Wednesday, October 12, 2022

October Horror Challenge 2022 #52: "Spiral (2021)"

I've seen all the other films in the Saw franchise, to varying degrees of success. I thought the last one, Jigsaw, was ok but it tried to retcon the details of the other Saw movies so it pissed me off on that note, but it had a lot of good gore like the rest of the Saw movies, so for that alone it was worth watching. I wasn't too sure which direction the series would take after that, though, so when this movie "from the book of Saw" was announced, I was eager to check it out, and today's the day. Let's do this thing.

This movie is about a cop with a father who was famous in the police force, so he feels like he's always in his father's shadow. He has been assigned a rookie partner so he can learn how to be a team player and less of a lone wolf. He and his new partner stumble across a string of grisly murders reminiscent of the Jigsaw killings, and the cop, named Zeke, finds himself at the center of the killer's obsessive plan. Will the two cops be able to solve the case or will the killer claim them as his next victims?

Jigsaw used to have a much scarier voice in the other movies. The voice on the Jigsaw tapes in this movie sounds like some guy from Blues Clues and it's very distracting when you're trying to react to the grisly carnage on screen and this silLy cartoony voice is doing all the talking. Other than that the movie isn't bad at first. Chris Rock does a good job playing Zeke and I'm pretty impressed with his acting. I've never really seen him in a serious role before and it's cool to know he can carry a movie like this.

Jigsaw is up to his old nasty tricks again. is it just me or is he even more brutal than ever here? oh, you make your choice and live, but I'm going to RIP all your fingers from their sockets. that's not a very fair trade, and some of the others are even worse. Anyone who's been cut by just one shard of broken glass knows how brutal some of these traps really are. The twist at the end is really um, twisted, but they always are in these movies. This one feels like Jigsaw's kill of the week by the time we get to the end, I feel like this was the direction the series was always headed in, and it kinda got lost on it's way through the seventh movie, but the subsequent movies are going to take this new direction, with a different killer in every movie just taking Jigsaw's idea and running with it. The problem with that is you always end up with a preachy killer over-explaining his evil plan at the end of the movie, but that's a small price to pay for getting a cool, gory, nasty new horror movie every year or two. I can dig it.

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