Jigsaw - 2017 - R

So it has been ages since I wrote a review of a movie, but after watching the 8th installment to the Saw franchise, I was compelled. Why? Because it was so close to being something good. So very close. If you're a fan, go ahead and give it a watch. It's not for the newb. Spoilers ahead cause I'm giving it all away.

This movie occurs ten years after John Kramer's (aka Jigsaw) death. It appears to follow a copycat killer who is dispatching victims in the same somewhat creative ways that jigsaw did years before, and they're trying to track him down. The central storyline is pretty standard in that the selectees of the game mostly yell at each other and ignore the very plain instructions despite the fact that they are shown to keep them alive. As a result, people generally die unnecessarily, but that's how these things go.

Where it goes into frustration-land is the ending. The ending of any story is the frame on which you hang all your hopes, and this was so freaking close to working. So close I could taste it. Dang, I'm mad about this one. The twist was perfect. It worked really, really well. I smiled.

This is your last chance. I'm about to spoil it all.

Consider yourself warned.

The twist was that the guy running the game in the present was one of the victims in the game we're actually watching throughout the film. You see, the core game we're watching was one of Jigsaw's first years ago, and those victims are long gone and deceased. The victims in the present are from a copycat of that original, although the guy in charge says that he only used three victims instead of five, and somehow they ended up in the same way. Don't think too hard about that cause it doesn't actually make sense unless he just outright killed them.

But then we get to the ending. The setup is magnificent. The guy running the show successfully framed the detective in charge, and he went to painstaking methods to do it. There is no way the guy is getting off. I mean, the detective is not a nice guy. We got a confession at the end. He deserves a comeuppance. Then, the movie ruins it.

Being framed for a bunch of murders would be a horrible way to go for a lawman, but instead of letting that punishment stand, the killer monologues him and us to death and then kills the detective anyway. Was it creative? Sure. Did the special effects team really want that in there? Clearly. Did it work? No. It completely ruined the entire framing plan. Why go to all that work and then not let it play out? Now instead of a framing, the detective is yet another victim and will die a martyr. Nothing bad will happen to him for his sins. He just dies which in this world is basically getting away with it.

All they had to do was let him live and wonder who was really behind it all. The movie could have told us who did it for the sake of the big reveal and twist, but left the character in the dark. If they had done that, the movie would have been elevated to diabolical.

What these writers need to understand is that torturing someone only works as long as they're alive. Once someone is dead, they're free. It would have been a great ending, but they screwed it up for the sake of a cool effect. Good job. Gruesome effects work, guys. Too bad the movie is now so mediocre that no one will care.

Jane White is Sick & Twisted -- 2002 -- R

What I learned from this movie? I've watched way too much TV. This film is basically a TV spoof complete with a cast that were regulars on TV at one time or another. I figured I'd been in front of the tube too much when a) I caught every opening spoof at the beginning and b) when Jane rattled off a list of names, and I knew nearly all of them.

This plot follows a completely clueless girl named Jane who uses TV to escape her messed up mother and life and believes that a talk show host is her long lost father. In order to meet her dad, she tries to be the people he wants to talk to on the show, beginning with her trying to be a "closet tranvestite prostitute."

Like most spoof films, it helps to know some of the spoofed material to "get" a lot of the jokes, but this one is so whacked-out that it is not always necessary, and it provided a lot of laughs as this poor girl worked her way to Chicago and never ended up anywhere near it. She did wind up in a desert, though, where she hoped to be abducted by aliens to enhance her sexual powers...anyway.

The actual production seemed to be very TV-showish, and I hope it was done to enhance the overall spoof effect, cause some of the effects were laughable and what one might expect on the a TV show (my favorite being where the driving movements of the actors, the driving sounds, and the moving background failed to line up during one sequence where Colin Mochrie's character drove Jane home).

The only real problem I ran into was that the movie was basically over when Gerry died. There were a couple loose ends to tie up, I'll grant, but all the steam ran out of the film after that point. My concern then was that the event occurred at 57 minutes. I was grateful that most of the last 30 minutes of run time was playing with the credits and outtakes and deleted scenes and such, but it was a disappointing ending to a film that was carrying itself just fine to that point.

So, if you've watched too much TV in your lifetime, and think you know everything, give this one a viewing and see how many references you can catch. It's quite amusing and has its moments.

Just My Luck -- 2006 -- PG-13

A movie of opposites: lucky vs. unlucky. Basically, the luckiest girl in the world shares a magical kiss with the unluckiest guy in the world swapping their luck...and they don't even know each others' names. It is a concept ripe for comedy, for sure.

Our first views of these characters show them in the unlikeliest of situations, both being uncommonly lucky and unlucky. As the movie wore on and the writers started running out of ideas, the coincidences turned to stupidity and forgetfulness. We clearly watch people not do things that should be second nature to them. That's not luck; that's good sense. That's not unlucky; that's blatant stupidity and failure to just pay attention to what you're doing.

A lot of the film was very amusing as the girl tried the only thing she knew to try and get her luck back from whoever took it. But again, where we started with amusing situations that were fun, we dipped into stupidity and lack of sense once we hit the end of those tracks. It generally felt like if they'd drawn the line a little earlier, it would have been better, but ratherthan allow the film to take a logical progression, they forced the characters into strange and unlikely situations just so we could get our laugh or further the plot.

Since it is a romantic comedy, the main characters are fairly well drawn. The girl has her friends, the guy has his that serve as multiple personalities of a single entity. They aren't bad, but they aren't great either.

So the movie gives us basically a mixed bag of good laughs and dumb laughs; good ideas and bad ideas; wonderful coincidences and moronic idiocy. It's not a bad movie, but you'll find yourself shaking your head a couple of times during its run.

Jason Goes To Hell -- 1993 -- UR

Ah, part 9 of the illustrious Friday the 13th series. Will it ever, ever end? Will it ever get better? Who knows? Probably not. Friday the 13th has one single purpose: to kill off the most people in the least amount of time possible. Some relate it to the basic construction of a porn film. The plot only exists for people to find reasons to have sex. Well, in most Friday films, the plot only exists to find reasons to kill people in random and creative ways. Unfortunately for the makers of the Friday films, these creative ways are usually cut in favor of getting an R rating.

This latest installment leaves behind the pathetic attempt at creativity that was Jason Takes Manhattan and tries to move in the direction of Halloween 5 and Nightmare 6 by throwing in a family member as a method to take out the bad guy. This one throws in another twist by allowing Jason to move from body to body in search of a legitimate family member as a permanent host. It's exceptionally clever, and for that, I gotta give it some credit. But...

The cleverness ends there. From this point, we have hosts of cliches, dumb moves, and stuff that flat doesn't make sense to make it all work. The way this story kicks off and the way Jason gets his first host is his heart enticing the mortician to eat it. Yup, remember when I said "eat your heart out, Friday the 13th"? Well, here's when that happens. He chows down on that black heart and becomes Jason. It's disgusting.

So toss in hosts of dumb characters, an obligatory camp crystal lake scene that serves zero purpose but to get some kids killed and throw in some T&A, lots of exposition and secrecy to keep us hanging, and a big old house that is the Voorhees mansion complete with holes in the floor that lead straight to the basement. It's crazy some of the things they expect us to swallow in this narrative. We even get the heroine who, after defeating the bad guy only inches away, kneels next to her friend to weep over her body for a really, really long time (incidentally, this friend is the only person she wept over during the entire film, and the person was such a minor death fodder character that we barely knew her).

Without nitpicking the heck out of the film, I'll end off by saying that the premise was pretty decent, and the opening was shocking. The idea made sense though the execution faltered considerably. It was ripe with the same old stuff that hurts all the prior installments, and it doesn't even follow the same continuity. If you watched all the other ones, you might as well view this one too, but if you haven't, it's nothing too special.

Jason X -- 2001 -- R

How to start. You may remember a Kubrick film that has two titles: a short one and a long one. It was called Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. It was often spoken of with both titles together, and in all likelihood., it's all one long title. I was considering this little debacle I just watched and think it could be double titled as well. Jason X or How To Be Slaughtered By A Psychopathic Undead Killer on a Spaceship.

I understand the point of this whole series, and I want to be clear that I'm not knocking the premise. The point here is to squeeze as many kills into as short a timeframe as possible. It's also the point to make them creative and gruesome at the same time, and in many ways, this one lives up to the Friday the 13th mantra. The part I always complain about in these is the stupidity of the characters and the contrivance of the plot. These things are still going strong in this tenth installment.

This time, they got a bit creative and just admitted that we only want to see the hack-n-slash, so screw continuity. Jason is locked up in a secure facility (ha-ha) pending his cryogenic freezing until they can figure out what to do with him. Well, he escapes his bonds and kills a lot of people before he is frozen solid along with the woman who was in charge (she gets stabbed for being stupid). Four hundred fifty-five years later, a team finds the facility intact and takes the woman and Jason to their spaceship since Earth (now referred to as Earth One) is a dusty hulk of a former planet. If you just asked how the freezer stayed on for 455 years, just keep telling yourself: it's only a movie... it's only a movie...

So the next sequence in the film actually makes perfect narrative sense, and works well within its framework. They take the woman and Jason to the ship. I mean, he's been cryogenically frozen for 450 years, and they have no idea who he is, so logically, unless they take steps to revive him, he's no threat at all...right? Well, wrong, of course. The undead monster comes to life and wipes out the immediate unfortunate in yet another creative way.

It is at this point that we have difficulty suspending our disbelief as nearly everyone on this ship is a "pretty" person. There are a handful of regular looking people, but lots of pretty teens, including most of the grunts. I didn't know model-quality girls went into the military to be grunts. Makes those co-ed barracks that much more interesting, I guess. Everyone wants to be in their platoon all of a sudden.

Anyway, after a couple of people are killed, they decide there is a hostile on board and go after him. Still making sense here. Jason wipes out the grunts and some others who don't know what they're dealing with, leaving a handful of survivors who now know what they're up against. This also leads us into easily the dumbest part of the entire film.

Now we're in F13 territory where instead of the standard movie question of "What's the worst that could happen?", we seem to be asking, "What's the easiest way to get this person killed?" They split up constantly, allowing them one on one time with the man. They get a shuttle ready to go and when Jason attacks someone on the bridge, shuttle girl flips out and shuts everyone out of the shuttle. I'm wondering how far this contrivance can possibly be pushed, and they show us. She tries to launch out on her own, but wait! the fuel line is still attached. Well, it must be clamped hard cause she rammed herself right into the bottom of the ship. I could not take this seriously. I laughed. I'm still shaking my head.

So they get the jump on the big guy eventually getting a big enough gun to blow him to pieces...but wait, he landed on that fix-em-up table in the lab. Good thing the lab is smashed to pieces and nothing wor- oh wait, it turned itself on. Hey, it's performing a self-diagnostic or something. It's running by itself! It's fixing Jason up all by itself. It resolved its own error message. Wow, that is one smart computer. I guess in the future, computers will be able to resolve troubleshooting step number one on their own: Is it on? Now we have...Uber-Jason! Did you laugh? Good.

Uber-Jason manages to get himself into a part of the ship, they're cutting away because it has a leak or something. They want to blow up the walkways and seal up the main portion of the ship. Well, Jason is on a walkway when they go boom, and as can be expected, he can survive and navigate the vacuum of space. Here's where disbelief is blown again.

Jason, of course, punches through the hull of the room everyone is hiding in causing the obligatory vacuum suction into space, by which another pretty teen meets their fate. I'm seeing where this is going and thinking it should be all right for them, since Jason will be fighting a constant uphill battle to get anywhere in the ship since he created a hull breach and everytime he tears open a door, he'll be fighting against the atmospheric pressure rushing out. You see, our heroes did the smart thing in running from the Uber-Dude and sealing every single door behind them. This would seal each compartment creating the scenario I described with the pressure. Well, I guess once you get far enough into the ship, the pressure equalizes enough with the outside air and you can tear open doors as you please...wait a minute. That's right, Jason tore through the doors and there was no atmospheric breach. Oh well.

Anyway, it's a film that gives you the chance to watch a  bunch of people get killed in some creative ways, and does have its element of fun if you don't think about it too hard. It's a nice turn from the former films and gives us an Alienesque story where everyone is trapped in space and has to deal with him without going anywhere. So, definitely not the worst of the series by any stretch. To be honest, in comparison with some of the other ones, it's actually one of the better installments.

To make the matter just a touch funnier...IMDB has it classified as a comedy as well as sci-fi and horror. They finally figured it out.