Movie Review: Spiral: From the Book of Saw

As long as a horror movie franchise as popular as “Saw” has been, there will be more Saw movies and it does not matter that the last Saw movie ended the life of the main character. As long as movies like this make money – there will be more of them.

Spiral is a new variation with the same idea behind it. Someone (in this case police officers) have done something bad in their life and gotten away with it, and now it is payday. Unfortunately for the victims in these films, payday consists of a horrendous and painful death along with an equally painful decision they have to make (like sawing off an arm) to try and save their life. The question I have always had is, who are the people who think of the death and torture scenes in these Saw movies – is a documentary within itself. The sadistic imagination behind some of these scenes is in some cases rather unbelievable. Why do some of us like to see movies like this, at this extreme level of cruelty? If there were not so many millions of us who like movies like this, they would not exist in the first place.

So far there have been nine Saw movies with this one the first new variation from the original that was released in 2004. Obviously, there will be many more new variations of this same general idea. I remember the first Saw movie had an outstanding ending scene that caught everyone by surprise, but since that first solid firm, most of the movies that followed have been mostly about horrendous torture and death scenes.

For this film I was surprised to see Samuel L. Jackson in this movie as the father of the main character Detective Zeke Banks, played well by Chris Rock. Perhaps Jackson just wanted to work with Chris Rock and did not care about the quality of this movie. In the past few years and especially with his appearance in the latest television series based on the movie Fargo, Chris Rock has completed in some very impressive acting roles. Unfortunately the decision to make this movie was not a good one, mostly because the script was not strong enough to recommend.

I agree with the low 41% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and I do not recommend this film.