Saw (2004)

Given the fact there is a serial killer, Jigsaw, playing philosophically-motivated torture games, that comic actor Carly Elwes plays a rubber-faced Ash-like doctor whom it is sometimes hard to take seriously, and that Ken Leung's Steven Singh is a David Mills replica, it is entirely possible this original movie of director James Wan's Saw series was intended as a parody of Se7en, but whether that is true or not, the story of two men waking up in a puzzle box was taken seriously enough to spawn a long-running series of gruesome horror thrillers, and this original movie is possibly even responsible for the birth of the Escape Room craze that took over the world in the year of Saw's release, 2004.

★★★☆☆

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