You know I thought the same thing, and for a long time I avoided these films, then one day, a friend put on Saw.
It was dumb and ridiculous and bad but nowhere near what I was expecting as far as gore, Any full moon production from back in the day was way gorier than these watered down “horror” films.
I’ve since seen part of the hostel films and wasn’t impressed either.
The biggest difference I could see was that the whole point of these movies was to feed some sort of morbid curiosity that I could not find in myself, the idea that you are going to see a movie whose only point is watching people die in “horrible” ways. Disguised as a power fantasy.
