Three . . . Extremes
Saw II
Three weeks ago the Senate voted 90 to 9 to forbid the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of U.S. military prisoners, which has prompted Vice President Cheney to seek an exemption for the CIA. How that will all play out remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: torture has never been a hard sell at the box office. One case in point is the grim low-budget thriller Saw, in which a mysterious psycho uses fiendish contraptions to torture innocent people. Written by a couple of cheery Australians, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, it was shot in 18 days for a paltry $1.2 million. Released in October 2004 by Lions Gate Films, which specializes in cheapo horror, it grossed $102 million worldwide. Ads and posters showed a pale, severed foot against a plain white background, and despite mixed reviews, the movie connected through word of mouth. (“Dude, there’s this scene where a guy cuts off his own foot!”)
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It might be easy to dismiss Saw–and the inevitable Saw II, which opens this weekend–as exploitation fare, but even the more cultured among us are susceptible to the pleasures of watching people suffer. Three…Extremes, a new art-house release, collects short horror films by three cutting-edge Asian directors: Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan; Japan’s Takashi Miike, whose 1999 hit Audition energized the critical cult for sadistic Asian pulp; and, hottest of all at the moment, South Korea’s Chan-wook Park, whose delirious Oldboy won the grand prize at last year’s Cannes film festival and opened to strong reviews here this spring. “Cut,” Park’s contribution to Three…Extremes, will probably delight critics as much as his other films, yet its premise–a psychopath holds a man captive and pressures him to kill an innocent person–is almost identical to that of Saw.
Park manages to imbue all this with a sense of self-inquiry, but it’s a dilemma everyone can relate to viscerally, which may account for the sustained popularity of torture in movies. Saw embraced it with the glee of a carnival barker: the two protagonists in that movie, a surgeon and a private investigator, wake to find themselves chained at opposite corners of a grimy subterranean toilet. A cassette tape left behind by their captor, a notorious serial killer, tells the surgeon (Cary Elwes) that he has until six that evening to kill the investigator (Leigh Whannell); otherwise the surgeon’s family will die. You can practically hear the debates going on at Arby’s after the show.
