Jigsaw (2002)

 

Directors: Don Adams and Harry James Picardi

Screenplay: Don Adams and Harry James Picardi            

Cast: Barret Walz as Colin; Aimee Bravo as Tawny; Mia Zifkin as Val; Arthur Simone as Eddie; Maren Lindow as Louise; James Palmer as Todd; Mark Vollmers as Sneaky Pete  

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #230

 

I could do my jokes as cave paintings to you...

Major Spoiler Warnings

The standard definition look of a low budget genre film, circa early 2000s, is an acquired taste but one I find appealing. From an era where that title was not quickly taken by the Saw franchise, the first theatrical film in 2004 a few years later, Jigsaw is perversely something I became fixated on since youth just from seeing the DVD cover. As a result, this is an important review regardless of whether it ultimately works for me as a movie or not.

It is pretty basic if a curiously told slasher film, as whilst it begins with a couple of actors in a room, the teacher for the art class the same age as the students, how many (including those produced by Full Moon Pictures as this was) reference the Surrealist movement and the exquisite corpse game, where you give separate pieces of a body of work to one person, and their separate pieces are reconnected together afterwards with no direct influence between them. In this case, the teacher hands a limb from a mannequin he dubs Jigsaw to each student. Each of them is to take it home and refurbish it however they want, to bring to a bar one night to discuss their choices over drinks and then, when put together, to be burned on a pyre as a cleansing ritual. Trust them to make it dangerous with a saw blade and a sawn-off shotgun on its arms, as Jigsaw for reasons never raised does eventually start to move and was probably displeased being set on fire.

And yet, for what is a slasher film, it takes within an eighty minute film until the fifty minute mark for the first kill to take place, which will put fans of the genre off. It tries instead to be more character based and serious for all these fifty minutes before, getting surprisingly dark for ultimately no point. Alongside the art teacher being a sleezeball trying to seduce one of his students, and getting another, a married mother, drunk enough to sleep with when rejected, two of the female characters in the cast have really uncomfortable back stories connected to what they bring in the mannequin limbs. One is that mother, going through college to have some life, stuck with an abusive stereotype redneck trucker character who, coming to the bar meet-up himself, looks down on universities as full of "artsy-fartsy" types putting stuff in your head. He is a crass stereotype of his wage class, comically broad to a disservice, but also really more stinging knowing the next decade's growing ambivalence to learning facts before making arguments is probably as broad but actually a real personality tick for people.

The other has an even bleaker narrative incongruous to the film. Whilst she is comfortable in her sexuality, which is progressive for the film, hers involves sexual abuse from her father and a suicide pact with a younger sister with a shotgun that is tonally inappropriate. Especially as, with the actress playing her for the most part as a very openly sexual person, dressed in a very revealing costume and cowboy hat, what in another context would be legitimately progressive, especially when her boyfriend is the one uncomfortable with learning her terrible childhood, we are not dealing with a film trying to tackle this content even as a slasher film. It is merely there, with no depth, and so afterwards, after opening up on this, her character goes to doing an erotic dance in a lightly toned scene with the barkeeper able to press a button to fire bubbles around her. Again, in another context, it may work fully. Here, it does seem abrupt and is never a real importance to a film that will just lead to a body count.

This is also in mind that, whilst this spends the aforementioned fifty minutes to even become a slasher, none of this builds to nuance with these characters, still broad archetypes of the subgenre. A comedic prat is the sympathetic male, but he is yet also non-stop with his one-liners to a way it is not natural to a characterisation, beyond that and ordering cough syrup for his choice for the whole group to drink on his turn just to be different. It also says a lot that, spoiler warning, the "final girl", the person who is the designated protagonist, has no back-story, nor has her ending concluded, as she ends the film tied down. The Jigsaw monster just lops the head off someone trying to use her as bait, and the film immediately cut to the end credits after this scene, really doing no favour for the film in never resolving anything in what's left of the plot. It is a film whose decision to be this serious in moments, juxtaposed with a cast also chosen who are clearly comfortable in doing scenes in their underwear, which does not know or was not aware of how tonally at odds it actually was with each other, especially as that ending does make it completely unfinished as a work and in point completely.

The killer itself, never explained, is a man in a suit. It does evoke The Fear (1995), an obscure horror film where a creepy life sized doll carved from wood evoked the fears of its victims, including some bleak subject matter in itself, but this film is a hodgepodge which is neither fish nor fowl. It is weird to think, for this review expecting all these years a trashy low budget slasher film, this is a film with little blood, not a lot of sleaze, a bit of the charm of these very low budget films from the turn of the Millennium as expected, and a few abruptly dark moments that, if this had been focused, would have actually led to something admirable.  To be honest, with some of the more charming aspects just following the barkeeper, this film should have probably stayed in the lighter hearted direction rather than risk the serious content it was too shy to properly deal with.

Also, the thing I was not expecting from this, after all these years, was to find the biggest virtue being one of the esoteric and diverse soundtracks from its ilk. I find myself leaving this wanting to praise the music supervisors, even with the curious acoustic ballad with lyrics about watching ice skating on television and searching for the web for (sic) "interracial porn". (The later, whilst funny in context of a sombre sounding song, makes you realise how problematic that porn subgenre title really is). You will find regional music in the golden age of slashers and American exploitation cinema of yore, which makes this not that strange to find, but here you get something just as idiosyncratic between early 2000s indie rock, country music, even metalcore of the era, the most unpredictable part of a generic slasher the soundtrack. Even if the metalcore music is the most generic, and dated, of the lot, even as a heavy metal fan who grew up in that era, it is fascinating I come aware from this realising very low budget films can get their resources together to have style like this, as for all the flaws I have raised, that soundtrack's eccentricities is a huge virtue for this film.

Jigsaw, not surprisingly, did not make an impact for me. Even to its abrupt end, never resolving what happened, nor having the decency to pay off the idea of the killer wanting to create an exquisite corpse from the limbs of his victims, unlike the infamous Spanish slasher Pieces (1982) which did, Jigsaw surprises just for where it stumbles and travels. It is evidence, even in negative ways, you can still be caught off-guard by the least expected touches in spite of a film not succeeding, which is a reward in itself and why these ultra-low budget genre films will always tempt me to them.