I finally got around to watching Saw, after months of people telling me that I’d probably like it.

Well, I did.

I liked it a lot, in fact. To the point that I’m almost at a loss for words.

It’s an intelligent film, which is a little weird these days. And there was far less blood than I expected. But I guess that’s okay.

You see, I’m used to there being more blood in movies than could reasonably come from the number of bodies that end up in these movies.

The movie starts out with two men chained on opposite sides of a very Silent Hill bathroom, with a dead body between them, and ends with one man chained and an entirely different dead body….

And the movie takes a rather convoluted path from beginning to end. Mostly because the movie starts in the middle.

The killer — the one they call the “Jigsaw killer” for some reason — is brilliant. The whole ‘finding ways to get his victims to kill themselves’ thing doesn’t seem like much, but the way they end up killing themselves is neat. He’s on some sort of crusade to get people who have full lives ahead of them to appreciate their lives, or something. I’m not sure what the guy in the room with the safe did to end up where he was, though.

I really liked the whole setup with the one who escaped. Some sort of drug addict, I guess, she wakes up taped to a chair with this metal contraption attached to her head. This thing has a timer on it, and works like a ‘reverse bear trap’. It’s hooked into her mouth, and when it goes off…well, we never get to see what it does to a real person. Pity.

There’s a lock. And a key. And the key is inside the stomach of her dead cellmate.

So she unsticks herself from the chair. And standing up releases the thing that was keeping the timer from counting down. But that’s not the best part.

The best part is that the cellmate wasn’t dead. He was as good as dead, but he wasn’t dead.

That was a nice touch. It really was.

Also nice: how the movie leads you all over the place with suspicion. Maybe it’s Adam, maybe it’s the doctor. Maybe it’s the cop — but no, he can’t be the actual killer, because the killer slashed his throat.

So maybe it’s the cop, and not actually Jigsaw at all.

But it’s not any of those. In fact, it’s the very last person anyone watching the movie would ever suspect.

The ending really makes the movie that much more worthwhile. The doctor thinking his family’s been killed by this guy, going completely batshit and cutting off his foot like he was supposed to [with the hacksaw, like they always showed in the TV ads], taking the gun from the corpse [there’s this segment earlier where he finds a microcassette in his pocket, along with a bullet and a key. The dead guy in the room is holding a player and a gun, and is apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound], shooting Adam….

And then the orderly guy comes in…and ends up dead because Adam, being shot in what appears to be the arm by a very out of it doctor, isn’t dead at all. And he’s not the only one.

The dead body that’s been dead throughout the entire movie gets up.

Just. Fucking. Beautiful.

And now that I’ve spoiled the ending, you can go watch the movie and pick up all the details I’ve left out.

…I can’t believe they’re making a sequel to this movie. I really, really can’t….