Goodbye, Hoff-O-Ween or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate 3D

This is always the most sad time of year for me.  It's the time when I have to wait the longest for the next Hoff-O-Ween.  It doesn't help that I fucking hate Christmas and everything involving the Christmas season with an unbridled fiery passion.  So from now until the new year, I'm generally a crotchety old fuck.

Hoff-O-Ween, for the uninformed, is what happens when a self-absorbed Halloween fanatic with the last name "Hoffman" wants to throw an annual party.  This is a good segue to digress into my frustration with being the lowest-of-low "celebrities" and having the name that I do...

...I spent most of my life after age 18 or so having people (usually service reps on the phone or store clerks who take my credit card) say, "really? - no way!" when I tell them my name.  That's in reference to the famous BMX legend Mat Hoffman.  He's got a series of video games and is talented.  I won $1.00 on television over the summer.  The especially idiotic strangers that I encounter will even give me a "so, do you know the Mat Hoffman?".  Yes - everyone who shares the same name always knows one another (let's forget the fact that our names are spelled differently)...

...Maybe being on a 3-night-a-week national primetime television show would help me to stand on my own.  Maybe this was my chance to make my "Matt Hoffman" a household name!  A friend told me recently that I made the "notable people" in my hometown Elgin, IL's Wikipedia entry.  If that's not hitting the big time, I don't know what is.  But it didn't take long to strike yet another in the longstanding series of crushing blows to my fragile ego when I clicked the link and found that it took me to [wait for it...you guessed it] the BMX Mat Hoffman's Wikipedia page.

Godammit.

Back to the original point that I sort of started making, I have been hosting Hoff-O-Ween for six years now.  That's about 4-5 years before David Hasslehoff was even relevant enough for us to care about him drunkenly writhing around on his floor shoveling Jr. Bacon Deluxe burgers from Wendy's down his throat.  Yet this year "The Hoff" (hmmm...where have I been hearing that since I was eight years old?) decided to get all "creative" and promote Hoff-O-Ween as his own!...

...Seriously, Hasslehoff - fuck you.  If it weren't for that picture of you and Gary Coleman in front of the Knight Rider car, you would never have even made an ironic comeback into pop culture.  I don't ask for much in this life, but please just give me Hoff-O-Ween.  You and I both know that it's mine.

Again I seem to be going off on a tangent from what was my original intention upon starting this blog...to wax nostalgic about Hoff-O-Ween (I know it was only like two days ago, but I still say that qualifies as "nostalgia").  In order to celebrate, I drank some pumpkin schnapps (yes - they really make it), ate some pizza and taco dip, and watched The Human Centipede.  The next night, I went to see Saw 3D.  Seven paragraphs into this post, I am finally starting to get to the point (do you see why I don't blog now?).  Without further adieu, here's my recap on the final Saw movie...I'll try to make this quick, but that's unlikely.

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THE REST OF THIS POST 

I have been a HUGE fan of the Saw franchise since its inception.  I feel it's probably the only great (or even decent) horror franchise to come out since the 80's.  While the films are heavily criticized for "senseless gore" (and while that may be true), the gore isn't the focus to the true fans.  I believe the writing in these films is brilliant in how everything intertwines throughout all the movies.  We're now seven movies deep, and still referencing back to the first in the series.  I remember when Pulp Fiction first came out, and everyone thought Tarantino was a genius for his use of time-manipulation and playing with sequence.  Well what Tarantino did for only 2-hours in his movie, Saw has spanned over an entire catalog of films...and therein lies its awesomeness.

This is the first Saw film that I haven't seen on opening night.  I should also say that I fucking hate 3D.  It's an annoying technology that decreases image quality and drains consumers' wallets just for the sake of a gimmick.  I paid $28 for two movie tickets.  Seriously?  Preposterous.  In three months I'll be able to own the movie for half of that cost.  For $28 I should have gotten a happy-ending massage while I relaxed and watched the show.  Going the 2D route and saving me some money would've been the smart move, but I'm a sucker for advertising so I got pulled into the hype.

Either way,  this one ranked in the middle for me.  I liked it because it didn't have the confusion of Saw VI, but it still had enough references to past Saw's to make it creative and give you those "ah-ha!" moments that make the franchise great.  They brought back a key character from the original Saw, but they did a terrible job (well, no job) of explaining the character's motivation for his involvement in the series.  It was like having a twist ending just for the sake of having a twist ending.

My only other criticism (aside from the painfully bad acting of the main cop character - Gibson, played by Chad Donella) is the reasons behind the traps.  Every other Saw edition had a firm grasp on making sure that whatever the protagonist was going through ended up relating to the series as a whole.  This one totally strayed from that, and the main victim really didn't have much to do with the overall chain of events spanning the movies.  That probably is related in major part to the fact that Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is dead and no longer involved.  But, again, it just seemed like a wasted opportunity for some decent writing and twists.

Overall this ranks in the middle of the "Saw badass-ness" spectrum.  I hope they really do end this like they are supposed to.  One more edition (produced out of greed) could kill the best horror franchise in decades.  Go out with a bang, Saw.

And once again - fuck you, Hasslehoff.