Saw: The Final Chapter has, for those of us who don't cotton to this type of sadistic fare, one small saving grace, and that's a fitful sense of humor about its own genre.

Obviously, I am not just immune to the allure of these films, I find their very existence troubling and disturbing, far beyond their 'mere' content. So take this review with the requisite amount of salt (just don't get it in any gaping flesh wounds, it will most likely sting). But with films like the Saw franchise, where images are so graphic and the violence and mayhem is so patently unappealing, it really raises some serious questions as to what is going on in peoples' heads that they willingly subject themselves to these nightmare visions. What is it about these films that so appeals to people? 'Basic' horror or thriller films are perhaps easier to understand on a general level after all, virtually everyone enjoys a good scare now and again.

Some sociologist either has already had or no doubt someday will have a field day trying to explain the psychological reasons people need to actually pay money to sit there and watch other humans get their eyeballs sewn shut, their bodies pummeled and hacked by any number of horrible instruments of pain and destruction, their limbs severed, their intestines spilled, and their heads burst apart like some cranial version of David Letterman's 'stupid watermelon' tricks. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, January 14, 2011Įlvis Presley once famously struck back at critics with an album entitled 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, and yet there were some cynics amongst us who may have asked, 'Why not?' The producers of the Saw franchise may, like Elvis (and/or Elvis' ghost, depending on whether or not you believe The King has indeed left the building), may be saying, 'Can $848 million in box office receipts be wrong?' To which the cynics amongst us may just as dogmatically respond, 'Yes.' Is the Saw franchise 'torture porn' or 'torture horror'? Its creators insist it isn't, and yet it's hard to argue that point when every film is filled with some of the most disgusting imagery imaginable of (at least sometimes relatively) innocent people getting stuck in the films' many signature 'traps' and meeting their fates in any number of horrible ways.

Saw 7 full movies