Werewolves Within (2021) is loosely based off a VR game released by Ubisoft in 2016. This means that the first 15 minutes of my viewing the movie involved my husband trying to figure out if it was a game he had played (SPOILER: Nope). He was able to tell me that the premise of the game was very much like Among Us, where you have a small group of players, one is a werewolf and the rest have to figure out who that player is and not die. The movie adds slightly more plot by having Finn (Sam Richardson) be the outsider, a forest ranger assigned to a new post in the small town of Beaverfield, where the major conflict is a newly proposed gas pipeline that everyone has an opinion about and the new conflict is bringing out everyone’s previous small town bullshit. My favorite video game adaptations are usually the ones based off of games that have such a simple premise that it allows for the movie to play and spin itself into something different…and play this movie does.
This movie revels in it’s self aware ridiculousness. Sure, a lot of the characters are tropes but that’s to be expected by a video game adaptation. My favorite subversion of a trope is actually that the main characters, Finn and Cecily (Milana Vayntrub), are a forest ranger and a postal worker. When the shit hits the fan and people start dying, they’re the ones who investigate what’s going on. Werewolves Within is a locked room mystery devoid of actual cops! I also love the character of Dr. Ellis (Rebecca Henderson), who is so aloof it’s both reasonable and unreasonable to ever suspect she might be the werewolf and provides several silly jump scares by just suddenly showing up in frame. Werewolves Within has the same kind of cast structure as Knives Out, where there are definitely lead characters but everyone in this movie understands the assignment and brings something special to the table. The cast is fantastic and filled with actors that will make you jump to IMDb trying to figure out where else you know them from. This is a movie that really lives or dies by its characters rather than the plot.
At 97 minutes, this movie runs at a fairly decent clip. It does have to spend some time setting up the geography of the town but, once things start getting bloody, the action really doesn’t stop unless it’s a scene that tells us more about the characters. The one scene that stands out to me where the movie stops to breathe for a moment is where Finn and Cecily end up at what I either recall being a bar or some sort of VFW type building and share a very sweet moment scored by music that 13-year-old me would have chosen from a jukebox and is totally derailed by reinforcing the idea that Finn is bad at relationships. When was the last time you saw two characters navigating sexual tension to Ace of Bass’ “The Sign”? The werewolf reveal is also a moment of spirited chaos that has some surprises of its own.
Overall , this movie is a shit ton of fun. It would make for a great teenaged sleepover movie, a midnight screening or an entry movie for an adult who can handle gore but claims to love action movies more than horror. It would also make a great drive-in double feature with Knives Out. The fact that it’s a video game adaptation lessens my excitement for it just a little bit, if only because it has pre-existing elements and characters that have to somehow be fit into the movie and the movie isn’t here to really explore any deep themes. Isolation and small town politics do provide a backbone for the overall plot but are not the focus of this fun popcorn movie.
Basically, I like this movie and I think it will end up being somebody’s cozy horror movie (or as I heard Josh Ruben say “warm blanket movie”, I really want to steal that), but I just love the creativity of Scare Me more. If someone held up both movies and asked me to pick, I’d pick Scare Me. I almost made this a double feature review because Scare Me deserves to be talked about, but came out at a time when I just couldn’t make the words flow (which is ironic). If I have to compare my relationship with these two movies, Werewolves Within would be the movie I watch when I just need to relax and Scare Me would be the movie I’d watch if I needed to be inspired.
If I were a more clever woman, I would have brought this blog back from the dead with the review of some zombie movie. I am a clever woman, but I am also an emotionally exhausted woman. Lucky for me, Spiral was released in theaters in May and has recently been released to VOD, with a DVD release at the end of July. I can pass this blog off as a somewhat timely opportunity to revisit one of my favorite horror series and a halfway decent way to work through some of the anxiety 2020 has wrought! So, without further ado, here is my ranking of the entire Saw franchise, including Spiral and Jigsaw, with some explanation as to why. As always, this is probably an ever changing ranking depending on my mood but this post is influenced by my most recent rewatch.
Saw 3
I feel like some people are going to find Saw 3 being at number 1 as controversial, but it’s the movie I have the most emotional attachment to. It’s the first truly gory horror movie I saw in a theater by myself, back when I was still kind of a scaredy cat. I had to keep telling myself not to leave. Saw III is the last of the Saw movies where John Kramer is still breathing and kidnaps a doctor to perform brain surgery on him. At the same time, this movie amps up Amanda as John’s acolyte, where she sets up a game for a man named Jeff. A lot of the bloody gore comes from the brain surgery stuff, but this movie is especially goopy and gross. The most gag-inducing scene for me is what I’ll call the “pig pit”. Besides just being gory fun, I think the two storylines tie together nicely and this would’ve made a nice ending to a Saw trilogy. I also really love Angus MacFadyen’s performance as Jeff. I genuinely feel for the amount of pain this man is in over the death of his son. The Saw franchise so often gets dismissed as “torture porn” for being a contemporary of movies like Hostel, but I see this movie as good allegory for how grief can destroy you and those around you if you don’t deal with it.
2. Saw 2
Often touted as “The Best of the Saw Movies”, this is the first to feature a group in the game, among them Detective Eric Matthews’ (Donnie Wahlberg) son. I think this one gets rated so highly because it’s early on in the series so not even the casual Saw viewer is experiencing fatigue yet, it has dialogue that you do have to pay attention to and it may take multiple viewings to be like “Well, that plot point was telegraphed”. The acting is good and the traps are pretty gnarly. This movie is always hard for me to watch because two of the traps trigger two very real anxieties for me: needles and cutting my wrists. That also makes it highly affective.
3. Saw
The movie that began it all and pulls a Texas Chainsaw Massacre on your brain. I know a lot of people who are into police procedural mysteries who refuse to watch this movie because it is “too gory”. Even I was surprised to find, upon rewatch, that it pulls away from a lot of the gore in favor of a twisty mystery about two men chained to pipes in a giant bathroom. We kind of care about Jigsaw’s motivations here but it’s really about the relationship between the characters. For me, this movie is not rated higher because of the fast-paced editing utilized at the end. I know the series became associated with that editing style, but it just makes for an ending where I’m still not fully sure I understand everyone’s reasons for ending up in that bathroom. It might be a plothole or it might be that my brain needs more time to catch on. I was very much on board with this movie franchise from the moment I saw the original Saw. As a professed fan, I feel like I am often asked to defend why I like this franchise. I’m not saying I condone the actions of a man so angry with U.S. healthcare condemning him to death that he feels he has to kidnap and torture the doctor who dismisses him as human being but, as a disabled woman, I understand where those feelings are coming from.
4. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
Mostly referred to in my circle as “That Chris Rock Saw Movie”, Spiral is the first new Saw movie in 4 years and a proper reboot of the franchise. I love it’s sweaty, gritty aesthetic and that the traps once again feel homemade. I love that this was the first saw movie that two people wanted to see with me! Chris Rock plays a detective ostracized by his department after turning in his partner for a crime the partner committed. I jokingly refer to this movie as “Everybody Hates Chris 2” because that’s such a heavy plot point. The only person who even respects him a little is his baby faced new partner. Spiral manages to bring in new and timely themes to the franchise, while throwing in a ton of easter eggs for longtime fans. Some of the easter eggs work better here than they ever did in the other Saw movies. Since this movie deals with cops and systemic corruption, the pig element actually means something! For me, the pig masks in the other movies always felt like a prop guy going, “These are the creepiest masks we could find. We’ll use them.” There were some subtle easter eggs that I didn’t even catch until a second viewing. Yes, the plot and acting is somewhat melodramatic but I’m really beginning to think that’s intentional with Saw movies. They’re like really gory Lifetime movies and I like Lifetime movies.
5. Saw 5 (I did not do this intentionally)
Remember when I said that this list is ranked on how I feel upon my most recent rewatch? If I had tried to rank these movies prior to 2020 (or without actually rewatching them), this movie would’ve been much lower on my list. There are basically two things going on in this movie. Detective Hoffman, Jigsaw’s “heir to the throne” at this point, is trying to stay one step ahead of some highly suspicious FBI agents and facilitate the most recent game. I find the Hoffman stuff to be rather dull. Hoffman’s character is that of corrupt cop who is also not very good at being a cop if you think too hard about it. I used to refer to this movie as “the bottle episode movie” because it rehashes a lot of stuff about Hoffman that the audience already knows but the FBI needs to play catch up on. Upon timely rewatch, this movie falls in the middle of this ranking because I kept thinking about the game portion being a really good metaphor for 2020. The game involves 5 people who all have some connection to one event. Upon waking up chained to a wall, they are told:
They are all selfish people used to doing things that only benefit them
If they all work together, they can survive
Panic aside, none of them seem capable of pushing their selfish tendencies aside to aid in fewer deaths. So most of them die in really gory ways. I don’t know if it was Saw IV or V where people started to complain that the traps were getting too violent but this movie could’ve been a whole lot less violent if the characters learned to work together. That hit me hard in 2020. So I like half this movie. I still mostly remember it for being the movie that flattens Scott Patterson (Detective Strahm) at a time where I was both a Saw and Gilmore Girls fan. That’ll fuck you up.
6. Saw 6 (Again!)
Saw 6 is ranked this high for a similar reason as Saw 5 and Saw. Half of this movie is just more of Hoffman running around and the other half is a game set up to torture people who had worked in John Kramer’s health insurance office, made decisions about his treatment and, therefore, deserve to die for condemning him to death. An overall theme in the Saw franchise seems to be one guy being fucked over by systemic corruption and taking it out on individuals. The thinking is flawed but, occassionally, I’ll hit upon a piece of dialogue that makes me blurt out, “Well, he’s not wrong…” This is the primary reason I will always love this movie. Again, I don’t believe anyone watches movies in a vacuum and I am a disabled woman who has had many dealings with American healthcare.
7. Saw 4
I ranked this movie here because I think it’s well directed, well produced and well acted but the theme of “You should just let this go” for the game feels like the filmmakers telling on themselves. There are nine Saw movies because, no matter how much mainstream movie people tend to shit on these movies, they made money (except Saw 6, apparently). Saw 4 feels like it’s doing clean up from the first 3 movies while also introducing a really unlikeable villain (Hoffman) to follow and crossing its fingers for a Saw 5. It’s low on my list because I generally forget anything that happens in it. I watched this movie 2 weeks ago and would probably get elements from other movies confused if asked.
8. Jigsaw
This movie is weird. I’ve seen it 3 times now and I think it’s growing on me, but in a fungus kind of way. While rewatching it 2 days ago, I realized it’s written by Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger who are also credited for writing Spiral. Going off of that information and this one tidbit I found on IMDb trivia, “The film was specifically written as a way to minimize on the torturous and extreme violence of the previous series installments, instead opting for a feeling of claustrophobia, along with gloss and style,” I have to say I blame the directors for this movie’s failures. Basically, this movie wants to bring back the franchise but is terrified of the “torture porn” label so it comes out extremely sanitized looking. Jigsaw is the “we’re not like other girls” of the Saw franchise. I get a serious Criminal Minds vibe from it, mostly because I was bingeing that show when this movie came out and there is one episode with Tobin Bell and another episode where someone almost dies in a grain silo and my brain mashes those two episodes together because of Jigsaw. Another flaw this movie has is the amount of mental gymnastics it takes to unnecessarily connect it to the original timeline.
I could make an argument for Spiral being a do over for Jigsaw. Some of the story and thematic elements are the same, but the characters in Spiral are better. My least favorite characters in Jigsaw is Eleanor. In an effort to throw the audience off of who the real killer is, the filmmakers made Eleanor a strange stereotype of a female true crime/horror fan. She ends up feeling a lot less suspicious when you can watch this movie and immediately say, “I think she just likes collecting movie props.”
9. Saw: TheFinal Chapter (aka Saw: 3D)
I feel like this movie falls victim to that period of time where social media was just starting to affect how people experienced the world and Hollywood was trying to address that with its existing franchises (it came out almost exactly 6 months before Scream 4). It’s a primary reason why the cold opening happens in store front window and draws a crowd. It’s also a movie that clearly sees the death of the franchise and not just because they slapped some 3D on it in a very in-your-face 80’s fashion. While the movie follows Hoffman trying to go after Jill Tuck, it introduces a new cop, Matt Gibson, with a connection to Hoffman that is very reminiscent of Chris Rock’s character in Spiral. He’s also mostly there to wrap up the Hoffman storyline. The most interesting thing about Saw: The Final Chapter is, once again, the game.
This time we are following Bobby Dagen, supposed Jigsaw survivor, who is making money off of telling a lie. This would’ve been an interesting way of exploring the stories people tell on social media versus the truth, but Dagen is actually on a book tour with his team and very supportive trophy wife. My favorite scene in this movie is when they bring back actress Tanedra Howard from the cold open of Saw 5, who basically just reads Dagen the riot act for his “everything happens for a reason” and “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” platitudes during a stop at a support group meeting. Of course the fact that Dagen is a gigantic liar angers John Kramer who confronts him at a book signing. I have very little recollection of where this movie is supposed to fall in the timeline or who actually set this game up. I think, by this point, the producers were keeping less track of that stuff. In my opinion, this is also the only Saw movie where the actions of one guy cause the death of a bunch of other innocent people and it feels really unfair. The end of this movie feels the most nihilistic of the franchise and it made me a bit sad. Unlike Saw 3, I think that was not the filmmaker’s goal.
I like the fact that they reveal Cary Elwes coming back in the support group scene but his reading of the scene is much colder. I feel more empathy for Howard’s character and she’s the one that sticks in my mind. It’s fun that they were able to bring back Elwes but I think he’s generally underused and I don’t totally buy him as a Jigsaw acolyte. A lot of bringing him back seems to be about filling in plotholes regarding surgical skills John Kramer does not possess. I do like the circular nature of the ending of this movie but that might mostly be because I really hate Hoffman.
So, there you have it. A somewhat randomly timed blog post ranking the Saw movies. I was thinking of closing this by trying to piece together the chronological order of these movies but that kind of makes me feel like this:
Instead I leave you with John Kramer and his acolytes and my understanding of their supposed reasons for doing what they do (some stated, some implied by action. If you haven’t seen Spiral, exit now and go watch it. Final warning.):
JohnKramer(Jigsaw): Dying of terminal cancer, survivor of a suicide attempt, recovering from the grief of the loss of his son due to wife Jill’s miscarriage. Causes him to develop a warped ideology of “helping people who take life for granted learn to live again” by surviving torture. Shown to be more judgemental and petty as the series goes on.
Amanda: Former drug addict, supposedly gets cleaned up after surviving the reverse bear trap. Gets called out by John for her traps being unwinnable. Goes after Detective Matthews due to a personal vendetta.
Mark Hoffman: Jigsaw copycat killer who gets roped in and constantly criticized by John Kramer. Generally just seems to like killing people and is an awful person. Also seems like a rather incompetent cop because his strategy for covering his tracks seems to mostly be setting things on fire which doesn’t always completely destroy evidence. He should know this.
Doctor Lawrence Gordon: Kramer’s doctor, victim in Saw. Saved by Kramer, which might be the reason he becomes an acolyte but mostly seems to be a surgeon for hire.
Jill Tuck: John’s ex-wife. Victimized by Hoffman. Including her here because she tends to show up behind the scenes a lot and John sets her up to run his end game. She also has a slightly sinister aura which makes me wonder how outside of the games she really was.
Logan Nelson: Survivor of one of Jigsaw’s early traps. Mostly saved by an instance of empathy John has after the trap fails to kill Logan, only harms him. Former X-ray tech that accidently switched the labels on John’s brain scan, causing his cancer diagnosis to be delayed and rendered untreatable. Spends a lot of quality time with new father figure John, building traps. Begins his first game as vengeance for his wife’s death, going after Detective Halloran. Halloran is guilty of working the system in ways that benefit him but get other people killed. Logan, as a medical examiner, takes his motto, “I speak for the dead” far too seriously.
WilliamSchenk: Technically a copycat killer but also adopts John’s twisted ideology of changing corrupt systems by killing individuals involved in them.
Lastly, not an official acolyte but Chris Rock’s character’s name is Detective Zeke Banks. I realize I just kept saying Chris Rock. It really is the “Chris Rock Saw Movie” to me because it feels influenced just as much by him as by the first franchise. I’m excited to see if they can take that to an interesting place.
Cold Skin (2017) is what I suspect a lot of us thought we were going to get going into The Lighthouse after seeing The Witch. While I will continue to insist that the former movie lies somewhere between domestic drama and domestic comedy, the latter is definitely an aquatic horror movie. Many of the starting plot points between the two movies are the same. In 1914, a young man (billed only as Friend on IMDb, played by David Oakes) arrives on an island near the Artic Circle to act as a weather observer for 12 months. The only other person on the island is the elusive lighthouse keeper (Ray Stevenson). The young man soon learns that, every night, the island is besieged by fish people coming out of the sea (example: above poster). The lighthouse keeper, played with the same intense weirdness by Stevenson that characterized Dafoe’s performance in The Lighthouse but with a lot more nudity, captures a female fish person (I don’t have a better term for them), who is later named Aneris by Friend, and keeps her prisoner with him in the lighthouse. A lot of the attacks at the end of the movie appear to be attempts to get her back. There’s even one attempt at bargaining by the female population with the two men on the island, that does not go well because at least the lighthouse keeper clearly sees Aneris as his property at that point.
I don’t have a ton to say about this movie but it’s a solid aquatic horror movie. The performances are off kilter and fun, without becoming downright silly. The tone is always kept straight and serious. The creature design for Aneris is really beautiful, although a bit reminiscent of The Shape of Water. The CGI for the hordes of fish people is a little dodgy but there’s so much going on in those scenes, it doesn’t really matter. The performances of the three main actors make up for any flaws and I wish this movie would get more attention. Now would be a great time to check it out on Shudder.
The Lodge(CW: Suicide, Cults)
Between about two weeks of minor illness and some travel, I almost didn’t catch this one in the theater. It was actually the last movie I saw before all the theaters in my area started shutting down. This may not be the best movie to watch while you’re holed up with you family, but if The Shining is on your list of things to binge, maybe give this a go.
Richard (Richard Armitage) takes his two children, Aiden and Mia (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh) to a rather remote house in the woods during winter break to get to know their soon-to-be step-mom, Grace. Aiden and Mia are still grieving the loss of their mother, Laura (Alicia Silverstone, whom I barely recognized), after she commits suicide. Grace was once a member of a suicide cult and a subject in a book written by Richard. Grace clearly, at some point, became “the other woman” because Laura hated Grace and, before her death, was poisoning the children against Grace with her words and actions. Laura’s suicide is truly shocking, partly because I expect an actor like Alicia Silverstone to get more screen time in a movie like this. It’s a powerful scene that resonates through and sets up the rest of the movie.
Once the four of them get up to the titular “lodge”, Richard has to go back to work for a couple days but promises to be back by Christmas. This leaves the two children, Grace, and her dog in isolation, working out their differences. At the moment when everybody seems to warm up to one another, something happens that, once again, plunges everyone into paranoia, distrust and fear.
I don’t really want to spoil the twists this movie takes because they genuinely made me go, “Woah, wait…what?” in the best way possible. I will say that I’m not entirely positive on this movie and found it, for lack of a better word, mean. For me, it fits into the same movie category as Martyrs. If you ask me if you should see this, my answer is, “Hell, yeah!” Just don’t ask me to watch it with you. I’d have to be in a really good mood to watch it again because I think it’s pretty honest about human behavior, even involving children. I do have one spoiler that’s more of a content warning so stop reading if you don’t want to know: *******************************************************************************************************SPOILER********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
The dog dies. While the actual death is offscreen, there are several scenes of it’s lifeless body. I burst out crying because I am that person. Give me a gruesome human death and I’m like, “That person’s acting.” Give me an animal death, especially that of a pet that I find particularly unnecessary and cruel, I will cry. I have turned movies off for this, but those have usually shown the death onscreen and include animal violence. This one just made me feel super sad and angry. No spoilers for anything else but I have never felt my emotions pivot so hard against characters in a movie before.
Unfortunately this movie is not yet streaming, but should be available on DVD on May 5th. Hopefully that date remains accurate because, by my estimate that will probably be just about the time everyone starts to get really tired of being stuck quarantined in their own homes and all the family drama will rear its ugly ahead. Sit down, take a deep breath and watch this movie together.
Story time, everyone. Gather ’round. What else you do you have to do right now? Binge your 40th-something hour of Netflix? I’ve got movies to watch too, but this will just take a few minutes.
I’ve been keeping myself sane for the last few days (since Friday the 13th to be exact, the idea for this post already planned before finding out I’m off work for an as-yet-undetermined amount of time) by catching up on all the Friday the 13th movies. Why, you ask? Because Friday the 13th was the first horror movie I remember being exposed to. I may have seen others before it, but it’s the one I remember being terrorized by so badly that the story keeps getting brought up by family. Anyway, story time:
When I was 11, I was the youngest person in my church youth group. Yes, this story involves church. The kids who were younger than me were in elementary school, so the decision was made to put me in with the high school kids. Periodically, we’d have church lock-ins, basically a big sleep over inside the church. I remember two things from probably one church lock-in: playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark and discovering a Dorian Gray-esque painting in a back room and watching Friday the 13th, courtesy of my brother, who is about three and a half years older then me. Why the adults let him bring it to a church lock in, I don’t know, but, honestly, I would’ve ended up seeing it at home eventually. My mom was pretty casual about what we were allowed to watch. Funny thing is, after all these years, I can’t remember exactly which Friday the 13th movie we watched. For years, I told people it was Part 3, but the first one makes more sense. While rewatching the series this weekend, I had a really strong flashback to having seen the end of Part 2 as well, so I DON’T KNOW ANYMORE. All I know is that it was a movie from the beginning of the series and it was definitely my brother’s fault. Even now, he’ll occassionally text me with a horror movie title he’ll dare me to watch.
Here’s the thing about church lock-ins: NO ONE SLEEPS. So I didn’t have any bad reactions to watching whichever movie it was right away. About a month later, I had nightmares. Unfortunately, this was at the tail end of a long stretch of childhood insomnia that my mother was, frankly, just over. So, I have dreams about Jason chasing me and go knock on the door to her bedroom. She goes upstairs to my brother’s room on the third floor and all I can hear is, “This is your problem, you deal with it!” and then footsteps. Suddenly, I realize there are scarier things, like an angry mother and an annoyed older brother in the late hours of the night. I think I pretended to be asleep because I don’t remember an actual interaction. But I never watched another Friday the 13th movie until I was in my 20s and definitely saw Part 3 (in a theater, in 3D. Special screening.) Frankly, in my teens, I didn’t really watch horror movies unless I was with friends. The first horror movie I remember seeing by myself in a theater was Saw 3 and I had to keep talking myself out of leaving (out of fear, I happen to like the Saw franchise).
My favorite part of this story happened when I was in my early 20s. I’m gonna guess it was October, because I remember Friday the 13th being on TV due to it being constantly interrupted by commercials, probably on SYFY (pronounced SIFFY). I was unemployed and seeing a lot of movies to keep myself sane. I was also back living with my parents. I had probably just seen one of the Saw movies. So, I’m settled in front of the TV in the late afternoon watching Friday the 13th. My mom comes home from work, comes around the corner into the living and just looks at the TV. Then looks at me. After a moment she asks, “Is this the best idea?” It’s a great idea, Mom.
What The Flick 