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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Insidious Chapter 2 (2013)

Don't expect to be a Rhodes Scholar in the ways of the Further after watching this - just how people pass into and through director James Wan's evil limbo, the Further, introduced in the original Insidious but further elaborated upon in this sequel, seems to no longer depend upon a character being dead - alive or injured or even merely remembered people can hang out there now, so more than before it resembles something like a train station, but still it is never satisfactorily explained - and there are other areas lacking elucidation: scene by scene you'll have trouble keeping track of whose house everyone is in - the Lamberts' or Elise's? - and you'll become dizzy trying to keep track of all the versions of Patrick Wilson's character, Josh, who appears simultaneously as a kid, as an adult, as an adult in memories, as an adult in the Further, as an imposter in each of those places, in flashback sequences as each of those incarnations; and would someone please pick up that baby walker because I don't want to watch a fourth and fifth adult come down those stairs to investigate the piano only to get a jump when the baby walker comes alive with noise and light, again.

★★☆☆☆

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