Buy it... only if you appreciated the ridiculously brutal tone of the film and have a taste for extremely difficult, heavily metallic industrial scores.

Avoid it... if you understand the meaning of the word "empathy."

Saw: (Charlie Clouser) It's always funny to watch and read the reactions of people who think films like the 2004 gore-fest Saw have some kind of artistic merit when you use such films as examples of why every successive generation of kids is growing up more aggressive and violent. If you denounce Saw as being not only repulsively violent but also a detriment to society, these people cry foul and claim that despite its plethora of fallacies of logic and a total lack of moral integrity, the film is still entertaining because of its unique concept and plot twists. Ironically, the only way their point is valid is if you accept the basic premise that the general movie-going population has indeed degenerated in its integrity. Make no mistake about it, Saw is a film that glorifies torture. It takes David Fincher and Seven as inspiration and hammers the concept into even more grotesque, NC-17 territory. The entire Saw franchise is built upon the fact that audiences like seeing other people tortured in ridiculous fashion. They liked it so much the first time that they rewarded novice director James Wan and his $1.2 million creation with over $100 million in worldwide grosses, spawning a franchise that included a sequel in each successive year for the rest of the decade. The first film, even if you set aside the gore and logical improbabilities (which is practically impossible), suffered from really wretched acting performances (Danny Glover was inexcusably bad and Cary Elwes was only tolerable because his career's evolution) and an obnoxious visual style that clearly indicated that the young director was trying far too hard to make an impression. Equaling the film's faux sense of intelligence was its soundtrack, which divides audiences along the same lines as the film itself. Essentially, if you thought that the film was a brilliant spectacle of horror, then the grinding, industrial score and similarly heavy songs will seem equal in both quality and emotional response. In reality, though, Wan's film received a score that functions primarily as unnerving sound effects, only developing any distant sense of compelling depth in the final few minutes. That was perhaps all that could have been expected of Nine Inch Nails keyboardist and producer Charlie Clouser, for whom Saw was a surprising launching pad into a career of trashy, low budget horror scores that included the aforementioned sequels to this mainstream feature debut (each increasingly difficult for his collectors or Saw enthusiasts to find on album).

Not to sound repetitive, but it's also funny to watch and read the reactions of people who think films like Saw have some kind of artistic merit when you take the next step and refer to their scores as mindless noise. There is a place for industrial metal in the film scoring industry. For years, now, Paul Haslinger has perhaps proven himself the most accomplished in this art. But all to often, scores that rely upon their industrial textures to create an atmosphere desired by a director or producer don't make any significant attempt to apply any really intelligent structure to that environment. Composers like Graeme Revell have attempted such feats. Sometimes, especially when involving former rock musicians, the industrial tone is interspersed with ass-licking hard rock passages. For Saw, Clouser waited until the final two cues to even attempt any kind of musical complexity befitting a character as complicated as Jigsaw in this franchise. In these cues (which are attributed to the character of Zepp but in all reality refer to Jigsaw for obvious reasons relating to control), he uses a small string section to convey a simple, cyclical motif that starts to define both the mechanized brutality of the torture scenarios and the poorly rendered romantic elements meant to draw audience sympathy. It sounds as though Clouser was trying to channel Clint Mansell here. Otherwise, Clouser's material should be submitted to Hollywood's vast collective library of sampled sound effects. The sounds in this score were generated from a combination of keyboarded or computerized droning and explicit effects, Danny Lohner's electric guitars in conventional and non-conventional performances, and a handful of awkwardly utilized specialty instruments or other items twisted into musical employment. Tonality is rare and continuity from cue to cue is only tethered to the limitations of the ensemble's abrasiveness. At times, as in "Last I Heard," Clouser uses various edits of the sound of a reciprocal saw blade as an appropriate accent. The unrelenting metallic harshness of a cue like "Reverse Beartrap," edited like many (including the songs) to distortion as though insanely high gains were applied, matches the film's stark and hapless attitude. A slight synthetic choral effect, as heard in "Fuck This Shit," cannot compete in this soundscape. Overall, Saw is a miserable experience on screen and on album, barely avoiding the lowest possible rating due to its basic effectiveness and marginal development at the end. Howard Shore's score for the related Seven is easily superior, as are half a dozen Haslinger efforts. So while you shouldn't cut off your shackled foot to escape Clouser's music for Saw, it still contains absolutely nothing redemptive enough to justify its existence. *   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download