Do you read spoilers?

[The Curmudgeon]

Maybe its just me, but I always get surprised when I either talk to people or read on the net, the amount of people who read what happens in a film or a TV show before actually watching it.

For example, I go on a wrestling site and their Friday night show is recorded on a Wednesday, and the amount of people who read the match results and what happens on the Wednesday and then tune in on the Friday is staggering. Take into account this is a TWO HOUR show, and what is the point in watching wrestling matches when you KNOW who's going to win already?

It's the same with films and TV shows. I know this guy who reads up on the net what's going to happen in, say, 24 or Lost, where the US gets those shows first.

I just don't understand it. I try my hardest to avoid ANY spoiler warnings so I can actually be surprised and excited in what I choose to watch.

Is this, like, an old fashioned notion now or something?

[trashcanman]

No, it's a passion for quality entertainment and that buzz you can only get when an unexpected bit of genius knocks you on your ass.

[Benjamin Haines]

I always try to avoid spoilers when it comes to anything that I actually want to see. On a similar note, one thing I don't understand is when people will watch the sequels to films before seeing the first movies in a series, or when they knowingly and willingly watch entries in a multiple-film series out of order. I know this one girl who watched Saw IV before having seen any of the previous Saw films, and if you're familiar with that series then you know that she would have basically been 100% lost in her viewing experience. Doesn't make sense to me.

[The Curmudgeon]

It doesn't make sense that anyone would go to see Saw IV.

[Benjamin Haines]

Hey, I resemble that remark!

[The Curmudgeon]

I really liked the first Saw movie - I thought it was something different, effective and fairly gruesome. The second one was too stupid for my tastes (this Jigsaw guy must have more money than Bruce Wayne), and I gave up after that.

God only knows what parts III and IV are like.

[Benjamin Haines]

I agree that the second film was stupid all-in-all. It's a fun party movie, but quality-wise it's bogged down by an unfocused plot and paper-thin characters. Having characters which exist solely to be gore fodder is one thing, but having eight of them and then devoting the majority of the film's screentime to them is quite another.

Saw III is actually a HUGE improvement over Saw II. While the gore included in the film is much more explicit than the previous two flicks, the focus on and development of the four main characters is what drives the movie. Saw IV is perhaps the sloppiest and most rushed movie in the series, but it's still a cut above the second film.

The thing I dig about this series is that it offers some real food for thought with the viewing experience. These films don't rely on empty, pointless gore and torture like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake or Hostel, or cheap startles like this recent trend of Asian horror films and their PG-13 Hollywood remakes. For continuity fiends like myself, the Saw films provide plenty to latch onto, with recurring characters, callbacks to previous events, and premeditated setups for future events running throughout all of the films in the series. They're not standalone or episodic flicks, they're movies to which you genuinely have to pay close attention in order to fully understand them. That's a very ballsy approach for a studio to take in producing an annually released series of horror films that are intended to appeal to the masses of mainstream ADD moviegoers. What's more, the Saw films actually have real, genuine moral to be gleaned from them; both the obvious (appreciate your life and what not), and the deeper, more metaphorical stuff which is there if you look for it. I won't spoil anything, but the moral that is posited at the end of Saw IV really works as an allegory for how you should and should not go about trying to help your friends and other people in real life.

[trashcanman]

Boo. Diss "Hostel" no longer, you! The "Saw" films are good for one thing to me: violent fucking death. And they always deliver that. The continuity gets the hell in the way to me. I view these films years apart and can't appreciate the incessant callbacks and characters jumping in and out of the story. I can see how that stuff might jazz up hardcore fans who watch the films again and again but I personally just don't care about all that. The moralizing wears as paper-thin as the characters and needs to meet a similiar fate. Just give me death! And stop with the MTV-editing and Matrix slowdown crap too. Remember: just death. Anything else is just getting on my nerves. And how long was Jigsaw at death's door but still pulling this stuff off anyway? I liked the movies, but I think it's time that that director put this to rest and moved on.

[Benjamin Haines]

I can enjoy a "just give me the gore and the nudity" B-movie if it's accessible and entertaining, but Hostel ain't it for me. The characters were beyond annoying, which makes the fact that they don't start dying until well into the proceedings quite unfortunate. While the premise of not revealing the whole torture mantra of the film until roughly halfway through definitely sounds intriguing, the first half didn't amount to anything but a padded-out excuse for softcore porn, like the bastard lovechild of a late-night Cinemax feature and a direct-to-video American Pie sequel. If the goal was to make the characters as unlikeable and unpleasant to watch as possible in order to make their deaths more relishable, that would be great, except it makes the entire viewing experience a chore to sit through for something which feels like it should have been over and done with in five minutes.

I like the continuity of the Saw films because to me it makes them feel more like serials, not like the episodic Halloween and Friday The 13th sequels. I enjoy going back for repeat viewings and piecing together points that I didn't notice the first time around. It's one of the same things I dig about Kevin Smith's ViewAskewniverse series, the 2004 Japanese TV series Ultraman Nexus, and 12 oz. Mouse (the greatest thing in the history of media). I wish I hadn't gotten lost on Lost so early on, but whenever budget permits (somewhere far down the line) I plan on delving into that entire series on DVD. Heroes and Arrested Development are square at the top of my "to-do list" too.

[trashcanman]

They should be. Hostel has some seriously great hidden black humor that reveals itself upon multiple viewings after the shock and awe wear off, like the original TCM. Remember the wheelchair guy in TCM? Annoying as all hell. His bisection scene always makes me smile and it's so messed up because he's handicapped but that's what makes it so funny. Roth has the same messed-up sense of humor. And naked ladies: pretty, no? A lot of people don't get that Eli Roth rides a thin line between satirizing horror films and taking them to their extreme. His flicks are not for everybody, but they are for me.

Kevin Smith rocks and I haven't seen 12 oz Mouse, but maybe I oughtta. The Saw flicks are obviously meant to be watched and re-watched, but I tend to want from them what Friday the 13th delivers, but with more ingenuity. They work either way, but straining to remember what happened in the one I saw years ago disracts me from the mighty fine gore at times.

[The Curmudgeon]

I'm with Benjamin in the "yayy" for continuity, and I'm with Trashy on the "yaay" for Hostel. I thought the second one was pretty average, but the first one I really enjoyed.

I don't like when continuity gets convoluted, like in the Scream series, where "ah, but I was the brother of the guy who's mother was with your father.." seemed to take over (plus the sequels were just dire. "Oh, hello, sister from Roseanne. What part could you be playing in this movie, I wonder?")

As for Halloween, the continuity that exists in the unofficial movies isn't really that bad. Like, they know they've not got Jamie Lee Curtis so they make the movies around her, with her daughter and even Billy Lumas, who's now fucked up after being chased by Michael (which, you know, you probably would be). I actually quite enjoyed the "other" Halloween movies, certainly better than Halloween Resurrection, which is still considered "canon" over Halloween 4? I don't think so.

[Benjamin Haines]

I did really like Roth's Cabin Fever. Now THAT was a sickly grueling good time. The Hostel movies are just too uneven for me to get into.

12 oz. Mouse was a cartoon created by Matt Maiellaro (one of the two men behind Aqua Teen Hunger Force) for Cartoon Network's [adult swim]. It met the same fate as Arrested Development for the same reasons: most of the people who gave it a chance didn't get it, and ratings were low. To be fair though, it is a very surreal show, very out there. David Lynch fans would dig it. Continuity is a major factor in the series, which could be another reason why it was shunned by viewers (anybody casually checking out any episode in the middle of the series would be thoroughly lost). Unlike other cartoons on [adult swim], each episode of 12 oz. Mouse picks up right where the one before it left off, with references frequently made to previous episodes and clues to the show's mysterious backplot hidden everywhere. Like Lost or Twin Peaks, it's a series where half the fun is in contemplating and trying to figure things out as you go along.

The makers of the show were given the cancellation notice when the second season was still being worked on, so they knew ahead of time that they would have to stop at 20 episodes and were thus able to steer the series toward its proper conclusion effectively. With a small but very loyal and devoted cult fan base (me among them), the [adult swim] chaps saw fit to release the entire series on DVD, sold exclusively through their website. Per the wish of Matt Maiellaro, all 20 episodes were combined as one on the DVD, with title and credit sequences removed except for the beginning and ending. They basically turned the series into one long movie, which works because the continuity is so tightly-woven. I strongly encourage everybody to check it out; it's only $12 on their website.