IT CAME FROM POUNDLAND II: Saw

Director: James Wan (2004)

Starring: Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potter

Find it: IMDB

Our semi-regular feature returns with Saw, a movie I didn't really like but couldn't turn down for £1. I've never watched it since buying the film, and probably never will. Still, at a quid, I maintain that it is a legitimate investment. Update: I sold it on eBay for £3.25. That's a lot of profit, given that I always deliberately overcharge for postage and packaging.

Se7en II: Saw stars Cary Elwes as Doctor Lawrence Gordon, a man kidnapped by the mysterious and elusive Jigsaw Killer. Together with a man who can't act and a corpse who can, Gordon is locked in a smelly bathroom and told to hack his foot off if he wants to survive. Meanwhile, other things are happening in the outside world. Wronged copper Danny Glover is on the hunt for Jigsaw, Gordon's wife (Monica Potter) and child (child) have been kidnapped and several unsavoury types fall victim to Jigsaw's little games. Despite the fact that nobody owns any lightbulbs and Cary Elwes sucks in this movie, Saw is a servicable enough little horror thriller type thing.

... and it stars Ben from off've LOST as a man called Zep.

Depending on your view of the movies, Saw has pretty much become tainted by its own sequels at this point - a byword for cheap schlock, seasonal moneygrabbing, lazy plot devices and an insistance on crowbarring Tobin Bell into flashbacks just for the sake of it. 

... and Miles from off've LOST as a man with a fat face

So Saw is a hard one for me to like now. I love (most of) its casting - Danny Glover, Monica Potter and the LOST alumni are good in everything - and the traps are admittedly quite inspired. It is what it is really; a passable Se7en rip-off with a few good twists and a neat concept. But like Freddy Kreuger and those damn cartoony sequels, it's become diluted by its own overexposure. And it's so self-serious that it's almost impossible to like. Whereas you want to see Freddy, Jason, Michael and Leatherface hack up the teens, Jigsaw is an irritating egoist with an overinflated sense of self-importance and whiny disposition. This is a man whose first thought after diagnosis with cancer is to build a bunch of silly traps with which he can torture crackheads and cheating doctors.

To be fair, if my doctor was as annoying as Cary Elwes is in this movie, I'd probably be tempted to lock him up in a toilet too. The lead performances in Saw are really pretty bad, all snot and overacting. Elwes and the crying photographer bloke are both outperformed by the supposedly (SPOILER) dead body with whom they share their lavatory. Good as Danny Glover is, even he doesn't seem to give much of a rat's ass about the film. Well, he is getting too old for this shit. Next up: Saw In A House with the Wahlberg that's not Marky Mark.

Slugs: The Movie

Director: Juan Piquer Simon (1988)
Starring: Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale
Find it: IMDB

Slugs: The Movie, as opposed to slugs: the animals, I guess. You have to be pretty bad at life to get yourself killed by slugs, of all creatures, but that hasn't stopped Slugs: The Movie from making a film out of such a series of occurrences. Writer Shaun Hutson (upon whose novel this film is based) even managed to get two books out of the idea. It's a more daffy idea than most creature features, but Slugs has its icky charms.

As in the books, the death sequences in Slugs all have the feel of a pre-credits Casualty injury. There's the horny teenagers having sex (well, maybe you might find that in Casualty After Dark), the grumpy old chap in his greenhouse and the young woman preparing dinner. Each of them come to a grisly end thanks to the slugs, which alternate between looking like actual slugs and black turds with teeth.

I was putting the bins out, a few weeks ago, and I stood on a slug whilst wearing only socks on my feet. Slugs: The Movie manages to replicate that feeling throughout. It's a credit to the species' inherent nastiness (sorry, slugs) that the film manages to feel utterly repellent while also being really bad at the same time. I found myself itching all over several times, particularly during the opening credits and the sex scene. As cops pour over the aftermath of the sex/death by slugs scene for evidence, hero Mike Brady remarks on the slug trails left all over the floor. It is shocking that nobody makes a jizz joke. Wasted opportunities aside, I maintain that the film is properly nasty at times.

The rest of the time, it's hilarious bullshit. The exploding greenhouse scene is just great, as is a bit in which a slug eats a poor unsuspecting hamster. The acting is atrociously bad, all monotone deliveries and terrible monologues. A scientist gives a lecture on slugs to our heroes, describing the creatures as though no-one has ever seen a slug before in their lives. Mind, the film was made in 1988, long before the advent of Wikipedia. If you wanted to research a subject in those dark days, you had little option but to ask a scientist. A useless scientist, to boot. Even I could tell you that all you need is a bit of salt or a few half-full beer cans to be rid of the lettuce-munching menace, and I'm no Alan Titchmarsh. But no, I suppose blowing up the sewers beneath your own city is so much easier.

Slugs: The Movie is not very good. Its more gruesome scenes are very well done, but there's no escaping from the fact that slugs are a pretty rubbish threat (unless you're an idiot or a vegetable) and that the heroes could easily solve the problem with a few salt shakers and some common sense. That poster there though, redeems everything.