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We arrived at the theater a bit early -- and as we entered our auditorium the lights were still up. Looking around the room I realized that, at 25, I was one of the oldest people in the room. Parents do not generally bring their kids to gory horror movies and teenagers and young adults are the movie-goers most likely to feel they just have to see the latest installment of such a movie on the night it opens.

The place was packed. So packed that a half-dozen kids who couldn't possibly have been 18 sat in the far right aisle when they couldn't find empty seats. The lights went down, but the audience was so loud we couldn't really hear the previews. A few people shushed and made quieting noises, but this just made the teenagers in the theater laugh out loud. This made me so angry that I wanted to, like an 80-year old man waggling his cane to chase kids off of his lawn, leap to my feet and give them what-for.

But I didn't. I just sat quietly as the movie began, the crowd quieted somewhat and we watched the first ten minutes of the film -- a protracted, gratuitously detailed autopsy scene. We see a man's head carved open, his brain taken out and weighed. His skin peeled back, his chest opened, his vital organs carved out. None of this has anything to do with the story, really -- but you have to sit through it anyway. At the end of the autopsy we see the only thing that we really needed to see -- a tape found in the man's stomach. This could have been achieved more artfully (and even more horrifyingly) in half as much time with not a quarter as much gore.

And it's this opening scene that tells you, really, everything you need to know about this film and the entire franchise.

For those who've been sitting the Saw films out: The story concerns a cancer-patient serial killer who believes he is teaching people to "cherish their lives" by kidnapping them and trapping them in horrible death contraptions/situations wherein they have to choose between living while doing something horrible and ironic to themselves (a sexual predator and voyeur has to gauge our his own eyes to escape a death machine, for instance) or being horrifically mutilated. The ends usually have sort of ludicrous twists that the writers/director keep you from guessing by denying you the information you'd really need to figure them out -- the worst kind of dime store mystery novel cheat grafted onto a horror movie.

Except that these are not horror movies, really. Real movie horror usually comes from either the fear of the unknown ("Oh my God...I know nothing about ghosts or monsters, I have no frame of reference...this is really scary because I'm outside of the known and don't know what could happen!") or from suspense ("Oh my God...the alien/serial killer/monster could be anywhere! I don't understand what's going on and am in danger! This character could die, might live, will almost certainly have to fight for their life...I don't know what could happen!").

The Saw movies provide neither of these, really. If you're bright enough to figure out how to buy a ticket then you know, from the beginning of the movie, that almost all the characters in the film are going to die. And you know that you're going to have to watch them die. And you know that it's going to take too long, be painful and disgusting and ultimately not really serve the plot at all.

Now -- I'm not one of these people who thinks that gore in horror movies is destroying the moral fiber of American youth (although frankly I was confused and annoyed that the entire audience in my showing seemed to be laughing hysterically at the horrible mutilations in the film, which don't have the comic quality of some of the deaths in the Nightmare on Elm St. movies, for instance, and which should make you shudder rather than giggle). I'm not philosophically against a movie like Saw. I just don't understand what gets people off about these movies. They're not well crafted mysteries. I don't find the killer particularly scary. The gore kind of makes me ill, but doesn't actually fill me with dread or horror. What's the point?

Furthermore, I feel like the gratuitousness of the blood and gore just make the films less effective. The death scenes are more explicit but less artful -- and so they're sort of self defeating.

As an example: Few things short of an awful death are more horrific than rape. So compare, for instance, the infamously gratuitous rape scenes in horror/revenge exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave to the single, not-over-the-top rape scene from The Accused. There's no contest as to which seems more horrific -- and once that determination is made the more gratuitous one seems to be trying so hard you're sort of embarrassed for it. It's one thing to say that Saw is no Silence of the Lambs. Sure, what is. But it's not even a Friday the 13th or Halloween.

The fourth installment in this franchise fills in the back story of the killer, nicknamed "Jigsaw" -- something horror movies often get around to as the formula wears thin from repeated use (think later installments in the "Psycho" franchise). For that, I suppose, the movie is of interest to people who have been following the films and are fascinated by the killer's psyche, the way he sees himself as on a mission to teach people through elaborate murders. Beyond that, I honestly had a hard time not falling asleep.

I know someone out there loves these films. Explain it to me. Because being confused by it is making me feel very old.