Ach, My Chest Hairs!

There's a part of me that appreciates tacky horror movies, and for the last couple of weeks I've had The Descent and Saw III on my shelf, waiting for the right moment. That moment came today, after I'd done my flood control earthmoving, my haystack moving, and moving of various other things and sorts.

So here's my capsule review: they're both better than trying to peel tape off your bare chest. How do I know this? Because I was... Oh, hell, there's no polite or tasteful way to say this, so I'll just say it. I'd bought a pre-packaged salad, the kind that comes in a clear plastic UFO and is sealed with tape, and I was naked, having just gotten out of the shower. Bat-21 was on TV, not that I like that movie (after a while the Bird Dog, do you read? radio chatter gets pretty tedious)... The point is that I was trying to eat a salad in bed while I was naked (or "taking an air bath" as Someone Famous once said) and I got the strip of tape that formerly held the salad UFO together stuck to the middle of my chest. I'm not particularly hirsute, but I'm even less hirsute now, the tape having removed approximately 33% of my chest hair from a strip an inch wide and six inches long.

So there's a visual you don't need - me eating a salad in bed in my altogether.

But I while I was at it I watched Saw III and The Descent. Goodness! And be warned that spoilers lurk beyond this point.

Neither one qualifies as "supernatural horror" and neither one generates any real horror. Mostly they generate squirming discomfort, though in different ways.

You know going in that Saw III is going to be full of outlandish traps, blood, screaming, ominously hoarse whispers, and protestations to the effect that Jigsaw doesn't murder anyone; his test subjects simply lack the "stuff" required to survive. And the movie delivers in that regard. The traps are suitably diabolical, there's a sufficiency of screaming and bleeding and bone-cracking, there are a few unexpected plot twists, and in the end the viewer comes away saying "Yes, this was very much congruent with the experience of having watched Saw and Saw II." I think my main criticism would be that it is relatively uninvolving - I didn't have any stake in the survival of anyone at all. The characters are all fairly flat and dull except for Amanda, and she's obviously a fruitcake. A buffly attractive fruitcake, but a fruitcake nevertheless. I also didn't think it matched the pinnacle of horror from Saw II, namely the pit full of hypodermic syringes. So, in short, it was dark, full of jerky camera moves, populated by relatively dull characters, and of interest mainly because it's a part of the Saw franchise. There were only two things that really took me by surprise and generated anything approaching real horror, the first being the revelation that Amanda is a cutter, and the second being Amanda taking a slug through the neck.

The Descent is a lot like The Cave only not underwater. It takes place in a cave that six oddly assorted women try to explore. Like The Cave, most of the real horror of The Descent is delivered by the environment, not the antagonist. The scenes of actual spelunking are pretty intense from that point of view - I'm not cut out to crawl through tiny passageways that are only barely shoulder-wide two miles below ground, so those scenes made my toes curl a bit. Most of the movie is frankly pretty confusing, especially once the party gets split up. There's a lot of running and flashlight-waving, and I got confused on who was where. But I guess it doesn't matter, since none of them survive anyway. In some ways I have to salute the ending. It was a novel way to spin the standard "horror movie ending", but having said that, I thought the touch of the blonde woman chopping the other woman through the knee was overdone. Given the circumstances, I'd have delayed retribution until reaching the surface, as two people have a better chance than just one.

So they're not great movies, but they're good movies. Better than peeling tape off your chest while watching Bat-21, and you can take that to the bank.