SAW WEEK: Saw IV (2007)

Even though Jigsaw - aka John Kramer (Tobin Bell) - is well and truly dead (the film opens with his gruesome autopsy), his 'games' continue, thanks to a message on a wax-covered microcassette found in his stomach.

Obsessed SWAT officer Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent) is led around the city through a series of challenges that he believes will help finally free long-missing cop Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and Rigg's friend, detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Manylor). If he can reach them in time.

Meanwhile, FBI agents Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) and Lindsey Perez (Athena Karkanis) believe Jigsaw had a third accomplice, as well as Amanda Young, and that's driving their investigations.

This leads them to Kramer's ex-wife, Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) and, through a series of flashbacks, we learn a major chunk of Jigsaw's "origin story", his motivation, and get to witness his first "game"... which turned out to be less than successful.

There is a twist in the third act (isn't there always), but in the process the plot gets twisted beyond breaking point, with the story ultimately feeling like an abandoned William Burroughs cut-up experiment as it mucks around with non-sequential storytelling techniques.

Saw IV does tie in with the previous episodes in the franchise, interlocking its various puzzle pieces with the narratives of episodes one through three, but I'm still not convinced it isn't without plot holes.

There are definitely elements of later events hinging on fortuitous outcomes in earlier traps that could never have been predicted so far ahead of time.

However, among the things I have grown to appreciate about the Saw franchise, well the few opening salvos, at least, is (a) Jigsaw's code of conduct (he is testing people, and he wants them to save themselves) and (b) given Jigsaw's failing health, his ability to attract followers to his growing "cult".

Unfortunately, as the series has gone on, and its become clear that people other than Kramer are rigging his traps, innocent people are starting to suffer as collateral damage.

Because his acolytes don't adhere to his rigid guidelines, those moments of random violence simply for shits and giggles - as I said before - are when the franchise lurches over the line from horror-thriller to torture porn.

There's a danger these are becoming more in style of Eli Roth's Hostel flicks, simply challenging the endurance of the audience, and running the risk of drowning out the "learn to appreciate your life" message with buckets of fake blood. 

The interesting part of this entry in the on-going saga of Jigsaw was the development of Kramer's backstory, what pushed a decent man to become a Riddler/Joker-level trap-builder and torturer. 

This is the last entry in the series to be directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, until Spiral: From The Book of Saw.

However, the scriptwriters of Saw IV, Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan, also penned the following three chapters (Saw V, Saw VI, and Saw 3D) - which were all directed by Kevin Greutert - so it'll be interesting to see what kind of continuity there is through these latter entries in the story of Jigsaw.

As a brief aside, given their simple sequential sequel titles, I feel the film makers missed a trick with Saw IV by not having some play on "i.v." as in an intravenous drip. But maybe that's just me.

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

While waiting for his trial for the murders committed in Joker, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is being held in Arkham Asylum, where he meets Harleen 'Lee' Quinzel (Lady Gaga) in a music therapy group.

It's love at first sight and, when she gets out before him, Harley promises to be at Arthur's trial every day, as well as vocal campaigner for his freedom.

Arthur's lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener) seeks to build a defence on the idea that Arthur and Joker are two separate personalities, brought on by his abusive upbringing.

Meanwhile, the district attorney, Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) is seeking to dismantle this idea, and is calling for the death penalty for Arthur.

Eventually, Arthur - egged on by Harley - grows tired of his lawyer's approach and dramatically fires her in the middle of the case, opting to defend himself: in full Joker make-up.

I can totally get why people were disappointed with Joker: Folie à Deux. It wasn't the Joker film they were expecting. Not that writer/director Todd Phillips had made any promises about where the sequel would be going... it just wasn't the stylish and violent remix of The Dark Knight that I think people were hoping for.

Rather it turned out to be an arthouse courtroom drama - and character piece - infused with elements of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (the Arkham scenes) and Natural Born Killers (the delusions and the media's glorification of murderers).

In truth, Phoenix's Joker is nothing like the source material (80-plus years of comic book escapades), but more akin  to someone cosplaying as The Joker.

As I said in my review of 2019's Joker (earlier today), the character has always worked in the comics, and most other media, because he doesn't have a definitive origin story. He's an enigma and that makes him more frightening - he's the one mystery the world's greatest detective, Batman, can't solve.

But Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix have made the character all too human, with a name, family and origin story, and - especially in this sequel when he is often depicted as - frail and wracked with self-doubt.

That makes for an interesting character... he's just not The Joker.

He is a straw man held up as a figurehead for a bubbling, anarchic revolution in rundown Gotham City, but - unlike the comic book iteration or even any of the live-action takes, right back to Cesar Romero in Batman '66 - he comes to the conclusion that he doesn't want that mantle.

Which, again, makes for an interesting revelation, but it just doesn't feel like something The Joker would do.

Providing strong support is Lady Gaga as a low-key, grounded Lee Quinzel, who gets under Arthur's skin and fuels his frequent delusions and dreams that frame themselves as musical numbers (one in the courtroom is very reminiscent of Sid Vicious' performance of My Way at the climax of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle).

Both Lee and Fleck are complex characters, well developed and growing towards a surprising - yet wholly believable - twist in the final scenes, that pretty much guarantees there won't be a third film in this particular franchise.

Joker: Folie à Deux (a psychological term for a shared delusion) is as gritty as the first movie, presenting us with a beautifully decaying Gotham City, with a troubled element of the populace inspired by their own perceptions of the murderous Fleck.

However there's no getting away from the overwhelming feeling that this was originally a psychological study that has just been dressed up with a few affectations from the Bat'verse to sell tickets.

Which I gather it didn't.

It was a brave experiment. But, sadly, it failed.

I actually believe if this duology has been made with different - or even original - protagonists audiences (coming to the story without any expectations) would have liked it more, because they would have then felt very clever pointing out: "oh, that's a bit like The Joker and Harley Quinn from the Batman comics".

While Folie à Deux lacks the kick of the first film, I did actually enjoy it for what it was, but it was still a peculiar take on the characters that bore little or no resemblance to the general public's vision of the source material.

Joker (2019)

First, some context: I have always been a strong advocate of the belief that one of the reasons The Joker - Batman's arch-nemesis - works so well as a villain, and has endured so long in comics, is because he doesn't have (and doesn't need) a definitive origin story.

As the ultimate unreliable narrator, he's had numerous possible origin stories since he first appeared in 1940, but we've never learned who he actually was as none of these possible backstories have ever stuck.

Part of my issue with prequels is that they very rarely truly complement the original material: Jedi knights were much cooler without midichlorians, xenomorphs were scarier before we knew who "engineered" them etc

However, taking all that into account, writer/director Todd Phillips' Joker is an incredibly powerful and engaging movie.

It's hard to believe that the same person responsible for the odious Hangover movies could craft this amazing Scorsese homage, a Taxi Driver for the comic book movie generation.

Set in 1970s Gotham, the rundown city is a roiling powder keg of social inequality, ready to blow at any moment.

Mentally unbalanced, clown-for-hire and would-be stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with his frail mother (Frances Conroy) and suffers a serious of brutal beat-downs - both physical and emotional - that push him over the edge.

However, media coverage of his violent actions are the spark that ignites the city, and as society explodes around him, Arthur is shocked to find himself on course to meet his idol: TV chat show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro).

As well as a Joker origin story, the movie also stands as a Batman origin story, as Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) and even young Bruce (Dante Pereira-Olson) get drawn into Arthur's story.

A gritty take on the world of the Batman comics - following in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy - Joker is Taxi Driver meets King Of Comedy, with a sprinkling of Fight Club and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns comic book run.

Fleck is Travis Bickle, equally awkward with women and full of pent-up aggression, but with his professional clowning substituting for Bickle's late-night cab driving, both giving them - they believe - insight into society's ills.

Echoing De Niro's riveting Oscar-nominated performance in Taxi Driver, Joaquin Phoenix owns Joker with his magnetic, and tragic, performance as the delusional Fleck, trying to find purpose in his life and an explanation for why all this shit keeps happening to him.

He brings a catalogue of tics and quirks to the character that make his Joker as shockingly memorable as that of the late Heath Ledger.

Are we supposed to feel sympathy, or even empathy, for Arthur? Or simply understand what drove him to do what he did? Or believes he did, if he really did it!

For all we know, at the end of the day, Arthur is just a Joker, but not the Joker!

A surprisingly cerebral and layered story, Joker (available from today on Sky Cinema) definitely demands multiple viewings to simply pick apart which elements - beyond the ones that are flagged up - are real and which occur only in Arthur's head.

Psychologically disturbing viewing, the 122-minute movie exquisitely encapsulates the Alan Moore quote from the highly regarded Batman/Joker graphic novel The Killing Joke:

"All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day."

While I wouldn't want all comic book movies to follow Joker's lead, this is an excellent demonstration of how the Marvel method isn't the only way to make to make outstanding movies in this genre.

The Legend of The 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

In 1804, a wicked Chinese priest, Kah (Chan Sen), makes his way to Transylvania to ask Count Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) to resurrect the "seven golden vampires" that Kah had previously employed to keep local peasants in order back home.

Dracula, however, has other ideas and steals Kah's physical form so that he can relocate to China and get back into the bloodsucking business for himself.

A century later and Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is lecturing at China's Chungking University on the dangers of vampires, while also seeking aid and co-operation to investigate local legends of the undead.

He is met with derision from all but one of his audience, Hsi Ching (David Chiang), whose village has been almost destroyed by attacks from The Seven Golden Vampires.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing's son, Leyland (Robin Stewart), has befriended the forthright, wealthy and attractive European widow Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who has caught the eye of a local tong boss.

Vanessa agrees to finance Val Helsing's expedition to the isolated village, on the condition that she can join the party, and Ching introduces his seven kung-fu trained siblings who will provide protection on the journey.

Soon after setting out, the group is ambushed by tong thugs and Van Helsing gets his first taste of Chinese martial arts.

Later on, they make camp in a cave and find themselves under attack from several of the gold mask-adorned vampires and an army of skipping zombies.

From there, the next stop for our heroes is their besieged village, where they organise the remaining villagers into a defensive force and await the assault of the vampires and their legion of the undead.

One of the vampires kidnaps Leyland's girlfriend, Ching's sister Mai Kwei (Shih Szu), leading the surviving heroes to pursue him to Kah's temple, where Van Helsing discovers that Kah is actually his archenemy: Count Dracula.

After this final conflict, like a good many films of its era, the movie abruptly ends without showing any interest in exploring the high cost our heroes had to pay to get through the climactic confrontation between good and evil.

A joint production of Hammer Films and The Shaw Brothers, The Legend of The 7 Golden Vampires is surprisingly good for what it is, but could have been so much better.

From the moment they are introduced, the protagonists are stuck on a narrative railroad, travelling from point A to point B on a linear journey, broken up by impressive fight scenes... and culminating in a massive fight scene.

You get the impression that the Hammer crew were so delighted to be able to blend their tried-and-tested horror formula with Chinese martial arts that they couldn't really think of anything else to do with their Chinese cast or exotic scenery (it was shot on location).

While there's no denying the film is a lot of fun, there is so little to actual story that beyond its martial arts "gimmick" it is largely ephemeral. 

The golden vampires aren't even the classic Chinese jiangshi ('hopping vampires'), which would have brought something a bit unusual to a '70s Hammer flick, but are instead a strange mix of Western vampires and Eastern martial artists.

It also pays not to think too hard about the 100 year time jump from the prologue to the main story and the havoc that plays with Van Helsing's timeline if he's coming off the back of his (many) fights with Dracula in, and around, Transylvania.

Are we supposed to assume that Dracula was doing all this - and dying frequently - at the same time he was in China running The Cult of The Seven Golden Vampires?

Or is this a different Dracula? 

Although he is reduced to a largely supporting role, John Forbes-Robertson's take on Count Dracula is oddly camp, with his make-up bearing a more than passing resemblance to Cesar Romero's Joker in the Adam West Batman show.

Long out of print and pretty rare in these parts, I watched the 86 minute DVD version of The Legend of The 7 Golden Vampires, having finally tracked it down on eBay for a reasonable price, but I understand there's a 110 minute Eastern version that I'd love to see one day.

Ultimately, The Legend of The 7 Golden Vampires comes across as a massive missed opportunity.

Smile 2 (2024)

It's no secret that the original Smile (from 2022) is one of my favourite creepy movies, for its genuine ability to get under my skin, so I had high hopes for the sequel, Smile 2, released on disc in the UK this week.

Sadly, the film isn't a particularly strong sequel as it mainly retreads a lot of the mythology created in the first movie, seemingly only choosing to build on it right at the last moment. And the suggested implications of this contradict what the established lore of the central demon's M.O. 

Personally, I would have liked a story that dug deeper into the backstory of the supernatural parasite at the heart of this franchise, rather than once again going over how it drives its victims insane and feeds off of them.

Picking up the story six days from the end of the first movie, the demonic "Smile" entity is passed on to drug dealer Lewis Fregoli (Lukas Gage).

Meanwhile, global pop sensation, Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing for a world tour, after a year recovering from a car crash that killed her boyfriend, actor Paul Hudson (Ray Nicholson), and severely injured her.

With a history of substance abuse, Skye finds it hard to obtain legal pain medication and so turns to her dealer... Lewis Fregoli.

Lewis is behaving very strangely when Skye arrives and eventually kills himself - in a particularly gruesome manner - right in front of her.

Soon after, Skye starts to have very vivid, and horrific, hallucinations and is seeing people with twisted smiles plastered across their faces.

While shocking and graphic in places, Smile 2 is slow to get going and I only found myself really getting drawn into the story at the mid-point of the two hour movie.

A lot of the shocks revolve around needles and broken glass, which is quite squirm-inducing, meaning Smile 2 feels more concerned with physical horror than the psychological horror of the first film.

There's a definite air of Emma Roberts around Naomi's portrayal of Skye, and our protagonist could easily have been any number of the self-absorbed, horrible characters that Roberts has played in the American Horror Story franchise. 

Skye isn't an easy character to get invested in, and therefore care about.

However, as she plunges deeper into her demon-fuelled psychosis, the film certainly becomes stronger, with one particularly impressive plot twist that reminded me of another of my favourite movies (although I can't say which as that will give the game away).

As Skye is a pop star - and the marketing for this movie brilliantly created a genuine online media presence for the character, from her own Instagram account to music videos - this means there's as much music in Smile 2 as the much maligned Joker: Folie à Deux.

Does this make Smile 2 a musical?

For my money, it's a fun, ultragory, horror tale that rehashes the mythology of its progenitor in a flashy new setting, but falls way short of Smile's unnerving originality.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Thirty-six years after the events of the original Beetlejuice movie, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) is now hosting her own paranormal reality show, Ghost House, when the death of her father calls her, her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), and her mother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara), back to their family home in Winter River for the funeral.

Meanwhile, in the afterlife, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) finds himself being stalked by his murderous ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), and he sees Lydia's return to her old home as his possible escape.

Settling in to Winter River, Astrid - a non-believer in the supernatural - is tricked by a malevolent ghost into swapping her existence for his, and ends up trapped in the afterlife.

Unable to think of any other way to rescue her daughter, Lydia calls on Beetlejuice for assistance.

I'll admit that when I sat down to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, while I had high hopes for a Tim Burton movie with this incredible cast, I wasn't convinced that it would be able to recapture the lightning in a bottle brilliance of 1988's iconic original.

But this sequel turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It's chaotic and madcap, with a whirlwind of plot elements swirling around (not all of which make 100 per cent sense or achieve resolution) and sweeping up a legion of memorable characters.

Michael Keaton has lost none of his gnarly charisma as the demonic Beetlejuice, while the three female leads are perfection personified in their roles: Winona Ryder retains her ultimate goth girl crown, Jenna Ortega sidesteps Wednesday Addams to create a wholly believable sceptic in a family of eccentrics, and Catherine O'Hara is, of course, Catherine O'Hara and we can expect nothing less.

It may be occasionally nonsensical, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a hell of a lot of crazy fun, with some great visual gags and a supporting cast as strong as its main cast: from a cameo by Danny DeVito as the afterlife's janitor to Willem Dafoe as Wolf Jackson, the ghost-detective who was actually a B-movie actor in life.

The joyous splattergun approach to the horror-comedy narrative includes the sudden insertion of Beetlejuice's origin story. This caught me totally by surprise, but then again as The Joker of the underworld, was this his true beginning or simply a flight of fancy?

As convincing a yarn as it was, not knowing its veracity certainly adds another layer to the character of the bio-exorcist.

Under Tim Burton's guidance, with a script from Smallville creators and Spider-Man 2 scribes, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages, just about, to be simultaneously quite different from the original and very similar.

The Jeffrey Jones of the situation (the disgraced actor played Lydia's dad, Charles, in the first movie) is handled really deftly, through a range of tricks from a claymation death sequence to a headless corpse (and voice impersonator) taking his place in the afterlife.

While, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice mainly stays away from aping moments directly from the original, the climactic musical number - lip-syncing to MacArthur Park - could never reach the enduring heights of the legendary Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) sequence.

That tune does pops up earlier, at Charles funeral, posing a serious challenge to Monty Python's Always Look On The Bright Side of Life as the best tune to play at a funeral.

Given the surreal maelstrom of the denouement, I'm now wondering how long we will have to wait for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.