This is a blessing for the recent Wrong Turn remake unbeholden to any particular iconography from the original 2003 film, it’s free to riff on the basic young-people-menaced-by-country-folk premise (itself a ripoff of countless other horror movies) with an ingenuity that Spiral sorely lacks.
Spiral horror movie#
Spiral wasn’t the only 2021 project to sorta-reboot a gory early-’00s horror movie that unexpectedly became a low-budget series, though the Wrong Turn franchise was confined to DVD, and never reached the heights of the Saw saga. Till Death is available for rental on Amazon, Vudu, and other platforms. It also benefits from a metaphorical simplicity - a relationship as a near-impossible burden - that would be unthinkable in the tangles of delightful but baffling Saw continuity. Like the Escape Room series, Till Death feels like it’s modifying elements of the Saw cycle without wholesale ripping them off. Dale, and while Fox may not be up for a depressing relationship wallow, she’s aces at the over-it dark comedy of dragging a corpse around as she evades merciless pursuers. It’s also tightly directed by relative newcomer S.K. The limited location, occasional gore, and messages left for her from a vengeful ex-husband all have Saw vibes, even as the movie is ultimately a bit more cat-and-mouse hunt than endurance test. Till Death Photo: Screen MediaĪ new horror-tinged thriller starring Megan Fox premiered on VOD and a few theaters in July with little fanfare, which is too bad, because after an unpromising start where Till Death comes across as a somnolent marital drama, it kicks into gear: Fox’s character winds up in a remote cabin, handcuffed to a dead body, with bad men after her.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is in theaters. They’re both briskly entertaining.Įscape Room is available to rent on Amazon, Vudu, and other platforms. Tournament of Champions has pretty typical sequel problems, in that it’s more of the same without enough new wrinkles. But it’s fun to see what Jigsaw might have worked up if he had a larger operating budget, and the characters, led by Taylor Russell’s Zoey, convey human emotion more convincingly than most of the actors in Saw, whose house style involves a lot of sweaty screaming. It’s essentially Saw without the grimy self-help angle, though some horror fans will doubtless find these virtually gore-free alternatives overly sanitized.
Spiral horror series#
The first movie sets up a sequel, and the new sequel, like both the Saw series and its Sony stablemate Resident Evil, immediately follows through on some of the setup, while deferring other developments to as-yet-unmade future installments. Sony clearly has its eye on a long-running B-movie saga with this PG-13 version of the house-of-traps subgenre. Here are seven solid movies that play the Saw game more successfully than Spiral: The Escape Room series Photo: Columbia Pictures That said, horror and horror-adjacent movies tend to offer the closest approximation of the Saw experience. Hell, the Fast & Furious films could be considered a form of Saw spinoff, given how they’ve paralleled the series’ wonderfully wonky, ever-expanding later-period continuity.
Not all of these Sawalikes are as conceptually close to the original as the Escape Room sequel, but they all offer more interesting variations on the series’ familiar tropes than Spiral, and together, they reveal that doing Saw better than Saw has become a cottage industry over the years.
There are an awful lot of Saw imitators on the market, taking advantage of that first film’s low-budget, grimy aesthetic and elaborate deathtraps. Fortunately, anyone in the market for Not Quite a Saw Movie has plenty of other options available - starting with the recent Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, which sequelizes the original 2019 Escape Room by making the premise play even more like Saw Junior. As the filmmakers insisted, it isn’t exactly Saw IX, but it isn’t exactly a new type of horror trap, either. Though some fans may enjoy the attempt to revive the sprawling, complicated Saw franchise, or at least might like Chris Rock’s early-movie tight five on divorce and Forrest Gump, Spiral doesn’t reach the heights of fan favorites Saw III or Saw VI. ( Spiral’s first digital rental window opened in June, but it was initially premium-priced as a simultaneous theatrical release.) Jackson) and legacy sequel (with Saw II-IV director Darren Lynn Bousman) in its May theatrical run can now be affordably disappointed from the comfort of their own home. Spiral: From the Book of Saw is now available for cheap digital rental and in various home-video formats, so any Saw fans who might have missed this combination reboot (with Chris Rock and Samuel L.
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