A long, long time ago -- no, really! It was five whole years ago! We'd just won the war in Iraq! -- a movie came out called Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Professional movie watchers like myself were a tad taken aback, largely because we had severe doubts about the quality of a movie based on a theme park ride. As it happens, the movie was actually pretty engaging, and for a few years, before Pirates of the Caribbean went to hell and became as bad as we thought it was going to be in the first place, people got to cluck their tongues at us and go "See? You never know."
Unfortunately, that's not entirely true. Sometimes you know. For example, I know that, even though amusement park rides based on movies are far more common, and generally of higher quality, than movies based on amusement park rides, the recently announced Saw: The Ride is going to go down in history as nothing but one more step towards the ultimate humilation, degradation and sad, slow death of the human race.
No, we're not kidding: there really is going to be such a thing as Saw: The Ride. Based on the depressingly popular torture-porn horror series, it's set to open at Surrey's Thorpe Park in Britain in March of 2009. Alleged to be the first roller-coaster to be based on a horror movie, the ride features a 100-foot vertical drop in free fall, which is so scary that it induced Saw producers Lionsgate to release a suicide-inducing press release claiming that "Saw: The Ride is a reflection of how thoroughly the Saw franchise has crossed over into pop culture at large." The rides will evoke the nausea-inspiring horror caused by serial killer Jigsaw as he systematically murders people for your amusement. Bring the kids!
If that was the worst of it, we probably wouldn't care so much; but with Saw V (there have been five of these already? Seriously?) opening worldwide, it's almost a certainty that by the time the franchise drags out to its ninth or tenth installment -- and assuming no one has actually been killed on the ride -- the idea-bereft producers are sure to release a flick in which Jigsaw menaces people on the roller-coaster, confronting innocent human beings with Saw: The Ride: The Movie. When will the suffering end?
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