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.
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