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The original Saw was the best horror movie I had seen in a long time. It was inventive, it took the conventions of the genre and turned them on their ear. Here's a killer who isn't an unstoppable immortal machine. It's a regular guy, flawed, driven to madness, taking out his frustrations on other flawed people by making them confront the mistakes they've made - creating life-and-death games in the process. If you can atone for the wrong you've done to other people, you live. you don't, you die.
And then the second movie ruined it. They took the premise of the first one, then tacked on "Oh, but we've been gassing you the whole time, so you're all going to die anyway. Lolz, made ya suffer!" So... what was the point in them redeeming themselves?
Plus, unlike every other horror movie in the last two decades, almost all of the violence was implied in the original. People's reactions to horrible acts are infinitely more interesting to me than the acts themselves. The close-ups as he saws through his own leg disturbed me way more than a gratuitous continuous shot of the leg coming off. And then in the second one... they show a girl fall in a pit of hypodermic needles? Utterly unnecessary, and from there it dipped into the torture porn that the first movie so carefully avoided.
After the second one neutered everything that made the first one amazing, I lost all interest in the series. I don't care how many more of these they make, they're not getting another dime from me.
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