Look out!

The new trailer for Saw 3D came out last week. I'm not going to lie. I'm really looking forward to it. Saw VI was shockingly outstanding, and while part of me would be happy to see a new Saw film every October for the next fifty years, it seems like now's a good time to wrap up the series. Although, as Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare taught us, advertising a horror film as being the last in a franchise is not legally binding.

Watching the trailer, though, I noticed something that really annoyed the hell out of me.

It starts off great! There's saws! And people screaming! And Jigsaw! Then, instead of showing us more saws and screaming and Jigsaw, the trailer inexplicably cuts away to a fake movie audience watching Saw 3D in order to show us what 3-D is, as if we don't understand what this strange new technology is.

Is this supposed to impress people? "Hmmm...Saw 3D. I dunno. The trailer looks okay and everything, but maybe I'll wait for the DVD and...holy shit! It was filmed in state of the art 3-D?!?! I'm there!"

And again, not true. Unless James Cameron directed this thing and then spent a couple of years in post-production like he did with Avatar, I'm not sure how you can call this "state of the art." A Five Guys cheeseburger is pretty good, but considering that there are better, more expensive cheeseburgers out there, it's not like Five Guys could get away with calling theirs the gold standard of cheeseburgers.

Worse, we have these stupid bits:

Get it? In a 3-D movie, it's like you're actually part of the film! Stuff flies out of the screen towards you! Someone might pick you up and pull you right into the movie! (Where, since it's a Saw film, you'll presumably be tortured to death.) You could even be impaled by a harness of spikes! You probably should have checked the back of your seat before you sat down, huh?

Of course, the reality is going to be far more disappointing. And because the people who are inclined to go to Saw 3D have undoubtedly seen low budget 3-D horror movies before, they're not being fooled. So why oversell the experience? Piranha's 3D effects weren't all that hot, and the filmmakers obviously knew that, so instead of trumpeting how awesome and immersive it was, they just threw in a lengthy 3-D sequence of two naked women swimming underwater and trusted that we'd all go home happy. And it worked!

Like a lot of filmgoers, I consider 3-D a scourge that's going to ruin lots of perfectly good movies and mainly just serve as an excuse for theaters to jack up ticket prices even more. But I also accept that it's here to stay, and horror movies, more than any other kind of film, won't be able to resist using it. But for God's sake, don't advertise it like it's the second coming. Hopefully, one of those nut jobs who file frivolous lawsuits against movie studios will go to Saw 3D, be disappointed by the complete lack of deadly saws shooting towards him, and sue Lionsgate for millions, so this sort of gross false advertisement never happens again.