Trash For Cash

It’s that time of the year again. Leaves are turning yellow and falling to the ground… The weather is getting colder and rainier… The big fall celebrations are drawing near: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

Another sign of autumn is the annual theatrical release of the latest title in the long, excruciating series of movies belonging to the Saw franchise. Miraculously, these mindless low-budget should-go-straight-to-DVD entries are still in production. The sixth movie – excitingly titled Saw VI – is in theatres right now, I believe.

Money talks, unoriginality walks.

The first five movies cost $36 million to produce, and brought in a worldwide total of almost $669 million altogether. That’s a bigger profit than that of Forrest Gump, a winner of six Academy Awards. Naturally you could argue that it is hardly fair to compare the profit of one quality film to that of five harebrained ones put together, but if you’ve seen at least one or two Saw movies, you will likely agree that lumping them all together in your mind is actually pretty easy.

After all, it’s the same concept again and again, repeated ad nauseam.

I enjoy horror movies in small doses, if for no other reason than the practically mandatory nudity. Although it’s fairly rare to find an actual horror movie these days among the garbage being released and tagged as “horror.” It doesn’t really matter how much blood and guts you show if the audience knows it’s coming. The subtle qualities that made movies like Alien so fabulously terrifying are entirely lost on the new generation of horror film writers. Today’s audience sees blood and guts on television. Just watch Fringe, for example. Good horror uses the exquisite power of your imagination, not the lame and desensitized power of your eyesight.

I am thinking about setting up some kind of a horror movie marathon on Halloween. Hardly an original concept, but I don’t usually (read: ever) do that sort of thing, and I am spending Halloween alone this year, so I figured I might do something like that for a change. But as to what movies I’ll be watching, I don’t know yet. I am reaching toward some classics, however… Spare me the mind-numbing predictability of enduring another Saw title.

If you are a fan of the franchise, though, you’ll have cause for celebration: Lions Gate Entertainment has promised two more films to be made and released in the next couple of years. Guess in this economy you need to milk that cow for the last drop.

Tagged as: Creativity, Culture, Film, Halloween, movies