Product Details

• Actors: Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Ken Leung, Dina Meyer
• Directors: James Wan
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1 EX), English (Dolby Digital 6.1 EX)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Lions Gate
• DVD Release Date: October 18, 2005
• Run Time: 103 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (600 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000AMWIVM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,249 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Saw - Unrated (Two-Disc Special Edition)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

SAW SPECIAL EDITION - DVD Movie

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 95 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The "Jigsaw Killer" plays another bloody little game, November 17, 2004

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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When I went to go see "Saw" late last night I was thinking "saw" as the past tense of see and not "saw" as the noun ("a hand or power tool or a machine used to cut hard material and equipped usually with a toothed blade or disk") or as the verb ("to cut with a saw"). What was I thinking? "Saw" is in the Grand Guignol of "Seven" and "The Bone Cutter," and apparently had to make some last minute cuts to avoid getting saddled with a NC-17 rating. That alone with give you an indication of what first time director James Wan and first time writer Leigh Whannell were going for in "Saw," even with only $1.2 million to make the film and 18 days to shoot it.

Adam (Leigh Whannell), a young man, wakes up underwater in a dark room with a chain around his ankle. He is not alone, and when the light come on he finds himself is what appears to be a long abandoned public restroom. At the other end is Lawrence (Cary Elwes), who is also chained to a pipe. On the floor in between them, out of their reach, is the corpse of a man who apparently killed himself with a gun. In his hand is a tape recorder. After becoming oriented to his strange surroundings, Adam discovers a plastic bag in his pocket, containing an envelope. Inside is a key and a small cassette tape with the words "Play Me." Let the game begin.

Beyond that you really do not want to know that much about this before you see it, and given the dreck that passes for horror thrillers in recent years "Saw" is worth the seeing in the theater. The last time I actually went to see a film in this genre in a theater was probably "Hannibal," and I have not had any reason to regret being selective in this regard. However, this is not going to be a date movie, but one for hardcore fans of the genre who prefer their DVD editions to be the director's unrated cut of the film. "Saw" is a film that works more in the world of horror films than it does in the real world, but that is certainly part for the genre at this point.

The entire film does not take place in the abandoned restroom, although that is main arena. Lawrence knows something about the "Jigsaw Killer," who has been constructing elaborate dances of death in which his victims have to try and save themselves. Only one victim has survived to date (Shawnee Smith), so it is possible to get out of this alive, just extremely difficult and we are treated to a couple of examples of where it did not go as well. Investigating the case are a couple of detectives, Tapp (Danny Glover) and Sing (Ken Leung), and the chronology of the film gets skewed as the present and the past become confused. The game also involves more than the two men chained to the wall, because Lawrence's wife, Alison (Monica Potter) and daughter, Diana (Makenzie Vega) are part of it as well.

During the film's endgame things are moving fast enough that you probably will not be able to figure out how it will all play out even though "Saw" overplays the obvious red herring card. The film pushes one of my least favorite buttons a couple of time, which is when somebody has a gun on the villain and does not blow them away. If there is one thing we have learned from all of these movies it is that hesitating when you have the bad guy in your sights is never a good thing. I especially go through the roof when a trained law enforcement officer is pointing the gun right at the killer and the killer still gets away (even Clarice Starling is guilty of this sin in "The Silence of the Lambs"). So there is some heavy handedness to Whannell's script that hopefully will be replaced by something more elegant when he and Wan make their recently announced "Saw 2" sequel for 2005.

But "Saw" is not an elegant horror film, although Wan gets points for keeping the most horrific moment of the film off screen (even though the rationale is small budget and not true aesthetic choice, which makes me fearful for what will happen when Wan and Whannell have a much bigger budget for the sequel). The "Jigsaw Killer" has a warped interest in having his victims better appreciate their lives, so getting out alive has to do not only with Lawrence and Adam solving the tasks they are given, but also with finding out some important things about each other. The important thing here is that the film's final scene is pretty horrific, even if the film cheats a bit to get to that point, and that even when the screen goes dark and the credits start to roll, Whannell keeps the horror going.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Novelties and Surprises. Weak story. Mildly scary., February 28, 2005

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saw (DVD)

`Saw' is a delightful movie to review, as it is such a mix of both good and poor qualities that it is a challenge to weigh them against one another to see what comes out ahead. For the impatient, I will say that I think the two cancel one another out in weighing the overall quality of the movie; however, the interesting aspects make the movie worth seeing and buying, in spite of the negatives.

The first and most important positive for a horror film is the visceral reaction of the viewer. Did the movie scare, frighten, or cause mad dashes to the bathroom to clean out soiled underpants? The answer to this question for me is a tentative yes, but only with regard to a single, minor character, where the movie played the `Aliens' / `The Exorcist' card which put a child at genuine risk, not the supernatural, kinda spooky, kinda neat type of menace of `Poltergeist'. So my score on this point is positive.

A second important positive for a horror film is the inventiveness of the threat. `Halloween' scores big on this point with its creative minimalism of a psychopathic stalker with a blank, white mask. This is in strong contrast to a lot of more elaborate scare scenarios done up until `Halloween' was made, whereupon everyone copied John Carpenter's idea. Another prime example among `B' movies is '28 Days Later' which changes the rules about how zombies are expected to act. It doubles its impact by adding a twist to the behavior of a group of survivors which seems to be making a psychological statement not unlike the classic `Lord of the Flies' survivors novel. My favorite example from A list movies is the nature of the threat in `Alien'. The object lesson here is to be sure to hire a great graphic artist when you design your monsters.

The seemingly most striking original element of `Saw' is the fact that the perp is not literally killing the victims himself, he is putting them in situations where they do things which leads to their killing themselves, or at least failing to find their way out of a trap before the trap is sprung and they are killed by the environment created by the perp. While this is the element of originality explicit in the movie, this story line may not be quite as original as the authors would have you believe. There is a strong similarity between the fate of the victims in `Saw' and the way in which the murders are done in `Seven'. In both cases, the scenario in which the vics die is connected to perceived past sins. And, the deaths in `Seven' are to some extent a result of the victims' own actions.

The truly more original aspect of `Saw' is that it is laid out very much like an adventure video game, where progress or even survival is based on solving puzzles. Clues are doled out by a very stingy puzzle master and they are generally couched in riddles, so we double the fun by making one answer one puzzle to get the clues needed to solve the next puzzle. The frustration in seeing the nested puzzles, yet you are stuck at the first step. Reminds me of the frustration of trying to find my way into the Underground Empire in `Zork I'. I must also say that most of the perils created by the perp win points for originality. These add to the dangers to those among us with weak bowels.

The biggest question for the audience is for how long does the filmmaker maintain the suspense for the viewer? The answers to some of the puzzles are evident to the audience long before they dawn on the characters, partly because the producers let the cat out of the bag for at least one major piece of business in their promotional material. The writer did manage to keep the identity of the ultimate perp hidden until the very end of the movie, largely by presenting us with a fairly transparent red herring that kept our attention diverted from the real puzzle master.

Weighed against these positives is a rather serious list of negatives beginning with the question of whether the two main characters would really behave as they did in the movie if they were presented with their situation. I think the initial panic is real enough, but I think the writer does not give enough credit to the problem solving abilities of a normally intelligent person, and at least one of the two principals is a highly educated surgeon. I really suspect that with the tools at hand, the two principle vics would have been a lot more clever in being able to free at least one, so he could go get help. As evidence of this, I offer the resolution to a similar problem in Stephen King's novel `Gerald's Game'.

If you resolve the improbabilities, you are left with some bad writing for the roles of the police detectives working this case, lead by Danny Glover. The glaring contrast between Glover in this movie and Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman in `Seven' makes my point better than anything else I can say. This is not Glover's fault, except in the fact that he decided to play this weak role to begin with. I am inclined to say that the movie would have been much better if the roles of Glover and his partner had been eliminated or minimized. The movie makers probably felt they needed the detectives' business to have someone to chase perps and take bullets from the potential perp and from booby traps, since the two main characters are trapped inside their own personal dungeon. The cops also introduce scenes from past perp scenes that fill out the way in that our perp works and thinks.

The movie does not live up to its hype, but it is worth a good chill.

84 of 111 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Beast is Disease, blood is merely a symptom, March 1, 2005

By 

Schtinky "Schtinky" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saw (DVD)

With some of the PG-13 tripe coming out as horror nowadays, SAW is a refreshing step back into the good old days where horror meant blood, and blood meant horror. No annoying harpies or pretty pictures of hell or tragically humanized vampires here, just an ingenious killer with an obscure motive.

SAW dives right into the depths of the madness too, opening with our killer's current victims, two men chained on opposite ends of a filthy restroom, a body in the center clutching a cassette player and a handgun. Each man is given a tape to play, which provides him with a nice dilemma to ponder during his captivity. The background of the killer and the events leading up to the men's current situation unfolds nicely during narrated recollections and well-placed flashbacks, while the actual motive stays hidden underneath the obvious delight the killer derives from the simple pleasures of torture.

Because SAW also brings to film an excellent `Whodunnit?', I am not going to elaborate on the storyline any further. Suffice to say that Cary Elwes and Danny Glover give excellent performances (Elwes surprising me since I have only seen him in comedy roles), the photography is good, the killing methods tasty, the blood not really overdone but still dosed out well, and the plot sustainable.

Lets face it fans, we don't go to horror movies to learn how to do decoupage, we go to get scared and grossed out. SAW fulfills that primal hankering, leaving you to utter `blech' and `bravo' in the same troubled breath, and wondering what your punishment would be like under the careful ministrations of this psychopath.

Aficionados of the genre are going to love SAW's mixture of gore, insanity, ingenious traps, and filth, while non-lover's of the theme should stick to `Sleepless In Seattle' and other such ilk. SAW put the taste of terror and gore back in my mouth, something that has been lacking in some of the recent sugar-coated intruders into this bloody domain. Enjoy!!