[yasr_overall_rating]
Bodies are turning up around the city, each having met a uniquely gruesome demise. As the investigation proceeds, evidence points to one suspect: John Kramer, the man known as Jigsaw, who has been dead for ten years.
While I enjoyed the first “Saw” movie, especially its surprise twist ending, the sequels that followed were less than imaginative and instead of trying to outdo the first film in terms of originality, instead, it followed the path of least resistance and they all just became gore fests for gorehounds. While some people don’t mind that, as a horror lover myself, I much prefer when a movie tries to be something more than just blood and guts but in the context of the “Saw” films, that is exactly what they became, trite, unimaginative, and filled with, at times, unnecessary violence. I guess as someone who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, watching the “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises, films that were, at times, scary, but when it came to the gore factor, it was never that believable so you never really felt the need to look away. With today’s horror movies, filmmakers like Eli Roth, Takashi Miike, and Rob Zombie, have pushed the boundaries with horror to such an extent that a new term was created to describe their films, “torture porn.” Nowadays, a lot of so-called horror movies have such realistic depictions of violence that you actually feel like you’re watching a snuff film. That is most definitely not my thing, I would much rather watch John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” Richard Donner’s “The Omen,” or any number of 1980s horror vehicles because while some of them were very bloody, you never ever felt like you were watching real life, and that is the escape with horror, to watch the bloody events unfolding on screen but always knowing that they are not real.
With “Jigsaw,” I found that the filmmakers went back to more of a 1980s approach, while much of the death and mayhem within the movie is quite brutal, it didn’t feel as visually ferocious as many of its predecessors and therefore, I was able to enjoy the film much more. When the police receive information that five people have been kidnapped and forced into surviving a “game,” mazes filled with deathtraps, eerily similar to the ones serial killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) forced people into in the past, before his death, they assume they are dealing with a copycat but as the bodies begin to pile up, one by one, everybody becomes a suspect, including the lead investigators on the case, Det. Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie) and Det. Hunt (Clé Bennett), as well as the case’s forensic pathologists, Logan Nelson (Matt Passmore), and his assistant Eleanor Bonneville (Hannah Emily Anderson). It comes to light that each one of them had some interaction with the real Jigsaw killer in the past but in order to try and solve this case and prevent any more people from dying, they must all put their hostility aside and concentrate on the task at hand and try to discover if the real Jigsaw is still alive, or if someone else is continuing his legacy.
It’s hard to tell if “Jigsaw” will spawn another sequel because at the end of each of its predecessors, they were all left wide open for a continuation and the same applies here. After the seventh and supposedly last entry in the series, “Saw 3D,” in 2010, and the lackluster box office results from most of the previous installments, Lionsgate decided to end the series once and for all. But you can’t keep a good serial killer down and with “Jigsaw,” they found a way of rebooting the series and continuing Jigsaw’s legacy and with the film having grossed $102.9 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, I think it’s safe to assume that the inevitable sequel will not be too far behind.
Available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray & DVD January 23rd from Lionsgate
