Saw
All anybody should want from a horror movie is the steady tightening in the pit of your stomach. While the new sado-masochistic gross-out flick "Saw" often resembles the ghastliest editions yet of "Fear Factor" and "Survivor" and features some of the grodiest direction this side of "Project Greenlight," it does manage at times to knead your tummy like dough, using real suspense for a rolling pin.
Most of it is generated from wondering whether the movie will deliver on the promise of one of its posters, which shows a foot severed from its leg. It's the kind of terror that really has nothing to do with the plot, which, by the time it's been fully carried out, is as twisted as your stomach.
A doctor (Cary Elwes) and a bratty young photographer (Leigh Whannell, the movie's writer) wake up on either side of the sort of big, grimy bathroom you see only in bad horror movies and good music videos. Each man's leg is chained to a pipe, and neither has any idea how he got there or what that male body is doing lying dead between them in its undies. There's a gun in one hand, a tape recorder in the other, and a pool of blood around the head.
After beginning the dopey dialogue (mostly from Elwes, who brings a dinner-theater zest to his predicament), both men discover personal notes that indicate what they have to do: One has to kill the other to survive. And while you wait for Joe Rogan or Jeff Probst to supervise the mayhem, the two men start following the series of clues, which have been left on cassette tapes and elsewhere by a sicko watching on a surveillance camera. The contestants (what else are they?) turn up a pair of hacksaws and immediately start using them in vain on their chains. Silly rabbits, hacksaws are for ankles.
By this point, the movie has likely won your dread. So rather than commence with the cutting, "Saw" takes a break, in order for the doctor to treat the photographer to the hunch he has about who might be behind this stunt. It's in these flashbacks that screenwriter Whannell and director James Wan are exposed as being under the dubious influence of every movie in the modern psychopath-movie liquor cabinet -- and "The Usual Suspects," too.
Someone has been rounding up people who've been "wasting their lives" and subjecting them to horrific tortures to prove how much they want to live. While the victims demonstrate this, the editing and photography go predictably nuts, running around them and deliriously speeding up their futile escapes. One man tried to crawl through a nest of barbed wire to freedom. Another was slathered in a flammable jelly and asked to crawl across a floor strewn with glass to decipher a code that would free him. He had to do this holding a candle. (He failed.) The sole "winner" was a woman who had to fish a key from a living man's stomach or her head would explode. Frankly, that looks comparatively easy.
Two detectives on the case -- Ken Leung and a never nuttier Danny Glover -- fingered the good doctor as the culprit. He was innocent of those crimes but guilty of a lesser one that makes a decent alibi. But the movie persists in dredging up more implausible mysteries and domestic drama, namely through some terribly handled scenes between the doctor and his soon-to-be-jeopardized family.
Eventually, it grows frustrating to watch the movie's puzzle assemble itself -- even once it does, there are pieces still missing. Why, for instance, does Glover's freaky character love news clippings as much as the average serial killer? And are we really to believe the major curveball in the final scene?
Not really. But as long as "Saw" stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.
Wesley Morris can reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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