rather than the hunted and she got genuine revenge on her psychotic, bemasked brother. And it ended in such a way that it would have been a truly satisfying conclusion to the entire series. Then along came Halloween: Resurrection and fucked all that up in a big, bad way.

From the very beginning, you know the movie is gonna be a bad one. The definitive end of Michael Meyers we’d seen in the previous movie was discarded and made into a big misunderstanding. Though the title suggests that Meyers might be resurrected, nothing so grand is needed; instead we’re told that he never even died and really Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had mistakenly killed some other dude. It’s the kind of poorly executed cheat that would make Kathy Bates get pissed off and break your legs.

Sadly, that’s not even the worst thing about the beginning. This little prologue where we learn that the last movie was a waste of our time also shows that Laurie, who had evolved into one bad-ass bitch in Halloween H20, was so distressed by the fact that she killed the wrong dude that she was put into an institution, where she spends her days and nights staring out the window waiting for Michael to return. Which he does, of course, and before the movie is five minutes old he’s killed Laurie. Yeah, you read that right: Michael Meyers gets the best of Laurie Strode and kills her dead right at the beginning of the picture. It’s exactly the opposite of what we want to see in a Halloween movie.

It’d be hard to say the movie only gets worse from there, but it definitely stays at least that bad. Some sort of internet TV show is going to give a bunch of college kids cameras and have them search the abandoned (OR IS IT?) Meyers house looking for clues as to what made the kid go bad and become a stabby little bastard. The producers of the show have secretly loaded the house with all kinds of fake spooky instruments of child abuse to make sure their viewers get the goods, but as a result, we don’t learn anything about Michael…which we don’t want to do anyway! What a terrible device to hang your story on. Remember how in all the other movies, Donald Pleasence is constantly screaming about how Michael is pure evil, with nothing inside him and black empty eyes? Remember that exchange in the original picture?

LAURIE: It was the boogeyman.
DR. LOOMIS: As a matter of fact, it was.

The boogeyman! That’s what he is, nothing more, and your audience already knows it. We know he’s just an evil killing machine and nothing made him that way (except, possibly, a dumb druid ritual in one of the sequels this movie ignores).

Anyhow, some kids go into the house. I don’t know who they were. Now, I don’t mean I don’t remember the characters’ names like in most slasher movies. In many a Friday the 13^th picture, we don’t specifically remember the characters themselves, as they’re basically just there to get knifed, but we at least remember which standard types were present. Let’s consider the horror movie The Ruins: in it you had the Brunette Girl, the Blonde Girl, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Shaggy Kid, and the Foreigner. That’s okay. We see these types and we know what they are. But Halloween: Resurrection goes so far wrong that I not only don’t remember what types were in the movie but I can’t even recall how many people were in the house. There was a girl and another girl, who were completely interchangeable. There was a guy who liked cooking. Then, there may have been as many as five others, but I honestly don’t know. I can’t even try to figure it out by counting the deaths, because the death scenes—the slasher movie’s stock in trade—had nothing whatsoever to recommend them. I watched the fuckin’ thing last night and I have no idea what went on.

So: some people go to a house, most (all? I don’t remember or care) of them get killed, but Michael escapes (or maybe he didn’t? see above), and everything about the movie sucks a fat one. Also there were some kids at a Halloween party, and they sent text messages a lot. I mean a lot.

The very existence of this movie enrages me. It would be bad enough if it were just a terrible movie. But it goes beyond that. It undermines the satisfying end that Halloween H20 provided and offers this load of garbage instead. Then, the next movie in the series was a remake that started the franchise all over again. So why was this needed? Why couldn’t they have left the original Halloween run, which started with so much promise, with a worthy last word? Why ruin all that by trying to continue a series that had breathed its last?

Will there ever come a time when Hollywood stops ruining everything I love?

If you don’t like Halloween: Resurrection, then you will also totally hate:

Halloween (2007)

There’s one key difference between that original classic and the current new batch of unpleasant, endurance-test movies. The modern pictures are trying to entertain you; The Last House on the Left, on the other hand, seems to adopt the position that nobody could be entertained by this. It’s job is not to amuse, but to upset. Instead of giving the audience what it wants, it points finger at the audience as they squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats, and it fairly shouts at you: “You came here to be delighted by people being raped and tortured and brutalized and murdered? What in the fuck is wrong with you?” And that’s why it succeeds where others have failed.

As a title, The Last House on the Left is completely meaningless. There aren’t any houses on the left, first or last. What the picture’s actually about is two innocent young girls who are kidnapped by a gang of thugs. They’re sexually assaulted, painfully tortured and ultimately murdered in cold blood. The violence is gritty and in your face, the brutal sexuality is on screen and never tastefully done and the whole thing is basically an attack on your senses and your sensibilities. Everything that transpires in these sequences is absolutely horrible, and it’s all juxtaposed with slapsticky scenes of comedy and oddly cheery folk music. That’s how life is, isn’t it? One minute it’s laughter and gaiety, the next terrible tragedy.

Although he’s since become one of horror’s top names, this was writer/director Wes Craven’s very first picture. A low budget and a crop of amatuers means there isn’t the flash and pizazz of a Hollywood movie, increasing your belief that what you’re seeing on screen is really happening. The grainy 16mm film further adds to the notion that this is a documentary rather than a simple movie (in spite of the now famous tagline “Keep repeating: It’s only a movie.”). And of course there’s the title card at the beginning that says the movie is based on a true story, which is a complete and utter lie. But hey, it keeps you guessing.

It’s hard to come up with anything more to say about this picture, because it’s really just an affront to all things decent. But it’s a good movie. It endures because it makes a statement, and that statement is: “Why would you sickos wanna look at this stuff? You should be ashamed of yourself, getting all excited over violence.” It’s that message that has caused it to rise above its imitators.

In his intro to the DVD, Wes Craven has this to say: “What you’re about to see is the most complete version of Last House on the Left that has been released to this date since the original theatrical release that was done previous to any cuts. And all materials that were removed for reasons of community standards or protests of censors and everything else has been restored, so you should be aware of that. Remove any small children or innocent animals from the room and take some sort of a tranquilizer yourself if you’re at all unstable in your psychological makeup.”

I think that about says it all.

When I saw the trailer for The Ruins, I didn’t really know what to make of it. I could tell there were going to be some people, and some peril, and probably some ruins. But just what the danger was, or how it manifested itself, or really what the movie was about…all that remained a mystery.

Then I actually saw the movie and discovered, to my dismay, that it is about some kids who go to some Central American ruins and are menaced by a sentient freaking plant. It’s Indiana Jones and the Little Shop of Horrors. I’m serious, I promise.

There are five characters trapped in the domain of the spooky plant. Well, that’s not strictly true; there are five people, but I would hardly call them characters. They’re more like slightly-animated cardboard cutouts, and if you’ve seen any movie ever you’ve seen them before. First are two couples, Clean-Cut b/w Blonde and Bushy-Hair b/w Brunette. Joining them is their new friend Foreigner. Together they wander around in the jungle and wind up at the titular ruins, the home of the deadly talking plant.

Oh, yeah, did I not mention that it’s a talking plant? It is.

Anyway, once these people find themselves in the realm of the freaky foliage, they’re not allowed to leave or something so they’re stuck. As if this weren’t problem enough, Foreigner manages almost immediately to fall and break his legs and spine. So Foreigner is in Urgent (HAR!) need of a hospital, Blonde and Brunette are annoying all the time, and Clean-Cut and Bushy-Hair don’t do anything at all in the course of the film that anyone would remember.The evil carnivorous talking plant attacks everybody a couple of times, leaving them bloodied and filthy; Foreigner in particular is a Dirty White Boy (HAR!). As time passes rescue seems more and more unlikely. The plant is closing in all the time and Foreigner’s condition is worsening; he develops a fever, leaving him Hot Blooded (HAR!), and it soon becomes apparent that they’re probably going to have to amputate his gross broken legs. Most of us would greet this news with shock and panic, but not this guy. He’s pragmatic and emotionally detached. Yes, Foreigner is Cold as Ice and willing to sacrifice his legs (HAR!!!).

Then I guess the plant attacks some more or whatever, some people die, some people don’t. I don’t really care much about this movie specifically. But I am very pleased by what it represents. Although the villain in this movie is a vicious vine and not a knife-wielding maniac, it’s still essentially a slasher movie. Our heroes are a group of attractive young people played by not very good actors, they go to a spooky and isolated location and are picked off one by one by the menace lurking in the shadows. One girl gets naked, there are some good gushy bits of splatter and gore, and in the end the girl who didn’t get naked survives. This is Friday the 13th 101 stuff, and I love it. I dearly hope this is indicative of a return to horror movies in the 1980s style: R-rated, one killing after another, gore played as much for cheers as for scares, and at least one healthy set of tits along the way.

So yeah, I didn’t like The Ruins much, but hopefully I’ll have it to thank for a lot of movies that I do.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

The single best way to describe Shutter, a remake of a 2004 horror film from Thailand, would be “unremarkable.” In almost every way, this is an eminently forgettable movie.

Our story follows Ben (Joshua Jackson) and his young bride (Rachael Taylor) as they start their new life together by moving to Japan, where a high profile photography job awaits, not to mention the vengeful ghost of a creepy girl. Apparently that’s what happens in Japan when you run over a disappearing woman with your car; she follows you around looking menacing and humming nerve-jangling melodies, driving you ever closer to the brink of madness. Oh, plus she keeps showing up in photographs as a weird spectral blur or whatever, which I guess is where the movie gets its camera-related title. I say I guess because I don’t actually care.

The problem with a movie like this, where the story hinges on scary pictures and spirit photography, is that the whole concept just doesn’t inspire fascination the way it once did. It has, after all, been over 100 years since Kodak’s Brownie came on the market and put photography in the hands of the masses. Everyone takes pictures of everything all the time, and so the camera has lost its mystique as a peculiar halter of time and capturer of souls. Add to that the fact that the Spooky Camera story has been told and retold so many times over the decades, and you’re left with a movie that’s not only paper-thin plotwise and devoid of any real scare potential, but also tediously familiar.

All is not thoroughly awful, however. There is one scene in particular that I did find interesting, from a directorial standpoint. As with the rest of the picture, the scene is clearly derivative of many things that have come before, but it’s executed in a somewhat innovative fashion. The standard version of the scene takes place on a stormy night, with something nefarious lurking in the dark and suddenly—surprise!—being illuminated by a flash of lightning. Given the photography theme of this picture, that trope was appropriately twisted to feature the sporadic bursts of light from the flashbulb of a camera with—gasp!—a mind of its own! What makes the way it played out so interesting is twofold. In part, there’s the fact that with each new flash, the camera was an entirely different place, with the ghostly terror moving to and fro about the room without being seen by the hero. Further, there is just how long this sequence went on. I’m not saying it was the battle scene from The Two Towers, but the time spent at the mercy of the camera’s flash was far more intriguing to watch than the usual “two lightning strikes and the killer’s right behind you” way of doing things. First the ghost is here, then she’s there, then you don’t know where she is, and in between it all: total blackness. I’m not talking about movie darkness, where it’s bright enough to see everything. When the flashbulbs weren’t firing, the screen was utterly black, and you never knew quite what you’d see when the light came back. But I suppose there’s a problem with your movie when its best scene is one where most of the time the audience isn’t looking at anything at all.

Despite that one moment of interest, I cannot in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone. After this and other films like The Ring and The Grudge, I’m forced to conclude that I just don’t care what’s cooking over in Asia, horrorwise. During this movie as during those others, I spent most of the time just wondering when it would be over. Further, there wasn’t a single good scare in the film’s whole running time, which is a detriment to horror films as I understand them. The actors all did their best, but Joshua Jackson was miscast as the male lead. He’s extremely likeable as a supporting castmember, but whatever qualities it takes to carry a film, he doesn’t have them.

Skip this one, guys. You aren’t missing anything.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

If the question is “Eric, would you like to see a horror movie starring Gregory Peck?” I immediately fire back the answer of “Hells, yes!” I’ll give you that answer every time. I love horror as much as every red-blooded American ought, and Greogry Peck was perhaps the very ultimate achievement in manhood. Gregory Peck knew how to be awesome at all times. He also knew that if your child was a demonspawn destined to destroy all of Christendom, the least you could do was stab him in ritualistic fashion with a series of ceremonial knives. The wisdom of Solomon, he had.

It’s not just the Peckinator that makes The Omen great, though. This may well be my very favorite horror movie of all time. I’m usually torn between it and Poltergeist, an odd state of affairs when you consider that neither film has any excessive gore or exposed breasts and that The Omen doesn’t even have any bad words! Not an f-bomb or raunchy sex scene in sight, yet I love this picture. You know what that means right? That means it must be really good to hold my toddler-like attention span and keep me from wandering outside to throw rocks at squirrels.

Being that this is the story of a little boy who’s totally the Antichrist, this movie fits into one of the major subgenres of horror. In contrast to Poltergeist and The Exorcist, which feature a cute little kid being unfairly terrorized, this is one of many films that feature a totally creepy kid who terrorizes everyone else. He stands there looking sinister and glaring up at you from his dead eyes, and you can’t help but fall into a feces-squirting fit of fright. Is there anything more unsettling than the menacing child? It’s completely unnatural for a little youngling to seem all malevolent and scareifying, and so our very foundations are shaken by this creepy Damien kid. Which is why we fully support the Peckster when he decides it’s time to rise up righteous and do something about his hellbaby.

Hey, you know who else is in this movie, in the role of the plucky photographer who joins Gregory Peck in his globetrotting adventures to learn how to murder his goat-legged boychild? It’s none other than David Warner! You may not recognize the name immediately, but you’d definitely recognize the guy. He’s an extremely awesome British chap who has appeared in such excellent movies as Star Trek VI and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II. Plus about a million other things. I’ve been obsessed with David Warner since I was still in shortpants, when I saw him as Bob Cratchitt in a TV version of A Christmas Carol (the one with George C. Scott as Scrooge). His appearance in the Ninja Turtles sequel only further cemented him in my mind as the most bodacious Briton since…well, I can’t think of any really cool Englanders from centuries past, but trust me, David Warner’s rockin’. Let’s just hope he doesn’t start to panic and…lose his head?! (HAHAHAHAforeshadowing?)

Any movie about a moody silent kid who pushes his mother over railings and enjoys the sight of nannies hanging themselves and causes apes to go (ready?) apeshit is going to naturally be scary. But there’s something about getting the Catholic church involved that always (with the exception of Stigmata, which I’d just as soon forget) manages to bump things up to the next level, isn’t there? I personally have no system of faith of any kind, much less one as elaborate and structured as Catholicism, but I totally dig any of these stories about biblical prophecy and Catholic rites and whatnot. The fancy robes and the nifty Latin words and the divide between clergy and laity and all the sturm und drang of the various rituals and ceremonies make everything seem so serious and full of gravitas. A Protestant minister wouldn’t be nearly so interesting as a Catholic priest, and their lack of milennia-old rigidly defined procedures just make them seem like a bunch of chumps. Some Methodist is comin’ around telling me about the Antichrist? Get out of here! Bring on the blood-drinkin’ Romans, please! Only they truly understand that end-times signs lurk around every corner.

Let’s not overlook the awesome score that Jerry Goldsmith put together for this movie. If ever there were music that was synonymous with the Adversary himself, this is it. I’m pretty sure this is what Lucifer rocks out to when he does spring cleaning in his office in hell. A choir of devil voices chants things like “Ave Satani” o’er and o’er, whipping young Damien into a frenzy of demonic bloodlust. Eerie chimes are tolling here and there, like playing a Black Sabbath album during a seance at a funeral. It’s music to warp your spine and flatten your soul, that’s what this is. It’s just what a film about Beelzebub, Jr. needs.

Yes, this movie truly has everything for the discerning viewer. A spookbaby, killer death music, violent babysitters, prophecy in the form of quatrains, and Gregory “The Stud” Peck wielding his frown like a lethal weapon. Pushy clergymen and resourceful shutterbugs abound. It’s the perfect horror film, I say. Don’t mess around with the 2006 remake, which managed to be exactly the same except with boring actors and no spark of enjoyment anywhere, and go straight for the Peck-laden original. It’s the best thing for you to do.

Discussion Question: What kind of parents name their kid Damien, anyway? Isn’t that just asking for trouble? Explain.

The original blob is an interesting film to dissect. On the one hand, it’s a classic. On the other, it’s not any good.

The lead character, Steve Andrews, is played by Steve McQueen. It’s safe to say that he does “okay,” but it’s clear that he’s only going through the proverbial motions, just as many of today’s big name actors do when they’re cast in a big budget picture, with a questionable script but a large paycheck to make up for it.

And man, is this script questionable. Maybe no one noticed in 1958, during the age of moster movies–when Giant Gila Monsters and Creatures from 20,000 Fathoms roamed across the silver screen–that an unstoppable, all-consuming, shapeless, slow-moving blob of goo is a completely lame monster to have to thwart.

Literally, the only thing that can be done to this thing is to freeze it. Oops, I ruined the ending for you. But nothing can ruin the sheer pleasure of laughing at the script, as a policeman shoots down a power line to try and electrocute the Jell-O, and another looks at it after the big climactic moment, and says simply, with no shot of the still “alive” blob, “…It didn’t work.”

This is just one moment of extreme exposition out of several hundred in the film (and trust me, no phrasing can ever do the hilariously awkward moment justice), particularly in the third act, when no one could think of a conclusion for this film about a monster which, by definition, is unstoppable.

But, as a cheeky side-note (and maybe it’s worth a viewing nowadays specifically because of this), it now appears that the movie is about global warming. Yes, the climate crisis was at the forefront of the minds of liberal Hollywood, even in 1958, before anyone knew it existed.

See, they freeze the thing, and pick it up with a helicopter to drop it off in the arctic. The last line of the movie, I’m not kidding you, is this:

Guy 1: “We’ll drop it off in the arctic, where hopefully it’ll stay frozen forever.”

Guy 2: “As long as the arctic stays frozen…”

*Dramatic Music!!*

There’s a real sense of dread at the end of the picture, and you get the distinct impression that this guy is actually suggesting that the polar ice caps may melt the following week.

And the final scene is of the helicopter, dropping the blob off in the icy North, with big white letters spelling out “THE END,” which then morph and change shape to form a–bum bum bummmm–QUESTION MARK.

Very nice. So this was actually an entertaining ending after a somewhat disappointing viewing of the film. It may be offered as a defense that this film is too old to stand up to modern cinematic evaluation–and indeed, the average quality of movies has risen over the decades as filmmakers refined their craft. But many a fine movie was made back then, which still impress to this day, including horror films.

Most Hitchcock films, for example, have much better writing, acting and directing than this silly little popcorn movie, which somehow found a place in the hearts of the American public.

Well. That was pretty unimpressive. I think the word that best describes The Tooth Fairy—the one word that sums up every aspect of the whole thing—is simply: Meh. Not actively bad but by no means very good, it’s a completely flat and underwhelming nothing of a picture. There are images and sounds, but if you stop looking or listening somewhere in the middle you aren’t going to feel like you’ve missed out on anything. It’s meh, I tell you. Meh.

The movie doesn’t leave an impression of any kind on the viewer. I watched the thing twice and here is what I can remember of the plot. A family is at a house. There is a mean lady who apparently takes teeth, and if she takes them all you’ll die. Or maybe even if she takes one? Then there’s some neighbor lady who isn’t a killer but who dresses just like the killer, why I don’t know. There are some mean-spirited hillbillies, although what they add to the proceedings is beyond me. A dude with no money shows up. And I think there may also have been a ghost, perhaps? A ghost on a bike?

The cast is equally enigmatic. Who were they? What characters did they play? It would be impossible to say without looking it up, and there’s not a chance that’s gonna happen. Even to look it up on IMDB would be to put in way more effort than this picture deserves. Even though the performances aren’t bad enough to make you cringe, they’re not good enough to make you care. The actors might just as well have been robots or rod puppets. Every thing about this film is so flat and un-noteworthy that if you’re watching it and your eyes drift over to your wallpaper, it will likely be ten or fifteen minutes before you realize you’ve stopped looking at the screen.

Even the killing—that gratuitous violence for which I live—was run-of-the-mill standard fare. A dude got his wiener chopped off, that much I can recall. But the other deaths? They could have been in any of a hundred other slasher movies. When people are being maimed and murdered and I don’t even crack a smile, you know something has gone amiss.

So what exactly went wrong in the making of this picture? What happened to squander any potential there was in the story? Who the hell cares. Not I. This movie is just like a big void in space, total nothingness. I don’t want to spend any more time on it. If you want to know more, I believe that’s tough shit for you.

This fourth installment in the Saw series takes the dreadfully familiar “been there, done that,” sentiment that strikes all horror franchises to a level all its own.

Not only are the regrettable torture scenes familiar, pointless, and, for the first time, unimaginative, but a decision was made to have the events of this film occur at the same time as the third one. This decision served absolutely no logical nor thematic purpose to the story told, but instead acts as nothing more than a gimmicky way to trump up yet another relentlessly abstract “twist” ending.

Like the re-hashed torture devices, the acting in this film reaches a new low. Costas Mandylor as detective Hoffman makes you think you’re watching a bad softcore porn story on Showtime rather than a multi-million dollar movie franchise. Thank god the random assortment of detective-looking actors they call a “cast” have absolutely no chemistry with one another, or else you’d spend your two hours waiting for Mandylor to inexplicably take of his pants to familiar “Baw-Chicka-Wah-Wah” music.

How did they end up making a Saw IV, anyway, when The Jigsaw Killer is dead? Good question. Turns out he’s far more active as a dead man than he was as a living person. As the story gets less imaginative, more and more exposition is needed, and we find in this film he has scattered no less than 15 different tape recordings and instructional notes around the city. Couple that with the idea that we’re watching a film that supposedly occurs concurrent with the third one, along with all its elaborate hoaxes, and it’s a concept worthy of even our most disdainful eye rolling.

Now, I would have to argue that the main appeal of the Jigsaw character in the first film was not the elaborate methods of his killing, nor the pseudo-philosophical lessons he tried to teach, but rather the apparent depth of his psychopathy and the mystery surrounding his shrouded identity.

In the fourth installment, however, perhaps out of boredom, they decided to explain who Jigsaw the man is, and what drove him to kill. He has a cold, mysterious, suspicious ex-wife whose purpose in the movie never becomes clear, except to tell us Jigsaw’s backstory. Namely, his story is that he was happy and in love, but a junkie she was trying to help in her clinic caused her to have a miscarriage.

This accident apparently drove John the man to become Jigsaw the killer, ruthlessly torturing not just society’s derelicts but the detectives whose job it is to protect the common good.

And this absurd methodology is never more abused for our pleasure than through the tragic character of detective Rigg, played by Lyriq Bent. His story is that of a man who wants nothing more than to save people’s lives, but apparently Jigsaw sees fault in this, and challenges the detective to stop saving people. Then there are a series of trials where he nonchalantly does things–absolutely horrendous things–that such a man would clearly never do by choice.

What can I say? His story is as pointless and absurd as all the rest, but at least he makes us feel something–he makes us feel sorry for him, and we regret that the filmmakers would ever expect their audience to believe or even be entertained by such preposterous a sequence of events.

And then we all die. The film has several instances in which it hints that this is the “last” installment–several references can be enjoyed to “The Final Test” and “The Last Game.” Of course, there’s also a handy audio tape that informs us this is “only the beginning”–just in case this horrible fourth film makes money at the box office.

Let us hope that it does not, and the former clues are the final pieces to such a wasteful and convoluted Jigsaw puzzle.

If you don’t like Saw IV, then you will also totally hate:

A movie came out a few years ago that effectively put an end (temporarily, of course) to the serial killer film as we know it, because it was so unique, so original, and so clearly difficult to top, people gave up trying. What’s more, it launched nearly a decade-long spat of films which belonged to a trendy offshoot of the horror genre, known as “Torture Horror.”

No, this film was not Saw. Hardly. It was called Seven, and long before Saw’s Jigsaw murderer tried to teach us that our vices were worth dying for; before Touristas wanted us to believe that Americans deserve the wrath of the third world; and light years ahead of Hostel’s feeble attempts to punish the rude and the young for sport, Seven was a film which analyzed and dissected our ills as a society, while humanizing a serial killer, his victims, his captors, and society at large.

The others, beginning with Saw, stand for nothing but utter dehumanization.

And of course it was only a matter of time before a fan of Seven–a film which left all the gruesome torture to our imaginations, and forced us to focus on the cause and effect of the acts rather than the acts themselves–decided “Hey, what if I made a movie like Seven, only I showed nothing BUT life-instructive torture?”

Thus began the modern renaissance of the Torture sub genre.

It’s exploitative, it’s unoriginal–but hey, no one said it couldn’t be entertaining, and that’s exactly what Saw (somehow) is.

I credit director James Wan with the success of the film, primarily because other than an under-used Danny Glover, the acting is atrocious (Cary Elwes turns in a horrendous performance that makes you long for the days of Robin Hood: Men in Tights); the writing is second rate (the storyline is barely intriguing, but mostly recognizable as a thematic copycat); and, most egregiously, it has a ludicrous “twist” ending which can act as a perfect definition for Deus Ex Machina.

Yes, Saw is an honorary member of the “let’s turn your viewing experience into the cinematic equivalent of a Cracker Jack box” school of filmmaking.

But, I say it again, thanks to director Wan, torture has never seemed this sexy-cool (and hasn’t since).

And even this review does the film a disservice. Saw incorrectly gets lumped into the “torture porn” category of horror, when really it’s far more psychological.

The two main victims go through some awful ordeals, certainly, but it’s all fairly mild–and definitely self-inflicted–compared to the “helpless beautiful woman has her intestines removed with hacksaw” scenes that other films like to exhibit. Even the flashbacks of the ancillary victims we see as the detectives follow Jigsaw’s demented wake are light on gore and heavy on psychodrama.

It’s a fair film for a first viewing, simply for novelty’s sake, but there are no characters (again, except for Danny Glover’s curiously deep bit role as an obsessive detective), there are no legitimate outcomes (which is why there are about seven of them), and the twist leaves you feeling like you’ve just driven two hours down a fascinating country road only to find that you’ve ended up at your house again.

But you can’t deny that it was a fun ride.

If you don’t like Saw, you will also totally hate: