I love horror, me. Nothing more wonderful than seeing people getting ripped to pieces, terrified out of their minds, by everything from supernatural monstrosities to simply being in the wrong place with the wrong people. Even wonderfully horrible 80s horror works fine by me, although I’d quite like to hang with the script writer for the original Hallowe’en, since he must be about five by now.

However, as most people with eyes and a working cerebellum can tell you, you try wanking off a successful franchise of anything, especially horror in this case, and you end up with a pile of wank and not much else. Although in this scenario, we’re imagining a load of wank coming from wanking off a franchise is a bad thing. My metaphors have been terrible lately. As is any attempt to keep a horror franchise alive. Freddy and Jason only managed to get to Freddy And Jason by sheer virtue of it beiing a big crossover thingy such as it was.

I think I’ve wandered a bit then, so lets return to my premise: make too many sequals of a film results in the last ones being horrible, and dragging down the awesome earlier films with it. Think Freddy, think Jason in space, think those Leprecaun films that nobody paid attention to after Jennifer Aniston ran off and joined a sitcom. Exactly.

But, as you may ahve expected from my long rambling intro, this isn’t a problem that’s staying in the past. Look at… well, every film in the cinema right about… NOW! LOOK NOW, YOU’LL MISS IT! FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS CHECK THE FILM LISTINGS!!!

Lots of sequals, right? Lots of crap as well? Exactly.

Now, to my point. Saw 5 is being advertised in those popup things in MSN Messanger. Saw Five. And while its saying its the last one, like fuck it is. For what was a very good reason. The first Saw was awesomely terrifying. A wonderfully twisted new antagonist, operating behind the scenes, setting horrifying traps to test his victims. And the traps themselves! Fuck me. Add to that, how they had all the subplots tying into, reinforcing, the main story of the two guys locked up in the bathroom. And the twist! It was so obvious in hindsight, yet so cleverly woven in there. When that fucking film came out, I was being dragged into girls bedrooms to check for axe murderers! I’m never dragged into girls bedrooms! Not even the girls who want me in there in the first place!

No I didn’t get booty in exchange for murderer hunting, you think I actually understand women?

Saw 2, not too shabby. Basically, Saw, only a bit grander in scope, and a bit less awesome. Not bad by any stretch, but certainly not its predecessor. Only I didn’t see the twist coming from a mile off. The traps were a bit less imaginative. The first one being a gun mounted in a door. A gun. That’s just lazy.

Saw 3, and by this point we can see the franchise wobbling quite badly. The twist was seen from miles away, almost paraded around on a stick. and while the traps were awesome, they didn’t feel as well explained as the last two films. They were just gory and elaborate. And for good measure, they decided to kill off all the antagonists. No Jigsaw, no Cutting Girl, just dead. And I haven’t seen Saw 4, but I can imagine the only way it can have gone without starting to parody itself would be carrying on the third film as if Jigsaw had planned he was going to be killed. Otherwise, its ridiculous.

Even with that, there’s no ground for a fifth Saw film to cover, save “bring people into cinema”. They’ve done it all. All. Far as I can see, some guys wearing Jigsaws skin as a mask. Imagine how you’d have felt if they released a Friday the 13th film if someone had just taken Jason’s mask and pretended to be him killing people. Then wish Bon Jovi would go back to the big hair again, and wonder what that sad sounding grunge music is.

I think I had a point there, but nobody needs a fifth Saw film, especially not the people who make Saw.

As many of the stoned, over fifties demographic will tell you, if you put on the film “The Wizard Of Oz”, and stick on the Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon”, you have obviously smoked enough draw in the Seventies to do something so utterly pointless. Also, you’ll see an eerie synchronisation between the two. Thinking this was an awesome idea, I hunted down a mashup video off of a perfectly legal download site, then had a watch.

By sheer force of willpower, I managed just under half of the video before declaring “Fuck this”, and throwing it out the window. And by ‘declaring “Fuck this”‘, I mean ‘thinking it to myself, because there wasn’t anyone else there’, and by ‘throwing it out the window’, I mean ‘closing Media Player’. Much less exciting, but I do pride myself on my accuracy. And my good looks. And my command of thirteen languages, incluiding binary, Morse code, and whatever language light bulbs talk in.

I was expecting a marvel of weird, cross-media perculiarities. At the very least, I was expecting something that vaguely resembled a similarity. I think I got two things. Could have been a dodgy video, but I think its because, as I’ve already mentioned, there wasn’t anything better to do in the Seventies when having a spliff. Somebody tried looping them up when stoned off their face, thought it seemed a bit similar, and created a phenomena. This is not something you should do.

Case in point, coupled with another student-life story. One time in Hull, we had a bit to smoke one evening, and that means quite a bit. We then put on a DVD of a program called Phoenix Nights, which I thought to be a documentry series about the unluckiest bar in the entire country. An hours worth of what I thought were horrifying coincidences in bad luck went by, before I realised that it was Peter Kays Phoenix Nights, was supposed to be funny, and was in fact a sitcom, and in no way real whatsoever. This is the sort of mindset I refer you to.

Coupled with that, and hastening my angrily closing the video, is the fact that Pink Floyd is as boring as shit. I recall Jeremy Clarkson, an otherwise impeccably right gentleman, writing that he enjoyed his music to take its time in such a manner, and why do all songs need to be three minutes rushed along and suchlike.

Because if everyone followed the Pink Floyd method, Mr Clarkson, songs would still have one verse, then fifteen minutes of long, repetitive instumental interlude, before another such interlude, and maybe an extra line if you’re good and don’t complain, and have another half an hour of monotonous guitar as well. I don’t follow this. Prog rock is supposed to be the stoner music our fathers had before us, but even with my head submerged in liquid THC, you couldn’t make Pink Floyd sound interesting. When I smoked, you could have said my name in a different accent and had me in a fit of giggles, and I’d have still told you to turn that shit off.

Basically, don’t go playing Dark Side with Oz, or you’ll fall asleep, knock over the ashtray, set you house on fire, then sue me for giving you head trauma. I don’t have a lawyer. I don’t have money. I have some blue cotton thread I found on my desk when I tidied it up earlier. Please don’t do it.

I like to think I have a finger on the pulse of popular culture. This is, of course, utter bollocks. I can muster some trivia about metal bands, and the obligatory Pretentious Rant About How Film Adaptions Of Books Are Crap. So I wasn’t too fazed by some film called Napoleon Dynamite swanning by, dropping memes and hipster T-shirts in its wake. If the box tells the truth, I was busy being drunk at the time.

Nonetheless, the time always comes when you’ve got nothing else to watch, you’re not sinking to taking the shrink wrap off of a boxed set of Lost someone thought was worth the cost of the DVDs, and your only other option is a DVD box with a guy wearing an afro.

Opinions from people I know have ranged between “Its awesome”, “give it a few plays and it’ll be awesome”, and “its shit”. All these people have, however, agreed on one thing: nothing really happens in the film. Which is sort of right. It is a story, in that it has characters whom things happen to, but there is no plot. Any goals the characters have last more than 15 minutes in film time.

What it is, thinks this pretentious pundit, is a shallow look at the life of the socially maladjusted. Everybody knew a Napoleon at school, some weird looking, weird acting guy who didn’t get on with many, if any, people, and perhaps didn’t come from a particularly well-off background, so probably smelt of beans. We didn’t know them (well, I assume not, unless the good reader was that guy), because they didn’t tell us, so we didn’t know what got them ticking. And his family doesn’t escape this banner either, his 27 year old brother still living at home chasing a girl on the internet, his uncle trying to stay flush with a desperate variety of jobs. Had a different director gone with this film, it could have been an interesting, perhaps introspective look at the life of the underdog.

But as you can easily forget, this was an MTV film, which brought us such cinematic classics as “Jackass: The Movie”, where a gang of thick Americans do dangerous stuff, and Henry Rollins drives an off-road vehicle, “Jackass The Movie 2″, where a gang of thick Americans do more dangerous stuff, but Henry Rollins does not drive an off-road vehicle, and “Coach Carter”, where Samuel Jackson is a badass scarty black man. Again. Only he coaches a basketball team while doing it.

With this fine pedigree of work behind them, they had to push out the boat to make Napoleon Dynamite a stupid film. Hence a distinct lack of plot, as mentioned, but also a bunch of pointless things like the dance routine at the end, and the whole “Vote For Pedro” thing. Even though he did have an awesome wig.

So, to ruin what was going to be a good piece of writing by just not caring about it anymore, if you’ve survived this long without seeing Napoleon Dynamite, you won’t miss much by not watching it. Unless you’re a gigantic nerd living in Idaho, in which case you might be worried by the biographical nature of the film.