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Let's set the stage.
October 2004 and I take a girl I met at Vintage Stock to see Saw. I already hate the film because I have to tell people I'm going to see Saw or that I saw Saw. It's an unwieldy bullshit set of words. How are you supposed to say them and not sound like an asshole? "I'm going to witness Saw." It's not a stigmata, though the point of the series seems to have evolved into involuntary self-flagellation.
So I'm driving a shitty Nissan and we see the movie. She liked it and I didn't. It was sort of a Se7en rip off, but it was the lack of really well designed kills (aside from the ceiling shotguns) and the laugh worthy sight of a puppet on a tricycle delivering Jigsaw's now iconic line, "I'd like to play a game", that had me wondering how long it would take to be over. We probably should have gotten drunk first (hindsight remains 20/20). We briefly debated Saw's relative merits and I took her back to the Vintage Stock parking lot. When we talked again she was telling me about her long distance boyfriend in West Virginia.
I haven't seen a Saw film since.
Apparently a lot happened. At least four films worth of stuff. And so, because I have to see the seventh film, Saw 3D, I decided to watch the sixth, my first in as many years. And then I had to hit Wikipedia.
Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) has been dead of his cancer for the last three flicks but gained followers that came to support his conceited cause. The first was Shawnee Smith's character, Amanda, which escaped me because I never saw Saw II. Thanks to Wikipedia I know that Saw III takes place in the same time frame and it all ties together with Saw IV. Between those Roman numerals we get Costas Fucking Mandylor, without a doubt the poor man's Don Johnson, a detective investigating the crimes of Jigsaw and who has also become a part of Jigsaw's game in order to save his daughter (who dies anyway and fuck you if you care).
Others live and die as well, including Marky Mark's brother, then come back again which is weird because watching Saw VI was like when I stopped watching Lost for two seasons and started again. All kinds of shit happened yet the same situations were still ongoing.
So anyway, Saw VI opens with a typical game scene between two people that were really just douchebags to begin with because they were screwing someone out of something. I guess at some point Jigsaw's murderous puzzles became acts of psychological philanthropy. The idea today is "a pound of flesh" and the trapped Red Shirt able to cut off enough pieces of themselves and deposit the chunks on a scale in a minute gets to live, and presumably re-think their approach to life.
The survivor is interviewed by The Worst Fucking Actor on Earth Named Costas Mandylor and Not Christopher Lambert (Det. Hoffman) who is actually behind the gruesome lessons. It's a prelude to the main plot involving the insurance company that denied Jigsaw's dead ass coverage. I shit you not, Saw VI is topical.
So we follow the trails of William Easton (Peter Outerbridge; whose last name sounds like a series of fantasy novels), a mid-level policy killer working for a greedy insurance company. He, with his team of opportunistic assholes, work night and day to deny coverage to people that will die without the help they thought they paid for. Easton is kidnapped and taken to Jigsaw's bizarre, posthumous, house of traps where he's made to navigate a series of tests that end in other people dying if he's lucky. It's all in order to see his family again, who have also been kidnapped and are held in cells with fire sprinklers ready to spew flesh melting acid on them if Easton doesn't navigate his tests in time.
The Saw franchise was already tired, and what was amazing about Saw VI, despite its breviity, was how it was tiring even though I skipped four movies. How these haven't become a SyFy Channel series yet I'll never know since Saw VI possesses all the traits of a cheaply made, straight-to-DVD name grab. These films have always been based on low overhead but even the first one had a cinematic sense and I'm told Saw II was actually kind of good. But the same could be said of the first couple of Hellraiser flicks. They spawned into nine films, mostly on video. Saw VI feels that cheap and tossed off while constantly tying its events back to its own overly self-important mythology.
Pretty much everyone in the film is a dick so there's no one to root for and all you're left with are the death games which, despite my missing most of the series, feel underwhelming compared to the highlights I've seen from the previous films. No pits of hypodermic needles or vats of guts. Instead the gags are almost all mechanically based and telegraphed from a mile off (during the Merry-Go-Round my assurance that two women would live was born out). They feel like video game levels and, as something meant to top itself, Saw VI doesn't seem to up the ante on its predecessors.
The acting is B-rate, even before the Mandylor Factor, and the direction by first timer Kevin Greutert is workman-like at best though he seems to make the most of his budget. He's also at the helm of Saw 3D so I guess I'll have the opportunity to see if he gets any better. But outside of the extra dimension making Saw suck for a higher ticket price, and unless Jigsaw has some beyond-the-grave plans to kill Jewish newborns crying for their mothers while they crawl through a mini-Auschwitz then I can say I have no confidence in this, the shittiest long-running horror series since The Doodlebops.
It's still not as bad as Twilight.
4 0f 10
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Wednesday, February 08, 2012
