Pulse (2006)

I think it goes without saying that technology is a pretty huge part of life in the twenty-first century. We've got the Internet to keep us abreast of the world around us at a moment's notice, we've got cell phones and PDAs and instant messaging software to keep us in contact with all our buddies no matter where we are, all of it available without having to actually physically interact with a real flesh-and-blood person. The distancing of humanity through technology served as the basis for Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's cinematic study in existential isolationism, Kairo.

I didn't exactly "get" Kairo when I saw it, but I guess I'm in the minority, since it's proven to be somewhat popular among fans of the multitude of ghost stories populating Asian cinema. So when American movie studios began purchasing the remake rights of numerous J-Horror movies in the wake of The Ring's success in 2002, Kairo was naturally one of those films. Picked up by Dimension Films and the Weinstein Company, the remake (titled Pulse) traveled a long and arduous road to theaters, which I'll get into later. But when it was finally released, it ended up being completely ripped to shreds by critics and barely made enough money at the box office to cover its budget. So let's get to explaining why.

Mattie Webber (Kristen Bell) is a bright young college psychology major, but she's not exactly in the best of spirits. She hasn't seen or heard from her boyfriend Josh (Jonathan Tucker) in several days, and he hasn't responded to any of her phone calls or text messages. After he finally leaves a bizarre message on her answering machine, Mattie swings by his apartment to check on him. Why it took her a week to decide to visit him in person, I have no idea.

But maybe she shouldn't have bothered checking on him after all, because when she enters his apartment, it looks like she's walking into a disaster area. There's cockroaches in the cabinets, maggots in the refrigerator, and a sickly, dying cat in a closet. So either Josh is a really poor tenant, or his building is located in the seventh circle of Hell.

Josh himself isn't doing to well either, as he looks like absolute crap. He's in dire need of some sun, and his demeanor is listless and uncaring. Josh tells Mattie to stay in the living room, then heads back to another room. A few moments go by, and when she goes to see what he's doing, Mattie is shocked to discover that Josh has hanged himself.

Mattie and her friends — party girl Izzy (Christina Milian), illegal downloading addict Stone (Rick Gonzalez), and all-around nerd Tim (Samm Levine) — all mourn Josh's suicide, reminiscing about him in an online chat room. The chat, however, is soon flooded with hundreds of messages from Josh's screen name, each and every one of them reading "help me."

The group assumes that his computer is still running and that a virus is creating the messages, so Stone is commissioned to go to Josh's apartment and turn the computer off. No big deal, right? Of course not. But something happens at the apartment that causes Stone to completely withdraw from the group. He doesn't leave his apartment, he keeps to himself, and when he does talk to one of the others, he speaks in a sullen, depressed, lifeless tone.

Whatever happened to Stone didn't stop those bizarre "help me" messages, so Mattie figures she'll go take care of Josh's computer herself. She ends up running into his landlady (Octavia Spencer), who in no uncertain terms tells Mattie that she sold Josh's computer to make up for him never paying his rent.

Turns out the buyer's check bounced, so Mattie uses that to track down a hacker by the name of Dexter McCarthy (Ian Somerhalder). She accuses him of harassing her and her friends with the messages, but Dexter stops her long enough to reveal that, since he's a bit of a procrastinator, the computer's been sitting in the trunk of his car since he bought it.

After Mattie leaves, Dexter decides to go ahead and take the computer inside. As soon as he turns it on, a question appears: "Do you want to meet a ghost?" It's followed by numerous scenes of despondent-looking people filming themselves with webcams, many of whom are killing themselves, nearly all of them seeming to stare at Dexter through his monitor.

As the days go by, the number of people out and about begins to dwindle. Once crowded areas of the college campus are now like ghost towns, and there is an increasing number of people committing suicide — and later, vanishing altogether — throughout the city.

Dexter tracks down Mattie, revealing what he'd been able to salvage from her late boyfriend's computer. Among the items he retrieved were a number of video messages to someone named Douglas Zieglar (Kel O'Neill). The videos disclose that Josh had hacked into Zieglar's computer, from which he had stolen and accidentally distributed a virus that Zieglar had developed.

This virus somehow managed to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, allowing the spirits of the deceased to reach our realm through cell phone networks and Wi-Fi connections. The bridge into our world is widening, with more and more ghosts entering and sucking the will to live out of everyone they encounter.

But before his death, Josh apparently developed another virus that he believed would counteract Zieglar's. This bit of information brings Mattie and Dexter together, and as the world's population gives way to a greater number of phantoms, they try to hunt down Zieglar to figure out how to put Josh's fix into play before they disappear as well.

What do you get when you take a plot that has boatloads of potential and a solid cast and combine that with lukewarm direction and a script that's about as deep as a kiddie pool? Pulse, that's what you get. Honestly, I should have known from all the time it spent languishing in developmental hell that it was doomed from the start. The movie was supposed to start production with Wes Craven on board as writer and director, but he eventually abandoned the project, supposedly due to a disagreement over how his werewolf movie Cursed was handled by Dimension Pictures. Kirsten Dunst had been hired as the film's star, but she ended up quitting to go work on Spider-Man 2. Pulse was even temporarily cancelled because of the studio's belief that it was too similar to The Ring.

Production eventually did commence, and the MPAA handed it an R rating. But no, we can't have an R-rated horror movie, because then it can't be marketed to teenagers. So the cast and crew went back and did re-shoots in order to tone down the movie's more terrifying scenes and acquire a PG-13. This only served to make the movie less scary, and by the time Dimension decided on a release date after bouncing it all over the calendar, Pulse was dead on arrival.
The really disappointing part of Pulse is that there's so many things in it that could go right, but most of them end up going wrong and turn the movie into a less-than-mediocre piece of crap.

What really bogs things down is the screenplay written by Ray Wright. (Wes Craven is credited as a co-writer, but my guess is that's only due to union regulations.) As I stated in the opening paragraph, I wasn't exactly a fan of Kairo. While it had a few creepy visuals, I thought the film was overlong, had little in the way of plot or story, and was thoroughly incomprehensible. Wright does improve upon Kairo by trying to tell some kind of story, but I don't believe that his attempt was all that successful.

One of the big problems with this is that there's no real sense that any time is passing. Does the movie take place over days? Weeks? I just couldn't tell you. It seems almost as if the movie skips from a minor epidemic of suicides to people vanishing into a cloud of black ash to the entire city being almost completely deserted within just a few scenes. Are things moving that quickly? Or is Wright just not very good at establishing a concrete timeline for we the viewer to follow?

Another problem is that Wright's script is absolutely absurd on almost every level. Absurdity can work in some movies, but Pulse is one of those movies where it doesn't. We never really care about any of the characters nor do we ever once feel like we're a part of this world we're presented with, like we're being forced to watch every implausible plot turn without any sort of insight as to why these things happen. Like the explanation for all the red duct tape that keeps popping up. They introduce it with a note from Josh that states, "Keeps them out, don't know why." That's lame. Near the end of the movie, Zieglar reveals that the red tape interferes with the carrier signals of the ghosts, or something like that. That's even lamer. The movie makes less and less sense as the movie goes on, to the point that you're begging the movie to start rolling the end credits just so it'll be over.

Wright also misses a prime opportunity to make a social commentary on how, despite the idea that it could bring people closer together, advances in communication technology are pushing society apart. Why bother talking to someone in person when you can e-mail them or send them an instant message from a thousand miles away? Why go out and interact with people in stores when you can simply get online and have everything you'd ever want, from clothes to entertainment to even pizzas, delivered right to your door?

While this sort of thing is all good and fun in theory, it also runs the risk of severely cutting down on real human interaction. And outside of one throwaway line at the end of the movie, I don't believe Wright really addresses this idea. There are some instances where he gets close, but he doesn't bother to pull the trigger.

Not everything about the movie is as bad as the script, I will admit. I said earlier that the work of first-time director Jim Sonzero was lukewarm, although that may be only due to the whole of the movie not really gelling together. Sonzero's work here is not exactly noteworthy, but there is the occasional flash of brilliance in it. Some of the scares are pulled off very well, and I thought the special effects were really good. I also have to state that Sonzero also does a fine job when it comes to his appropriation of Kairo's best moments. Each of them are excellently done, and Sonzero even adds a memorable moment or two of his own.

He also teams up with director of cinematography Mark Plummer to create a number of great camera angles and shots, as well as utilizing a dreary blue-gray color scheme that works excellently in relating the life being drained out of the world. (Unfortunately, the color scheme also has the disappointing side effect of just making the film more and more depressing as each minute passes.) I must also applaud composer Elia Cmiral for his wonderful score. His use of both music and creepy ambient noise serves to bolster the film's atmosphere, and in a better film, the music would have been absolutely excellent.

The cast, for the most part, does what they can with what they're given. Try as they might, they just can't save this turkey. Rick Gonzalez and Samm Levine are likable despite their roles being both thankless and poorly written, while Jonathan Tucker's role is so minor in terms of screen time that it doesn't really matter how his performance was. Though in Tucker's defense, he wasn't too bad at all.

And despite being known more for her singing career than acting, Christina Milian actually does a halfway decent job. Lost star Ian Somerhalder, our story's male lead, does manage to hold up his share of the work in a performance that might not go on his career highlight reel, but it does get his foot in the door when it comes to doing big Hollywood movies.

The best of the main cast, though, has to be Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame. Despite the role being less like Veronica Mars and more like just another horror role meant for a cute blonde actress (see also: Naomi Watts in The Ring; Sarah Michelle Gellar in The Grudge), Bell does as fine a job as can be expected. She's a quite talented actress when it comes to working with good material, but Pulse proves that she can at least chip in a watchable performance when working with awful material as well.

Though as good as Bell is, perhaps the most entertaining offering comes from a quick cameo by Brad Dourif, who diehard horror fans will recognize as the voice of Chucky the killer doll. Dourif has only forty-five seconds of screen time, but he delivers his lines with such enthusiasm that it almost made me wish he had a bigger role in the movie.

And who gave the worst performance? Kel O'Neill, who plays Zieglar. He only has one scene, but his performance is just bad, bad, bad. The character is useless and contributes absolutely nothing to the movie, so I guess O'Neill figured he wouldn't bother. His performance is horrible, and the scene itself completely insults the intelligence of the audience by badly spelling out everything that we've pretty much figured out by the time it happens. The whole thing seems like a big waste.

I think the biggest reasons for Pulse's failure were its horrible script and what appears to be rampant studio interference. Instead of being the exception, the movie was unfortunately the norm because no matter what kind of effort was put into it, Pulse ended up being nothing that hadn't already been done. There's nothing new about the movie, nothing we haven't seen before, nothing that really makes it worth watching more than any other J-Horror remake that has been made over the last decade. If anything, I'd say that had Kiyoshi Kurosawa never made Kairo and Pulse was an original film, it would have promptly been rightfully dismissed as an incredibly cheap hybrid of the infinitely superior movies The Grudge and White Noise.

And while it isn't a complete and total failure, it's pretty darn close. You could do a lot worse than Pulse, but you could do a hell of a lot better too. So I'm going to give Pulse two stars and pray that ghosts don't start crawling out of my computer to get revenge against me for giving this movie a bad review.

Final Rating: **

The Grudge 2 (2006)

I've made it no secret that I think the horror genre's strongest presence this century lies not in the United States, but overseas. Some of the most important, influential horror movies of the last several years have come from Eurasia, particularly Japan and Korea. Perhaps sensing the potential in bringing the J-Horror phenomenon to America, DreamWorks Pictures and director Gore Verbinski teamed up in 2002 to create The Ring, a remake of Hideo Nakata's amazing ghost story Ringu. The Ring was a big fat hit, grossing nearly 250 million dollars worldwide and inspiring other American film studios to start doing their own J-Horror remakes.

One of the more unique of these remakes was The Grudge. Inspired by Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on films, The Grudge stood out from the rest because of the lengths producers Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert were willing to go to keep it faithful to its source material. Shimizu was hired to direct, Takako Fuji was brought back to reprise her role as the film's villain, and the movie was shot with a mostly-Japanese crew in Tokyo. And while critical reaction was mixed, The Grudge scared up 187 million dollars worldwide and Columbia Pictures announced plans for a sequel only three days after its release. With Shimizu and Fuji once again returning to the Ju-on/Grudge franchise, The Grudge 2 hit American theaters on October 13, 2006. I liked the remake, but the sequel, I'm not as enthusiastic about.

Like the other Ju-on/Grudge movies, the movie follows a nonlinear timeline, intertwining three different stories in three different points of the chronology. It gets kind of confusing at times, so bear with me as I try to make sense of them here, for the sake of a somewhat coherent plot synopsis. Okay? Alright.

Our first story occurs mere days after the events of the previous Grudge movie. Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is in a Tokyo hospital, and word of her "accident" has gotten back to her bedridden mother (Joanna Cassidy) in California. Too ill to travel, she commissions Karen's estranged sister Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) to see what's causing all the problems. Aubrey flies to Japan and arrives at the hospital, discovering that her sister is has been driven completely out of her gourd by what has happened to her.

Karen begs Aubrey to get her out of the hospital, but ends up causing a scene and forcing orderlies to strap her to the bed as her sibling is pushed out of the room. But it's no time until Karen breaks free of her restraints and attempts an escape. She ends up on the roof, but that provides her no shelter from the malevolent spirits that haunt her. This lack of shelter proves fatal, as Karen plummets off the roof and lands on the pavement in front of Aubrey as she leaves the hospital. This tragedy prompts Aubrey to team with a journalist named Eason (Edison Chen) and dig deeper into the supernatural machinations behind Karen's demise. But the deeper they dig, the more they find themselves being stalked by the same ghosts.

Our second story revolves around Allison Fleming (Arielle Kebbel), the new kid at Tokyo's international high school. Her awkwardness makes her an easy target for the cool kids, which is inferred as Vanessa (Teresa Palmer) and Miyuki (Misako Uno) lead her to the charred remains of the house from the previous movie. The pair guide Allison upstairs to a closet door, and tell her that if she can sit in the closet and count to ten, she'll see the ghost of a woman that was murdered and stashed in the crawlspace above the closet. All the kids are doing the closet ten-count, Vanessa and Miyuki say, so since peer pressure is a bitch, Allison reluctantly climbs into the closet and gets to counting.

But if Mean Girls has taught me anything, it's that teenage girls are the most evil people on the planet. I say that because as soon as Allison gets to five, Vanessa and Miyuki slam the closet door and trap their terrified classmate inside. Allison flips out, even more so once she sees the stringy-haired ghost crawling into the closet from the crawlspace above it. She manages to free herself from the closet, and all three girls bolt from the house. However, what was supposed to be a harmless prank evolves into something far worse, as the three girls soon learn that just because they're out of the house doesn't mean they're out of trouble.

And the third story is something a little different, taking us from Tokyo to the windy city of Chicago as a woman named Trish (Jennifer Beals) is moving in with her new husband Bill (Christopher Cousins) and his children. She has no problem getting along with Bill's daughter Lacey (Sarah Roemer) and her best friend Sally (Jenna Dewan), but his son Jake (Matthew Knight) isn't handling the changes all that well. Trish attempts to make nice with Jake, but far more disconcerting things are afoot in their apartment building. Everyone begins acting bizarrely, and the neighbors (Paul Jarrett and Gwenda Lorenzetti) are harboring a creepy stranger who lurks around the building at all hours of the night in a dirty hooded sweatshirt. And a few ghosts have been making appearances in the tenement's shadows too.

All three stories come to a head in the film's climax, as we learn how they are all connected to one another, to the murderous spirits of Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji) and her son Toshio (Oga Tanaka), and to a curse that can no longer be contained in the land of the rising sun.

Have you ever seen a movie that has all the potential in the world, but fails to capitalize upon it for one reason or another? That's what happened with The Grudge 2. There is some good to be found in the movie, particularly the direction, but it falls flat in quite a few categories. I wanted to like The Grudge 2, I really did, but it seems like the movie came down with a bad case of "sequelitis" and made promises it couldn't keep. Because instead of getting a terrifying horror movie on the level of the others in the Ju-on/Grudge franchise, we instead get a nonsensical exercise in mediocrity on the level of The Ring 2. And that's terrible.

Of all the things wrong with the movie, one of the few things that actually gets it right is Takashi Shimizu's direction. Shimizu must have figured that if the rest of the movie isn't going to be any good, he might as well make it look good. This is the sixth time he's directed a Grudge or Ju-on movie, so you'd figure he'd either be really good at it, or bored out of his skull. I don't know about the latter, but I'm sure he's got the former down. He packs the movie with an amazing atmosphere and creepy, unsettling, and downright bizarre visuals (the girl with the half-gallon of milk, for example), and manages to insert Kayako and Toshio any way he can in order to facilitate a scare. Kayako and Toshio are like evil pissed-off ghost ninjas. They just pop up out of nowhere and spook and/or kill their prey, then vanish just as quickly as they appeared. You know what would have been awesome? If, as a wild plot twist, Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid had been the root of all the problems. I know Pat Morita's dead, but there's your angle! He's controlling all this from beyond the grave!

But anyway, back to Shimizu's work and the scares, lots and lots of scares. Whether they're subtle, blatant, or cheap "boo!" scares, they might not be as strong as they could be, but a few of them are still effective. Shimizu and cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima pair up to create a number of wonderfully framed camera shots from different intriguing angles, and when combined with the great music score composed by Christopher Young, certain scares manage to sneak up on us and raise the fright factor.

However, where the movie starts going downhill is the screenplay penned by Stephen Susco. With three stories being told simultaneously, the movie can become confusing as we bounce back and forth between them. And the more confused we become, the more we begin to withdraw from the movie. If Susco had instead kept the stories separated as three different chapters (similar to the Ju-on movies or a Quentin Tarantino movie), I think the concept would have worked better. But by chopping them up and hopping around from one to another, it's harder to build a level of suspense that encompasses each individual story. It causes the movie to teeter on the brink of incoherence, really hurting any chances the movie had of being any good.

And I have to say that I thought the Aubrey storyline was thoroughly useless. The remake was the paragon of the phrase "less is more," and its simplicity was its strongest point. It merely let the concept — "everyone who enters a haunted house dies" — work up the scares. But by adding all these little details about Kayako's rough childhood, that simplicity is ruined by making things too complex. We don't need to know everything about Kayako's past, other than what caused her to be a ghost in the first place. Why isn't that good enough? Why muck it up with all this unnecessary fluff? And it doesn't help that they brought up some big twist regarding Kayako's mother, then cease to mention it any further once it becomes no longer relevant. If they're just going to drop it at a moment's notice, why even include it to begin with? Sigh... the movie would have been ten times better if this storyline had just been excised and the movie's focus shifted to balancing the remainder.

I didn't have such a problem with the other two storylines. The schoolgirl storyline is straight out of the Ju-on flicks, and outside of the "mean girls pull a prank on an awkward classmate" cliché, I thought it worked. However, of the three, I was most interested in the Chicago story. The idea of Kayako and Toshio crossing the Pacific Ocean is an intriguing one, because it can open up the franchise to a plethora of new victims and setups that might not be readily available in a Japanese setting. (Though I will admit that Kayako appearing in a no-tell motel during the schoolgirl storyline was very neat.) The grudge calling an American apartment building home is definitely a concept I'd like to see reprised in a sequel or two.

And while we're here, let's talk about some things I didn't quite get about the movie. In their storyline, Aubrey and Eason visit an seventy-something exorcist who lives in the middle of nowhere and speaks English fluently. How? Does every senior citizen living in the Japanese countryside speak perfect English? I'm not saying that it's impossible for her to have such a masterful handle on the language, but it seems rather improbable. It's not just The Grudge 2, but it seems like so many movies set in foreign countries have characters that speak English with no problem despite the fact that they probably shouldn't be able to. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 might suck, but one thing they got right is having a reason why a 14th-century Japanese emperor could speak fluent English.

And another thing I couldn't quite grasp is that it's established that the story of the three schoolgirls is set two years after the events that befell the Davis sisters, so you'd think that the Saeki house more than likely would have been demolished after Karen torched the place at the end of the first movie. Or at the very least, since its owners were dead, it would have been left to either the next of kin, or even defaulted back to the real estate company so they could do something with it. I know the house has to be there (and in surprisingly good structural shape, too!) for the sake of the plot, but you'd think that what's left of a building after it's burned down would be taken care of after a while. If it was, say, two weeks after the fire instead of two years, it would make more sense. But what do I know, I'm not a screenwriter.

Last but not least is the cast. Takako Fuji and Oga Tanaka aren't in roles that are super-challenging, but they and their characters are the most important parts of the movie, and I think they did a great job. Meanwhile, Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance alternates between placid or completely over-the-top insane, with no middle ground amid the two extremes. I guess Gellar figured that since she was only getting roughly five or six minutes of screen time, that she was going to at least do something that would stand out.

And while I normally like Amber Tamblyn's work, I don't believe this will be noted as one of her best performances. She keeps a perpetual sourpuss look on her face, not really showing too big of a difference in happiness, sadness, fear, or confusion. If she had been working as hard as she did on Joan of Arcadia, I might not be complaining. Arielle Kebbel, Matthew Knight, and Edison Chen aren't all that bad, but I didn't believe that any of them really held the screen like they should have. None of the rest of the cast really contribute anything memorable, and I'm sad that Ryo Ishibashi's role in the movie is relegated to a short two-minute cameo. He was one of my favorite parts of the first Grudge, and I think he and his character could have easily been placed in Chen's spot without making too much of a difference.

Maybe I'm being too hard on The Grudge 2. There are some good parts to be found, so if you can enjoy the movie on that alone, it might not be as bad as I'm making it out to be. But I found that the movie's mediocre and bad points outnumber its good ones. As a whole, it isn't all that it could have been. It isn't completely awful, but it almost seems like just a quick way to capitalize on the previous movie's success. All the pieces are there to make a great movie, but it appears only a few of them were put into place. The movie is too long, too complex, and weaker than it should have been. And ultimately, the movie is just kinda there. It's entertaining to a particular degree, if one can get over the flaws that drag it down. So because of that, I'm going to give The Grudge 2 two stars. What a wasted opportunity it was.

Final Rating: **

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

There was no greater time to be young or young at heart than on a Saturday morning in the 1980s. While the concept of Saturday morning cartoons had been around since the 1960s, many of the most fondly remembered cartoons of my generation were from the 1980s. Shows like Masters of the Universe, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and The Real Ghostbusters made the decade of excess memorable for nostalgic cartoon fans such as myself. However, many of these cartoons were accompanied by such massive and popular toy lines that it was hard to tell whether the toys were a marketing device for the show, or if the show was a marketing device for the toys.

One such cartoon was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Based on the gritty underground comic book created in 1984 by Mirage Comics founders Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the lighthearted cartoon made its debut in the winter of 1987 and immediately became a mainstream cultural sensation. And what a sensation it was. Ninja Turtles merchandise flooded the marketplace, from the successful action figures and toys to products like breakfast cereal, clothing, Hostess fruit pies, video games, and a second line of kid-friendly comic books published by Archie Comics.

The Turtles were everywhere, so invading the lives of my generation that if a group of six-year-old kids formed a Ninja Turtle religion in the late-'80s, I wouldn't have been surprised. The phenomenon became so huge, that it only made sense for someone to produce a movie in order to capitalize on the popularity of the Ninja Turtles. Drawing inspiration from both the cartoon and Eastman and Laird's original comics, New Line Cinema's live-action cinematic adaptation hit theaters on March 30, 1990. Great comic/cartoon tie-in, or shameful attempt to make money? I'll tell you at the end.

New York City has fallen under the grip of a crime wave. No, this crime wave has nothing to do with a drug trafficking ring, murders, assorted violence, the Mafia, or gang warfare on the scale of The Warriors, or anything fun like that. It's just lots and lots of burglaries. From petty thefts to grand larcenies, more and more robberies perpetrated by unseen thieves are being committed. Yeah, it might just be a bunch of minor misdemeanors, but those can really pile up if there's a mighty crapload of them all at the same time.

The police refuse to talk about these crimes, but television news reporter April O'Neil (Judith Hoag) theorizes that they're possibly being committed by the same group of people. After filing a report about the crime wave for the evening news, April actually comes across some of these unseen thieves as they rob a production truck in a dark corner of the parking lot. They see her too, and none of them have any qualms about mugging a defenseless woman. Luckily for April, a street light above them shatters, and unluckily for her attackers, something knocks them all out just before the police arrive.

We follow April's saviors into the sewers, where we discover that they are a quartet of anthropomorphic tortoises trained in martial arts, each named after Renaissance artists and each carrying their own signature weapon. There's the sword-wielding samurai Leonardo (the voice of Brian Tochi); intellectual Donatello (the voice of Corey Feldman), armed with a bo staff; nunchucku-twirling practical joker Michelangelo (the voice of Robbie Rist); and sai-using Raphael (the voice of Kenn Troum), a sarcastic loner with a quick temper. The four return the subterranean den they call their home, as they prepare for a victory feast with their adoptive father, a wise mutant rat named Splinter (the voice of Kevin Clash).

Raphael and Leonardo get into an argument soon after arriving home, and Raphael storms out so he can cool off. He ends up in Central Park, where a fight with two purse snatchers leads Raphael to another brawl with Casey Jones (Elias Koates), a masked vigilante armed with an arsenal of sports equipment. Casey wins after cracking him with a cricket bat, further enraging Raphael by calling him a freak as he runs off. And that just doesn't jive with Raphael. He chases Casey a few blocks, but returns home defeated after his quarry evades him.

A day or two passes, and April returns to work, digging deeper into the cause of the crime wave. Doing so has not only draws the ire of the police department's grossly ineffective chief (Raymond Serra), but runs her afoul of a secretive, ancient band of ninjas known as the Foot Clan. A group of masked Foot members accost her in a subway terminal, warning her to keep her mouth shut before knocking her unconscious. But luckily for April, Raphael steps in and wards them off. He scoops her up and not knowing where else to go, takes her to his humble abode. She eventually awakens and is understandably freaked out, but calms down long enough for Splinter to explain how he and his four reptilian "sons" came to be. The Turtles escort April back to her apartment, but return to discover that the Foot has discovered their home and kidnapped Splinter.

The four emotionally crushed Turtles return to the safe haven of April's apartment, while Splinter is taken to the Foot's headquarters. Their headquarters is a secluded warehouse reminiscent of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, a den of sin and vice that seems to have drawn the attention of every no-good sleazebag punk kid in New York City. It is there that the Foot Clan is slowly building an army of teenage ninja warriors, led by a criminal mastermind known as "The Shredder" (James Saito).

One of these teenagers is Danny Pennington (Michael Terney), the son of April's boss. Shredder has proclaimed the Turtles as the Foot's equivalent of Public Enemy #1, and having seen them hiding out at April's apartment, Danny tells Shredder exactly where to find them. Oh, that's just great. That no-good little weasel completely sold the Turtles out. I didn't like you before, but it's safe to say that you just made my list, pal. And another thing, Danny: stealing wallets from yuppies, wearing Sex Pistols shirts, and hanging out with an evil ninja clan doesn't make you hip. It just makes you even more of a tool.

Morning comes, and Shredder's chief lieutenant Tatsu (Toshishiro Obata) leads a veritable army of Foot soldiers to April's apartment and launch a surprise attack on the Turtles. Even with Casey joining the fracas after seeing it from a nearby rooftop, the Foot grossly outnumber our heroes, who are forced to fall back as the building burns down around them. They retreat to April's childhood home in the country, where the defeated Turtles regroup and prepare themselves for a return to the city. They do eventually return, and with an apologetic Danny leading Casey to the Foot's headquarters so they can free Splinter, the Turtles wage a war with the Foot Clan that moves from the sewers to the streets, climaxing upon the city's rooftops as they have a final confrontation with Shredder.

In the lexicon of movies based on comic book superheroes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seems to get lost in the shuffle. One could blame it on the fact that the unbelievably immense success of the cartoon and action figures overshadowed the existence of the comics. And it's usually dismissed by non-fans, lumped with other forgotten comic book movies like Spawn or Steel. Forgotten comic book movies are usually that way for a reason; those that remember them don't exactly remember them fondly.

But usually, the forgotten ones were poorly-made claptrap that completely flopped at the box office. That wasn't the case with this particular movie. The movie is actually pretty well done, and just like the franchise that inspired it, the movie was actually a big fat hit. It grossed just shy of 202 million dollars at the worldwide box office, and actually earned a spot as the highest-grossing independent movie of all time (until being dethroned by The Blair Witch Project nine years later). What surprises me about that is that it was neither produced nor distributed by a major studio. You'd think that with Turtlemania running wild, the major studios would be sacrificing their firstborn children to acquire the film rights. But New Line Cinema picked up the distribution rights with Golden Harvest handling production, and New Line had their some of their biggest success since the Nightmare on Elm Street series began.

The screenplay written by Todd W. Langen and Bobby Herbeck is very well done. It's actually darker than one would expect, considering that the movie probably wouldn't have been made if it hadn't been for a certain bright, cheerful Saturday morning cartoon. There's brief violence against women and animals (not counting violence against the four turtles, of course), two murders (and a third, implied one), and even a handful of mild profanities. I assume Langen and Herbeck chose to write the movie like this in order to retain some connection to Eastman and Laird's original comics, while also doing something to make the movie feel grown up. They even make references to The Grapes of Wrath, War and Peace, and, of all things, Bruce Willis's old TV show, Moonlighting. That way, the adults who got dragged to the local movie theater by their Turtle-obsessed kids wouldn't feel like they were watching a movie made entirely for children.

But I have to say that, darkness aside, Langen and Herbeck's screenplay has a youthful enthusiasm. Scenes like Donatello and Casey playfully insulting one another alphabetically, Michelangelo yelling martial arts advice at an animated version of The Tortoise and the Hare, and the Turtles teasing Raphael because they think he has a crush on April keep the movie entertaining, lighthearted, and enjoyable. The only part of the script that fails is the instances of awkward, cringe-worthy dialogue, particularly the surfer lingo used by the Turtles. I'll admit that Kentucky has never exactly been the surfing capitol of the world, but I can't say that I know a single person that has ever said "gnarly," "radical," or "cowabunga" in a regular conversation. I have no clue how talking like that was ever cool, even in 1990. Of course, I'll probably be mocking modern slang in about twenty years, but that's the circle of life.

Steve Barron's direction isn't too bad either. Known at the time for his work as a music video director, Barron appears to understand that the silliness of the Ninja Turtles concept is also what makes it special. Thus, neither Barron or cinematographer John Fenner really try anything fancy to distract from that silliness. I must say, though, that Barron does manage to keep the movie's energy high, especially during the action sequences. Prolonged fight scenes can grow tedious if they go on for too long, but Barron injects them with humor in order to keep them entertaining. Of course, it's completely within reason for the Turtles to crack joke after joke during their fights, so that also shows Barron's understanding of the property. On the music side of things, I enjoyed the music composed by John Du Prez. The score is engaging, exciting, matching the movie's pace and tone scene for scene and really enhancing what we see onscreen. And I have to say that the score is way better than pretty much all of the songs on the soundtrack. Pretty much all of the songs are as lame today as they were in 1990, and that's terrible.

The voice actors are excellent too, each of them filling their roles well. The actors playing the Turtles and Splinter give each of their characters lots of depth and emotion, which the roles need in order to make the characters believable. Unfortunately, the human cast is a mixed bag. Elias Koates is outstanding as Casey Jones, turning in a performance that's my favorite part of the whole movie. If I had to pick just one reason to check this movie out, it would be Koates's hilarious, entertaining performance. Meanwhile, Judith Hoag misses a few notes, which is mostly due to her having to deliver a few awkward lines of dialogue (i.e. "Am I behind on my Sony payments again?"). But for the most part, she's not bad.

But I'll tell you who is bad: pretty much everybody else. Raymond Serra and Jay Patterson, who plays April's boss, are complete non-factors in extremely minor, almost pointless roles, and Michael Turney just isn't very good at all. I could have completely done without the character to begin with, and Turney's awful performance makes me reach for my DVD player's fast-forward button every time I see him.

And I don't know whether I should really comment on James Saito or Toshishiro Obata's performances, since according to the credits, both of their voices are dubbed (with David McCharen handling Saito's dialogue and Michael McConnohie handling Obata's dialogue). It's like how people were complaining that Linda Blair got an Oscar nomination for her performance in The Exorcist when she didn't even speak half of her own dialogue in the finished film. If Saito and Obata's voices were dubbed over for reasons similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance in Hercules in New York, that's one thing. But if it's a matter of a language barrier, then I don't know what the problem is. Some of the actors in Hostel couldn't speak a word of English, and still managed to learn their lines phonetically. It shouldn't have been too hard for Obata, since he only had three short lines in the whole thing. I guess I'm just raising a stink over something that isn't all that big of a deal in the long run, but sometimes it's just the little things that bug me to death.

I would, however, be remiss if I didn't at least mention the real stars of the movie: the costumes designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The movie wasn't a success for the plot or the direction or anything like that; it made so much money because kids wanted to see four six-foot-tall turtles kick ninjas in the head. And I think those kids got their money's worth.

Nowadays, the characters would have probably would have been CGI-enhanced, if not completely computer generated. But the fact that they're four guys in suits with animatronic facial features helps the movie feel a bit more real, since we can see that the cast is actually interacting with someone that's there on the set with them. And you'd think that the turtle costumes would be uncomfortable and constrictive, but the four actors wearing them — David Forman, Michelan Sisti, Leif Tilden, and Josh Pais as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael respectively — and their stunt doubles don't seem like they have any trouble performing. And for that, I applaud the Creature Shop's efforts.

I was one of millions of kids caught in the grip of Turtlemania back in 1990. We couldn't get enough of our favorite foursome, and to us, a Ninja Turtles movie was bigger than the Super Bowl and World Series combined. And nearly twenty years later, we Turtle fans have grown up, but I think the movie as aged as well as one could expect. No, it isn't as solid as it might have been when it was first released, but it's not a bad movie at all. As a comic book movie, I'll admit that it isn't as well-made as recent fare featuring Marvel and DC stars. But as entertainment, and as a reminder of just how wonderful my youth was, I think the movie was great. My final verdict: three and a half stars, leaning heavily towards four. Cowabunga, indeed.

Final Rating: ***½

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

In many of my reviews, I've noted that one of the biggest trends in Hollywood is the remake. Why struggle to think up something original when you can simply redo some other well-known movie? This trend is especially rampant in the horror genre, with dozens of American genre classics and a number of Asian movies being remade to varying levels of success. A lot of these remakes are generally frowned upon by horror fans after they are initially announced by studios, but one that got a lot of ire was the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003. Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic is beloved by the horror faithful, so when New Line Cinema and hot-shot producer Michael Bay's production company Platinum Dunes announced they'd be teaming to "re-imagine" it, it wasn't the most popular of news items.

But when the movie was hit theaters, it was a big fat hit that drew just as much acceptance as it did derision. Three years later, New Line and Platinum Dunes reunited to continue the story told by the remake. But in lieu of moving the story forward with a traditional sequel, the decision was made to go a different route and take the story a step backward with a prequel. Titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, the movie presents us with what its promotional campaign billed "the birth of fear" in all its blood-soaked glory. Let's see how it holds up.

The year is 1939. Inside a stuffy slaughterhouse in rural Travis County, Texas, a pregnant young woman goes into labor, giving birth to a son before she ultimately dies. The disfigured baby is later discovered by the passing Luda Mae Hewitt (Marietta Marich) in a dumpster outside the slaughterhouse, and she takes it home to raise as her own.

Flash forward thirty years to the summer of 1969. The adopted baby has grown into an extremely antisocial adult named Thomas (Andrew Brynarski), who hides his facial deformities beneath a crude leather mask as he works in the very slaughterhouse he was born in. But as Bob Dylan sang, "the times, they are a-changin'."

Faced with a number of sanctions from health inspectors, the slaughterhouse has been forced to lay off all its employees and close up shop for good. Closing the slaughterhouse has killed the entire town, and nearly all of its citizens have taken off for good. But Thomas remains at the slaughterhouse, refusing to vacate the premises. And he isn't too keen on told to leave, either. When his boss insults him and orders him to leave, Thomas doesn't hesitate in beating him to death with a sledgehammer. Satisfied with what he's done, he picks up a nearby chainsaw and starts walking the long road to home.

This little incident doesn't go unnoticed by the police, however. The one cop that has yet to leave town, Sheriff Hoyt (Lew Temple), contacts Thomas's brother Charlie (R. Lee Ermey) and asks him to help track Thomas down. The pair eventually find him, but when Hoyt goes to arrest Thomas, Charlie decides he's not having any of that and blows Hoyt's face off with a shotgun. And since the abandoned town doesn't have a police force now, Charlie decides that he's going to be the town's law and order. So what does he do? He drives Hoyt's police car home, cleans up the uniform, and assumes the identity of the deceased Sheriff Hoyt. That evening, the Hewitt family gathers around the dinner table. Hoyt announces to Luda Mae and his uncle Monty (Terrence Evans) that while the neighborhood may have become a ghost town, the Hewitts aren't going to abandon their home. And thanks to the former sheriff, they're not going to go hungry. I'm sure you know what that means. Nothing brings a family together like cannibalism.

And just their luck, a potential meal is passing through town. The Vietnam War is in full swing, and Eric Hill (Matthew Bomer) has been drafted into service. His brother Dean (Taylor Handley), who's already served one tour of duty in the war, plans on re-enlisting so Eric isn't alone, and their girlfriends Chrissie (Jordana Brewster) and Bailey (Diora Baird) are helping them drive across Texas so they can sign up. The only catch is that Eric has no desire to enlist, so he and Bailey are planning on bolting to Mexico the first chance they get. But unfortunately, their chances are slim to none. As they drive down a deserted stretch of road, the quartet are accosted by a biker (Emily Kaye), who pulls up beside them and draws a sawed-off shotgun with the intentions of robbing them.

But in all the chaos, the four travelers hit a cow, causing their jeep to flip. Chrissie is thrown from the vehicle into a roadside ditch, and watches in horror as the new Sheriff Hoyt arrives and guns down the biker for no good reason. He corrals Dean, Eric, and Bailey into his cruiser and takes them off to the Hewitt house, where we know no good things will happen. With a little begrudging assistance from the biker's boyfriend (Lee Tergesen), Chrissie sets out to free her friends from the clutches of the Hewitt family and the chainsaw-wielding psychopath that earned the nickname "Leatherface."

If one thing can be said about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, it's that the movie never forgets what it is. It's a movie about a family of redneck cannibals and a big guy with a chainsaw and a leather mask. Never does it try to be anything more or anything less. The movie understands its own nature, and has no problem showing that nature to its viewers. It is violent, bloody, and thoroughly misanthropic, terms that it wears proudly as badges of honor. And while it's not great, it most certainly knows what it wants to achieve and goes for it with gusto.

Director Jonathan Liebesman makes his second attempt at a feature-length movie, and I thought he did a lot to redeem himself after that mediocre waste of time called Darkness Falls that he directed in 2003. If prequels have one fatal flaw, it's that we know how things are going to turn out. That's the nature of most prequels; you can usually guess with a fair amount of accuracy who will be the survivors and who will be the victims. Liebesman seems to recognize this, and he makes a very good attempt to at least keep our attention by keeping the pace tight and the intensity high.

And working with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, he gives the movie a gritty, visceral feeling that was missing from the remake. He tints the movie with sepia colors, giving it a dry, dusty, and dirty look that, when combined with Liebesman's use of shadows, works to greatly enhance the movie's tense atmosphere. Aiding the atmosphere is the music score composed by Steve Jablonsky, the usual composer for Platinum Dunes movies. Jablonsky's music is quite effective, never distracting from the movie by being overbearing, instead supporting the on-screen terror. It is tense and scary all on its own, which really boosts the movie as a whole.

Let's not forget the screenplay written by Sheldon Turner, working from a story from noted "splatterpunk" author David J. Schow. Turner's script is quite well done, not letting the audience go once it gets into its groove. His dialogue is believable, and while the protagonists aren't exactly the movie's main focus when compared to the Hewitts, they're still likable, sympathetic characters. But I have to note the best part of the script, which is how Turner uses the concept of a prequel to take the opportunity to further develop the Hewitts. He fully reveals their cannibalistic nature, and makes them an actual family.

And that's what makes Turner's script so effective. It's not completely because of how crazy they are, but how normal they perceive their behavior to be. Forcing physical and psychological torture upon innocent bystanders before chopping them up and eating them for dinner is nothing out of the ordinary for them. Villains like the Hewitts are incredibly scary, because they feel that they are totally, 100% justified in what they do. Their murders are not instigated by vengeance or their own personal amusement, but simply because killing and eating their victims are the way they survive.

Lastly, there's the cast. Everyone's performances are relatively even, but nobody really stands out except for Andrew Brynarski and R. Lee Ermey. As with the remake, Brynarski and Ermey make the entire movie their own. Since Leatherface is a physical role with no dialogue, Brynarski's acting has to be of a physical nature. And he's more than up to the task. His performance really helps the theory that beyond his violent streak and talent with butchery, Leatherface is like a whipped puppy dog. He doesn't really stand up for himself, since he's so used to being bullied, bossed around, and generally talked down to by his brother and his peers. He's basically a poor beaten animal in a human's body, and Brynarski's performance exhibits that.

The other truly notable member of the cast, Ermey, is absolutely astounding. I make it no secret that I'm a fan of Ermey, and his performance here reinforces that. Ermey plays the character as sadistic, brutal, and with a sardonic wit that really injects the movie with a ton of black humor. He's really the standout cast member of both the remake and the prequel, and I think believe that Platinum Dunes couldn't have hired anyone better to play Sheriff Hoyt.

Just like the remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning has gotten a decisively mixed reception. Personally, I liked it. I'll admit to liking the remake a wee bit more, but the prequel is not without its merits. I found it to have a vibe much closer to Tobe Hooper's original movie than the remake, and the prequel's depiction of the Hewitts really puts them as some of the decade's better horror villains. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning won't go down as an all-time classic, but I did like it a lot. Since it had its flaws, but it certainly did a lot of things I liked, the final verdict for the movie is three and a half stars. It's worth at least a rental.

Final Rating: ***½

Saw III (2006)

One of the most famous horror movie clichés is that the sinners always die first. Drink a beer, you're going to die. Smoke marijuana, you're going to die. Have sex, you're going to die. Be an all-around pain in the neck, you're gonna die. The "sinners die first" cliché has not usually been addressed outright in the past, but this changed when Lions Gate Films released the low-budget flick Saw two days before Halloween in 2004. The brainchild of Australian filmmakers James Wan and Leigh Whannell, Saw introduced the world to Jigsaw, an evil genius who places victims in intricate deathtraps to teach them about the value of human life.

The movie was a huge success, and twelve months later, a sequel hit theaters and achieved even more box office success than its predecessor. Someone at Lions Gate must have had the idea to keep the franchise going a Halloween tradition, as the third chapter of the Saw franchise saw its release on October 26, 2006. And I'm willing to bet that it is perhaps the most ambitious entry in the series.

Master manipulator John "Jigsaw" Kramer (Tobin Bell) is on his deathbed. Closer than ever to succumbing to the brain tumor that changed his life, he has time enough for one last game. Playing the game is Jeff Reinhart (Angus Macfayden), a man tormented by the memories of his eight-year-old son's tragic death and burning with an immeasurable hatred for the drunk driver that caused it and for those who let him get away with a mere slap on the wrist. It is this animosity that has caught Jigsaw's eye, and he has chosen Jeff as his newest guinea pig. Awaiting him in a veritable house of horrors are three tests that will challenge not his will to live, but his will to forgive.

To ensure her gravely ill mentor can see Jeff's adventure to its completion, Jigsaw's budding protégé Amanda (Shawnee Smith) kidnaps troubled yet talented surgeon Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) and orders her to help him. To ensure her cooperation, Amanda straps a collar rigged with shotgun shells around Lynn's neck. The collar is remotely connected to Jigsaw's heart rate monitor; if he flatlines or if Lynn moves outside of a certain range, the collar will activate and blow her face off. With no options, she is forced to do everything she can to make sure Jigsaw stays alive until his final game can be completed.

It should be stated that Saw III is without a doubt the best chapter in the Saw saga thus far. It is remarkably strong, thanks in large part to placing as much concentration on the development of its characters as it does the creative and deliciously nasty deathtraps that have become the franchise's hallmark. It helps that the movie also boasts tight direction, an extremely well-written script, and an amazing cast. Put it all together, and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it makes for one of the best genre entries in some time.

Let's hit the script first. Penned by Leigh Whannell, the screenplay is awesome. It has all of the twists and turns that fans of the series have come to expect, but it balances that with something resembling — gasp! — a soul. While the first two movies are dripping with misanthropy, Saw III actually has something to talk about. It is a tale of forgiveness and compassion, and although it is told with tremendous amounts of graphic violence, the message is there and the movie is better for it. Whannell's screenplay also focuses heavily on its four main characters, each intriguing in their own way.

The most developed and layered characters are Jigsaw and Amanda, who have evolved beyond their relatively minor appearances in the first film to become the franchise's most important characters. What makes Jigsaw — and by proxy the entire Saw franchise — special is that instead of being the traditionally sadistic villain with an insatiable bloodlust and a jet black heart, Jigsaw honestly does not wish death upon his victims. By his own admission in Saw III, he abhors murderers. He wants his victims to survive and become better people due to the hardships he puts them through. That gives Jigsaw a certain bizarre nobility that makes him stand out from his genre brethren. Take, for instance, the scene in which Lynn performs brain surgery on a half-conscious Jigsaw. For Jigsaw to agree to go through this surely painful procedure puts him on the same level as those he chooses to test. It makes him unlike nearly every other horror villain; it makes him human.

Amanda's story, from Jigsaw's victim to Jigsaw's apprentice, pushes forward as well. One could call her a victim of Stockholm Syndrome taken to an unconscionable degree. Jigsaw's trap for her saved her from her heroin addiction, and instead of intently following in his footsteps, she took a wrong turn somewhere. Amanda is a character full of anger and pain and contempt for others, and sees becoming the new Jigsaw not as a way to keep Jigsaw's philosophy going, but to inflict the pain inside her soul upon others. She's taken to cutting herself as a release from her problems, and a potential return to her addiction hangs above her head like a dark cloud. Amanda could have taken any path after surviving Jigsaw's game, but the one she has chosen is both frightening and heartbreaking.

Neither Jigsaw or Amanda reveal all the cards in their hands until the grand finale, and my, what a finale it is. One of the franchise's trademarks is the twist ending in each chapter, and Saw III's twist is the biggest yet. Whannell's screenplay wraps up nearly every loose end from the entire trilogy thus far in the movie's last five minutes, and brings the entire Saw universe full circle. We're given the broadest scope of Jigsaw's world yet, making the franchise is deeper because of it.

Up next is the direction by Darren Lynn Bousman. Working with cinematographer David Armstrong, Bousman's direction is excellently done. He utilizes some amazing scene transitions and maintains the franchise's traditional rapid-fire editing, while changing things up a little, as he incorporates a darker, gloomier atmosphere in the scenes with Jeff while using the franchise's usual bright lighting for Jigsaw's lair. Much of the movie also looks to have a very light, almost subliminal green tint, which I found to help quite a bit with establishing the proper atmosphere for the movie.

This ambiance is greatly assisted by the remarkable score composed by Charlie Clouser. I absolutely loved Clouser's music for the first two Saw movies, and he didn't let me down with Saw III. The score is very heavy, very industrial, and very befitting of the movie's tone. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the recurring reprisals of the "Zepp Overture," a piece of music from the first Saw that has essentially become the de facto theme song for the series. Clouser uses a few different versions of the song throughout the movie, each one used in a way that enhances the scenes they're featured in.

Last but not least, there's the cast. I found Bahar Soomekh to be off and on in her role, but Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, and Angus Macfayden are all amazing. Macfadyen's performance as Jeff, a father whose mourning of the past is ruining his present, is utterly sympathetic. The role is an emotional and heart-wrenching one, and Macfayden knocks it out of the park. And once again, both Bell and Smith, the glue that have held the entire series together, are nothing short of wonderful. I honestly cannot imagine anyone else in their roles. The character of Amanda is simultaneously strong and weak, forceful and vulnerable, and Smith's powerful performance reflects that. Smith balances Amanda's rage and fragility excellently, something that I feel strengthens the character.

Meanwhile, Bell still manages to be excellent while doing the bulk of his performance lying on his back. I stated above that Jigsaw is a very human villain, and I believe that what Bell brings a lot of that to the surface. He plays Jigsaw as someone who, despite being borderline helpless, is still very much trying to assert his control over his life's work even as chinks in his armor begin to appear.

This, along giving Jigsaw a reserved, almost accepting outlook on being faced with his own mortality, really made a difference on how I look at the character even in the prior two movies. If one looks at Jigsaw's evolution over the course of the series, from evil genius to puppet master to a man in the twilight of his life, you see how even though he may be going about it a way most people wouldn't dream of, Jigsaw is a man who wants to make a difference in the world. But while Jigsaw has evolved, the constant has been Bell's respectable performances. As I said, Bell and Smith are the glue that holds the Saw movies together, and I believe that to be the truth.

Critics have dismissed Saw III as just another mindless gorefest organized to simply gross people out. But did those people watch the same movie I did? While I will readily admit that Saw III is not for the squeamish, there's more to it than gallons of fake gore. It's a story that forgiveness is divine, and that nursing the grudges you have against your fellow man will ultimately come back to burn you.

I'm sure that as long as the series makes money, Lions Gate won't hesitate to annually make a Saw movie until they reach Saw 37: Jigsaw in Space. But if it were to stop with Saw III, I think the story would be wrapped up nicely. Saw III would be a more-than-satisfying ending to a trilogy that's become a horror classic for the twenty-first century. And I think it earns four stars and a strong recommendation to check out the entire Saw series. Go check 'em out.

Final Rating: ****