Census Bloodbath: Cheers For Fears

For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1988

Director: John Quinn

Cast: Betsy Russell, Leif Garrett, Lucinda Dickey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After intense examination, I have concluded that the period between about 1986 and 1988 is when the cheesiest, most vomitously unfashionable concentration of campiness hit the slasher genre. Unfortunately, right around this period is when the subgenre was in its most severe decline. The glut of slashers had been flooding the market since 1980, only increasing in strength following the home video boom of the mid-80’s. Of course, when a high pressure perm front meets a low pressure quality snap, you get a maelstrom of memorable bad-good delights.

Take Cheerleader Camp. A woods-based slasher flick that was exactly too late to meet its prime market, it’s still a memorably entertaining crapfest. Co-produced, by – of all companies – the Japanese Daiei Films (progenitors of the Gamera franchise), Cheerleader Camp is deliriously out of touch with anything resembling reality.

Starting with the campers’ ages, which bottom out at about, oh, 32.

Camp Hurrah. Where dreams come true. Where men can be men and women can be topless. The particular cheerleading group we will be following is from Lindo Valley, composed of the cooing nymphette Pam (Teri Weigel, who you might recognize from Lesbian Babysitters 5), the blonde bubblehead Bonnie (Lorie Griffin), the Ethnic One Theresa (Rebecca Ferratti), the requisite fat prankster Timmy (Travis McKenna), the sweet, doting mascot Cory (Lucinda Dickey), the lascivious team captain with a gravity-defying hairline Brent (Leif Garrett), and his girlfriend Alison (Betsy Russell, who would later marry another onscreen psycho – Jigsaw. She appeared as his wife Jill in Saw IV-VII). Alison has been plagued by bad dreams, because you saw how much money that Freddy movie made, right?

When people who defy Alison start dying under mysterious circumstances, Alison worries that not all might be right in her mind. Is she killing these people? Or is it somebody else? The snobby camp owner Deedee Tipton (Vickie Benson)? Pop (Buck Flower of Maniac Cop, Pumpkinhead, and a million other things), the leering handyman with the Southern drawl who feels transplanted from some other movie entirely? When the killer turns their sights on the Lindo Valley team, their cheerleading getaway quickly becomes a bloody fiasco.

They did NOT stick the landing.

You’d think from that setup that Cheerleader Camp would be more or less a boob showcase, highlighting the best and bustiest of today’s youth. But take a look at that calendar, sucker. This is 1988, and the MPAA had long since choked out the genre’s capacity for sleaze like a pernicious weed. Although there IS a highly amusing sequence that could only be classified as a Bikini Removal contest, this is largely an exploitation-free zone. Shirts are practically super glued on, and the gore is shooed offscreen (though, in the few kills that do have blood, the effects are shockingly solid).

What Cheerleader Camp does have in spades to make up for its deficiencies is pure, unadulterated lunacy. Three characters in particular have tapped into a rich vein of incredulity. While Alison, Brent, and Pam stumble their way through a musty, run-of-the-mill slasher pic, Timmy, Miss Tipton, and pop the handyman are quietly constructing a Looney Tunes cartoon on the sidelines.

While Timmy spies on bathing women using a periscope and decked out in full Mrs. Doubtfire regalia, Miss Tipton (who could totally be played by Judy Greer in the remake) gets blasted on cocktails and has nudity-free cheerleading themed sex with the local sheriff. You’d think that description would be enough to sufficiently explain the nature of that scene, but you would be dead wrong. Deedee Tipton is a shining paragon of inexplicable slasher sexuality, and this convoluted, needlessly detailed scene is so crazy go nuts that it’s worth the price of admission alone. I mean, you can catch Cheerleader Camp for free on YouTube, but it’s such a sterling scene it’s legitimately worth paying actual human money for.

And then there’s Pop. Actor Buck Flower knows exactly where this movie stands in the pantheon of cinema (he was in Back to the Future and Escape from New York, so I’m pretty sure he knows that Cheerleader Camp is not his career peak), so he goes hog wild, ad-libbing all his lines and not giving half a hoot if his character makes sense. He is an endless repository of folksy, down-South sayings and lecherous, sweaty hyperbole that will stun your mind into submission. He’s the only genuinely good actor here, and his screen presence is like a giant electromagnet.

He’s a true role model.

While most of Cheerleader Camp’s fun falls into the unintentional bad-good category, there is a primitive but surprisingly effective sense of humor at work here. A scene of the mascots attempting to eat lunch while still in costume is as funny and well-shot as any contemporaneous ten comedy. And there are a handful of clever cuts that provide punchlines through the film’s editing itself, which is a level of comedic foresight almost unknown in the genre.

So as much as I want to hate Cheerleader Camp for its plot (which is as dense as a sponge, skipping through a loosely linked series of vignettes) its dreadful third act (which hinges on a red herring the screenwriter couldn’t be bothered to call out attention to and is basically a perpetual motion machine of teens running through underlit woods), or its total lack of scares (save for two nightmare scenes which are appropriately surreal), Cheerleader Camp is still a bucket of bloody fun. It’s not as recommendable a bad movie as, say, Killer Party, but it certainly has more focused, solid material than a Girls Nite Out. Don’t rush out to see it, but if you stumble across Cheerleader Camp in a dusty bargain bin, at least give it a second thought.

Killer: Cory (Lucinda Dickey)

Final Girl: Alison (Betsy Russell)

Best Kill: Pam’s “hedge clippers through the back of the skull” demise is shear ecstasy.

Sign of the Times: Every time the camera cuts back to Theresa, her hair is teased about a foot taller.

Scariest Moment: In a nightmare, Alison’s pom poms slice her arms open like razors.

Weirdest Moment: While being chased through the woods, Timmy decides to take a break to film a monologue – and then decides to take a piss, all while still filming.

Champion Dialogue: “That judge in the orange skirt… Make yer peepee harder than a ten pound bag of nickel jawbreakers.”

Body Count: 9; 7 perpetrated by the killer, 1 by a gaggle of scared cheerleaders, and the last by the Final Girl herself.

1. Suzy’s wrists are slit.
2. Pam is stabbed through the skull with shears.
3. Theresa is hit with a van.
4. Deedee is cleavered in the back.
5. Timmy is axed in the tummy.
6. Sheriff has his head crushed with a bear trap.
7. Pop is shot to death.
8. Bonnie is strangled with a phone cord.
9. Brent is shot.

TL;DR: Cheerleader Camp is a weak, late entry in the slasher genre, but it's silly enough to be diverting.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1197

No Saw Unsung

Year: 2010

Director: Kevin Greutert

Cast: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It is a long-revered tradition in the horror community that the word "final" is about as credible as a used car salesman who moonlights as a lawyer and does construction estimates on the side. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter was followed by a sequel less than a year later and, in 1993, when New Line decided to call it a day with Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, it seemed to stick. That is, until Jason X, 8 years later. Their 1991 effort Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare met a similarly inconclusive fate, chased by Wes Craven's New Nightmare a mere three years later.

So let me tell you that I for one will not bat an eyelash when the inevitable Saw VIII: The Beginning is announced. But for the time being, Saw: The Final Chapter (also known as the anemically chintzy Saw 3D) is the definitive final film in the Saw franchise. For that I thank Lionsgate, because if I'd had to watch even one more of these, I might have had to quit the blogging business forever and pick up a steady job to pay off my massive therapy bills.

Just burying the memory of this go-kart drill is going to take years out of my life.

Saw: The Final Chapter is one of those films that, through sheer insipidity and near perfect crapsmanship, actually make the films that come before it retroactively worse. Because while the Saw films pretty much haven't been good since the second one, I've more or less enjoyed this marathon experience, at least for the insight into the twisted horror game of the 2000's. But with every tired, amoral plot beat in this new film, the last of my goodwill for the franchise shriveled up and vanished in a puff of smoke.

Saw: The Final Chapter opens with a trap that takes place in public in broad daylight, insists that any woman who cheats on her boyfriend deserves to be buzz sawed in half, and has absolutely zero connection with the rest of the plot*. At least the movie clues us in right away that it's going to be a terrible, misogynistic gauntlet of crap, saving us the five minutes or so of attempting to muster up some esteem for the godforsaken thing. 

*There is some (largely inadequate) explanation for this scene available on the IMDb trivia page, presumably taken from the commentary for the film (of which there are two separate tracks on the DVD - lord help the lonely fan who listened to them both), but it involves a timeline, characters, motivations, and backstory that are not even remotely alluded to within the confines of this narrative. Legend has it that this film was originally meant to be two separate films, but after Saw VI tanked in the box office, they merged it into one grand finale, leaving behind this vestigial scene like a gruesome appendix.

It's hard not to view this as a metaphor for what it's like to sit down and watch this film.

There are two main plots to Saw: The Final Chapter. They are neither connected, nor particularly "final", but alas they insist upon happening anyway. The larger portion of the plot revolves around Bobby (Sean Patrick Flanery), a man who claims to be a Jigsaw victim in order to appear on talk shows, sell books, and run a high profile Jigsaw Survivor support group (one member of which is the mom from Part VI who was never actually in any danger and literally just sat in a cage for an hour, so I sense some attention issues). 

Obviously, he is put into a trap emulating the one he claimed to have suffered through so he can take advantage of the full Jigsaw experience. This includes such complementary amenities as 1) excessively complicated murder traps, 2) beleaguered metaphors about hearing, seeing, and speaking evil, and 3) addled scribblings on any available wall space ("Understand your problems," "Verify your self worth through commitment" - because evidently Jigsaw has secret aspirations of being a motivational speaker for local businesses).

Oh, also his publicist, manager, best friend, and wife are killed for good measure. Oh, also this plot ends without a single nod toward connecting it with the B story or explanation about who exactly arranged the trap. Oh, also it has no satisfactory conclusion within itself. Oh, also this movie is the cinematic equivalent of biting a hangnail and accidentally tearing too far.

The second plot largely involves the exploits of Jigsaw compatriot/resident douchenozzle Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) as he tracks down Jigsaw's ex-wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), who recently attempted to kill him via reverse bear trap and is being protected by useless Internal Affairs officer Matt Gibson (Chad Donella) in exchange for information on Hoffman's whereabouts. He's so useless that his repeated efforts to comfort Jill (literally repeated - "You're in a safehouse. Safe house. Safe. House.") are immediately thwarted ("This tape just came in the mail addressed to Jill."). 

Also, Hoffman terrorizes the authorities with infernally simple clues and (drumroll) malicious emails because he is a 14-year-old bully in 2003. He probably also has an email signature that says something like "Hoffman Rules Police Drools Jigsaw 4EVA!!! !!1! Gerard Way is God" followed by a metric ton of sparkly hearts.

Aw man, they won't know what hit 'em when I send them that chain email. That little girl ghost is totally gonna tear their sh*t up if they don't send it to 50 friends!

It looks like we're in this one for the long haul, so let's take a breather for a moment and appreciate some of the positive elements of the film. The directing style is clean and precise, finally scrubbed clean of the obnoxiously dingy Grimstagram color filters that permeate the franchise. It only took six entries for them to figure out that not every frame positively cries out to be tinted green, so at least they're evolving. I'd prefer for them to be actually improving, but wishing for the sixth sequel in a horror franchise to be a good film is not a productive pastime.

So that's swell. At least they have that in the bag. And I say the following with absolute, positive, 100% unironic praise: the DVD menu is frickin' rad as hell. Seriously. It's simple and effective, capturing the feeling of the films free of the messiness typically involved with this franchise's publicity campaign**. Above the selection menu is a timer counting down from 45 seconds and the scrawled phrase "Make Your Choice." Integrating the fictional world with reality is probably one of my favorite styles of promotion, and it's an elegant, fun way to keep fans enthralled. But this isn't a menu review. This is a movie review. I just wanted to give you guys a brief moment of solace before the true terror begins.

**I would like to take a brief moment to at long last publicly criticize the go-to tagline for the franchise: "If it's Halloween, it must be Saw." Yes, the films debuted every October for seven years, so I get what they're trying to accomplish. But if that's not the most clumsily structured conditional statement in the history of the English language, I weep for the parent of whoever penned it.

Alright, it's time to finish this. Let's finally bust free from the trap that is the Saw franchise.

The gore is slightly more demure than the previous entry, but what it does have to offer is relentlessly pushed on the audience. The camera lingers over gaping maws and ripping flesh like they're juicy burgers in a fast food commercial. At least that means that the franchise is also finally free of the annoyingly hyperactive dubstep hummingbird editing that normally surrounded the gore sequences. Unfortunately it turns out that, without that Saw staple, it just makes everything worse. Is it possible for both options to be the lesser of two evils?

But the non-gory traps are pointless (nearly the entire police force is murdered with what looks like a battle droid), so at the very least the violent ones are well crafted. Although that has never been an issue with this franchise. The utmost care and professionalism is put into making sure the audience feels like they need to vomit for 90 minutes. A couple of them are even over-the-top fun, in the vein of the Hatchet franchise. Unfortunately, the bulk of it is wan torture porn that, by the turn of the decade, was well past its sell-by date. In fact, while forcing myself to sit through the second half of the film (Sergio had long since checked out and was scrolling Tumblr on his phone - what a trouper), I entertained myself by imagining the producers discussing the gore in the concept meeting.

"So, we hear that people really don't like bad things happening to eyes or teeth."

"Alright perfect, let's do that. Now, how can we make this fit in with the overarching storyl-"

"Oh, were you saying something? I just released the movie to theaters, can it wait?"

On top of that, the acting is atypically atrocious. I'm saying it's bad even by the standards of the Saw franchise. Cary Elwes and Tobin Bell turn in their worst performances in the series in about two scenes each - thanks for showing up to work, guys. Chad Donella does little to convince the audience that he's not a twelve-year-old boy on Ritalin masquerading as a secret agent. And where Costas Mandylor had his multitude of faults as a smug, cocky brute, he's even worse as a ragged quasi-terrorist in stubbly survival mode.

Not even the added perk of three dimensions adds any, well, dimension, to the film. There's a couple scenes that are fun through sheer lunacy (a saw is tossed full force into the camera; the puppet Billy enters in a room by smashing through a window in a steel cage - he's like a wooden Liza Minnelli), but most of the effects just involve guts being doggedly thrown at the camera with no vigor or enthusiasm whatsoever.

 No, their real priority was making sure that every scene made the female audience members as uncomfortable as possible.

Which brings me to a brief reflection on the franchise as a whole. Although parts 1 and II favor story over gore, the final five wallow in inflicting squishy grimness onto cardboard characters while Jigsaw pontificates about his harebrained philosophy in flashback. They're deeply misogynistic (Part IV and The Final Chapter both feature traps that punish women who are in abusive relationships because being beaten up by a man is clearly their fault), punishingly grim, and pedantically amoral.

I'll (thankfully) never have the chance to say this again in a review, so I'm gonna lay it all out now: Jigsaw's philosophy is a load of garbage. He smugly claims that he's trying to connect with people's survival instincts by making them mutilate themselves and learn to appreciate life more. But there are several flaws in his theories.

First (And Foremost). Just because Jigsaw decides that somebody sucks doesn't mean that they deserve to get their arm chopped off.

Second. Jigsaw doesn't stick to his word. Although he will take every opportunity to moralize about how "I AM NOT A MURDERER" and "KILLING IS DISTASTEFUL" and how everyone in his "tests" is given the opportunity to survive, a great deal of his traps in the later films involve tertiary characters who have done nothing wrong other than associate with a wrongdoer and are given no opportunity to enact an escape. These people are punished for their nonexistent indiscretions with long, drawn-out torture all in the name of bettering their friend who is, by all accounts, way more of a douche than them.

Third. The murders are too excessive and complicated. Jigsaw and his compatriots are the type who always bring a spring-loaded 45-second-timer reverse bear trap to a knife fight.

Fourth. Jigsaw claims that he's attempting to better the lives of those around him, but his traps are mostly just petty swats at people who screwed him over.

Fifth. Yeah, Jigsaw is definitely a murderer. No two ways about it. 

Just because the guy from Linkin Park has to peel his back away from the seat himself doesn't mean that you're not guilty of gluing it there in the first place.

I have pondered and pondered about just why (oh why) these movies have such a thriving community of fans that even now will troll negative reviews of the films (not that I have firsthand experience or anything), post excessive and poorly written reviews/factoids on IMDb or other online resources, and generally tout the films as the crux of modern horror. 

My current working theory is that the Saw franchise rewards fandom and constant rewatching. Characters, traps, scenes and situations from earlier entries either become important elements later on, have small payoffs in flashbacks or future revelations, or tie together in increasingly twisted ways. So any character that one may be particularly fond of will definitely reappear in some capacity. Or any moment that one enjoys will be reworked and re-envisioned over and over again as the series mythology expands. With each new twist, more information about the world of Jigsaw falls into place, rewarding the people who spend their time on message boards contemplating motivations and connections, penning theories into the wee hours or writing Billy the Puppet fanfiction.

Because goodness knows, with films as tedious and nasty as The Final Chapter, I certainly hope it's not the vulgar gore and pedantic moralism that keeps people coming back. Please.

TL; DR: Saw: The Final Chapter is the worst of a rotten bunch.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 2310

Reviews In This Series

Saw (Wan, 2004)

Saw II (Bousman 2005)

Saw III (Bousman, 2006)

Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)

Saw V (Hackl, 2008)

Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)

Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)

But Saw, What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks

Year: 2009

Director: Kevin Greutert

Cast: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Mark Rolston

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

We're past the point of no return. After this post, there's only one movie left in my marathon of the infamous Saw series. Luckily by this point, the films have established a baseline of "competent but dreary," largely accomplished by keeping crew duties in the family. Seeing as our director this time around is yet another longtime friend of the franchise, editor Kevin Greutert, it would be quite reasonable to assume that Saw VI might be in the same vein as its cohorts.

As it turns out, Saw VI is even better than the baseline. In fact, it's the best film in the franchise since Saw II. Don't take that to mean it isn't pretty darn bad, but it's like finding a Fresca in the middle of a cooler full of Club Soda. I'll take what I can get with the Saw movies.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't recall there being an actual saw in the franchise since day one.  It must be the work of those wicked hardware lobbyists.

We pick up almost exactly where the last film left off (after an entirely unrelated and gratuitously grisly trap, as per tradition) - Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) is crushed to death by a shrinking room as Jigsaw's new protégé Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) laboriously lowers himself into the ground in a box filled with broken glass, smug as a bug. Saw V, everyone.

The next scene is the biggest twist in the entire franchise. You might want to listen to this song while you read the next sentence in order to be adequately prepared for the supreme level of twisting that is about to happen to your mind. Alright, are you ready? The scene that follows is entirely based on character development. For perhaps the first time in six films, a moment plays that isn't coated in grime as we visit Will Easton (Peter Outerbridge) in his fancy high rise office.

Will is the owner of a corrupt health insurance company and employer of the Dog Pit, a team of six highly trained individuals who look for discrepancies in insurance forms and find reasons to terminate contracts with sick patients. While we learn about Will, his work, and his life, the film acquires a slick, bright aesthetic that - for a single shining moment - allows us to forget that we're watching a Saw movie. 

What a gift. We should write thank you letters to Mr. Greutert.

So anyway, traps. The more the merrier, and because there's already been five consecutive movies to one-up, the more there are. Will is abducted and put through a gauntlet of four traps that viscerally depict how the choices he has made with his company have great impact on human lives. A mother (Shauna MacDonald) and her douchey son (Devon Bostick) - who has only two types of lines in the film, either "Acid Facts" or "The F Word." - are trapped in a cage with a vat of hydrofluoric acid above them. And Pamela (Samantha Lemole), a journalist, is trapped in a cage with a video monitor overseeing the other traps. So... That's something. It kinda reminds me of my Saturday nights, actually, what with all the Saw films I've been zipping through lately.

While all this mess is going on, Hoffman works with Agent Erickson (Mark Rolston) and the secretly not dead Agent Perez (Athena Karkanis), attempting to prevent them from discovering his true identity and feeding them clues that Strahm may have been perpetrating the killings. And he has flashbacks to when Amanda (Shawnee Smith) was still alive because why not. Also Jigsaw's ex-wife Jill (Betsy Russell) pops in from time to time to be ambiguously evil and remind us that - for all the bad acting and stilted line deliveries Mandylor and Co. bring to the table, things could be much, much worse.

Seen here in a brief moment of repose before attending the Unskilled Performers Association Convention & Yuletide Ball.

For once, the film has enough good elements in its production to counteract the blistering inanity of the script. Alas, that script thing will never change - although it's commendable that Saw writing duties have only been shared by about four people and change throughout the entire process. With such uniform work behind the camera, the stories may have wooden dialogue and incomprehensible twists, but at least they have consistent internal logic and characters. 

So even if Saw VI contents itself with unmotivated villains, a shrilly preposterous ending and over-explanation of its metaphors using Jigsaw as a mouthpiece ("The blood on your hands will literally represent the blood that's on your hands," he says), even getting him to gaze wistfully into a piranha tank ("Piranha," he says) while remonstrating Will in a flashback, at least it's coming from a place of organic nonsense.

But hey! Good elements! We've watched the "all the cool kids tint the frame" Saw aesthetic go from blue to green to yellow and back to blue, each shade more ugly than the last. But here in Saw VI, we get rooms that are only shadowy and grimy to increase tension when necessary and a much gentler teal color to guide us through. This color offsets the gore, which appears in full, steaming force in the opening scene, though it tones down until the grand finale once the traps get more plot-centric.

And all the plots service a political point, providing some of the only truly analyzable "subtext" in the franchise thus far. Having Jigsaw expound the virtues of healthcare reform while staring at a piranha tank and watching Hilary Clinton on the news may be overdoing it, at least it's doing something.

I swear, this scene feels important, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Unfortunately, Jigsaw's pedantic MO is pushed extra hard to contrast with the more topical political appeal. Haven't we figured out by now that, despite his claims, Jigsaw is a far from "moral" killer? A good 70% of his traps this round involve at least one person being forced to die for the benefit of another. Sure, that person may be learning one of his soporific "lessons," but the human bait in their traps is afforded no true means of survival.

This flies directly in the face of Jigsaw's philosophy, as repeatedly stated throughout the six films in the franchise, vigorously so in this very film. I shan't mention that his philosophy is inherently flawed (punishing people who don't value their life by murdering them isn't exactly a motivational speech), because without it the Saw films have nothing. But in Saw VI their established logic is spit on again and again, yet nobody seems to notice or care.

Please excuse my fervor, it has been a rough couple weeks. But don't dismiss this as a nerd rant (hashtag) either. The biggest issue with the Saw films as a mainstream tentpole is that the lessons they teach are highly dubious. I'm not saying a torture film will inspire novice serial killers to pick up some iron shackles at the next Home Depot sale, but Saw's incessant moral-peddling encourages easily-plied douchebags to truly believe that this villainous character is righteous. You can toss me all the gore gags and extreme material you want, but that pandering moralism just doesn't sit right with me.

Unfortunately for these six, they'll never sit right ever again.

If the inherent hypocrisy of Jigsaw's ideology isn't apparent in the reprimanding scene where he yells "He's a HUMAN BEING!" at Hoffman after he dumps an unconscious man onto the floor, immediately before attaching him to a machine that will twist his limbs off one by one, then it can't be helped. I'm ready for this to be over.

Anyway, the film really isn't the worst. That's just been building up for a while and I had to blow off some steam before our closing number. Really, if you're picking one Saw film past Part III to watch, you're best off with this one. It's got its share of grotesqueries and idiocies, but at least it has a more intelligent aesthetic and a political core to prevent them from shallowness.

See you all soon!

TL;DR: Saw VI is the best of the back half of the franchise, though you should necessarily take that with a grain of salt.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1411

Reviews In This Series

Saw (Wan, 2004)

Saw II (Bousman, 2005)

Saw III (Bousman, 2006)

Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)

Saw V (Hackl, 2008)

Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)

Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)

I Fought The Saw And The Saw Won

Year: 2007

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Cast: Tobin Bell, Scott Patterson, Costas Mandylor

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There's not a lot the Saw movies have to offer to the discerning cinephile, but at the very least they're consistent. In this case consistency means equally mystifying conclusions, ineptly acted characters who are dumber than the wood that comprises their dialogue, and exponentially grimmer gore sequences imprisoned in an irritating aesthetic like bright green amber. But they're consistent just the same.

Director Darren Lynn Bousman returns for his third and final entry in the franchise, the only remaining leading light of the original (more or less - he jumped in on Part II) Saw production team now that writer Leigh Whannell has left the building. Usually when a franchise's recurring writer jumps ship, the whole enterprise begins to slowly sink, but here his loss is felt not one whit, largely because his replacements are just about equally crappy. The more things change, the more things stay the same, or so they say.

[WARNING: THERE ARE MEDIUM SPOILERS FOR EARLIER ENTRIES IN THE FRANCHISE LITTERED AROUND THIS REVIEW.]

Spoiler alert: It's pretty dumb.

The most I can say is that, through some inexplicable twist of fate, Saw IV at least slightly improves upon its shrill and pornographic predecessor. Although this is in no way clear at the beginning, which features an alarmingly grotesque autopsy for no other reason than to quench thirsty gorehounds before the plot even threatens to peek its head around the curtain. I mean, at this point, who else was left in Saw's core audience? 

These are the questions that plague me. By the end of this marathon, I hope to have gained some insight toward an answer. I have a hypothesis that I've been chewing on, but I think I'll save that chestnut until we're a little further down the line.

Anyway, the traps. Because the screenwriters like the "gauntlet" idea of Saw III so much, that trap style continues here as Lt. Daniel Rigg (Lyriq Bent) - who has proven himself to have somewhat of a hero complex that is putting strain on his marriage and health - is put through a series of increasingly baffling tests in which Jigsaw attempts to teach him that not everyone can be saved and, in fact, should be taught to save themselves. Rigg is sent on a sort of grotesque scavenger hunt in which he must ignore victims in perilous traps in order to learn his lesson and save the lives of Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) and Lt. Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), who are being held captive at an undisclosed location inside - you guessed it - an arcane death trap.

My current working theory is that the sun is green in the Saw universe and that any normally colored scenes are just the result of tatty fluorescents.

While all this is happening, Agents Lindsey Perez (Athena Karkanis) and Peter Strahm (Scott Patterson) are close on Rigg's tail, hoping to stop the Jigsaw killer once and for all and discover just who his mysterious accomplice might be (SPOILER: It's dumb). 

As you may have noticed, once again the Saw series returns to a police procedural format, which is a great boon considering that it allows for more plot than merely a string of bloody traps like the world's worst candy necklace. It also fixes the biggest flaw of Saw III, returning the villain to the shadows instead of keeping him front and center.

The issue is, now that there are three whole movies to cull information from, the mythology of the Saw universe has gotten unwieldy. Like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, the franchise has grown and grown with each dollop of blood, finally becoming a monstrous behemoth threatening to destroy everything in its path. And the first thing in Saw IV's crosshairs is narrative coherence. Old characters and minor recurring details are shoved willy nilly into the plot like a child trying to put a game of Life back into the box.

There are only so many old white dudes gasping in astonishment at other old white dudes one mind can take before it shuts down completely. I mean, I've been watching these films essentially back to back and need to use Sergio as a sounding board to piece together what the hell is actually happening in whatever scene we are watching. And that's not even mentioning the array of perplexing clues that Agent Strahm somehow uses to find Jigsaw's hideout.

The less said about any of this, the better. No one is in the Saw camp for the heady narrative structure.

In this entry, Jigsaw's apparent clairvoyance reaches a peak as he can predict with accuracy which police officers will investigate his case, who stand in what position in any given room, and even - to a T - [who will be in his autopsy room after he dies]. Even worse, his MO is shakier than ever. Despite his repeated and irritating insistence in Part III that he is not a murderer, half the people in his traps are only there to be killed by others. It's still not technically murder by his hand, but the whole point is that people should be able to get out of their own traps. Whatever. It's not my place to question the motivations of a wheezy old sociopathic dickbag. And no, I'm not talking about the screenwriter, don't be mean.

In addition to this, Saw IV pulls out the age-old Hollywood sequel sin of adding unnecessary backstory to the killer by adding an ex-wife, a dead kid, and a weird baby Jigsaw doll into a story that should be as simple as "the dude had cancer, bro."

And the acting - oh, the acting! What would a Saw film be without a slew of kinda-unknowns with less personality than the creepy puppet? Nobody is a bad-good standout this time around, although the worst performances absolutely come from Betsy Russell as Jigsaw's ex-wife (although it's admittedly a challenge to pretend to be in love with someone old enough to be your grandfather - ask any of the Playboy bunnies) and Costas Mandylor, whose name is far more interesting than his befuddling turn as Lt. Hoffman.

Unfortunately, three sequels have been enough to drag even the perennial Tobin Bell down. The prequel-ish flashback material he is given is remarkably unsuited for his talents and this time around Jigsaw just seems drowsy - like a man on too much Dramamine rather than a deluded force of pure evil. And Donnie Wahlberg isn't even given a chance to be bad in perhaps the easiest role of his career - a man who is gagged and bound. Although the few lines he does get to say bring back his beloved character trait of yelling the same thing over and over again ad nauseum. 

That's dedication right there.

So yeah, Saw IV isn't great. It's slightly better than III in several regards. Including the increased procedural element, the gore is less lovingly pornographic (though it is even more grotesque), the seamless transitions between scenes are beginning to grow on me, and the twist is more clever - although I finally discovered the reason the twists have never really bothered me. 

The score by Charlie Clauser ("Hello Zepp," though I like to call it the Revelation Song) that is reused for each closing sequence is just marvelous. It provides so much drama and import to any scene its attached to that even the dumbest pile of turds imaginable feels like an epically glorious epiphany. "Hello Zepp" could make a dentist telling you that you need a root canal feel like an adventure. You go, Charlie Clauser. Sorry I've never mentioned you before.

One more thing - certain parts of Saw IV are truly hilarious. Whether it's a tastelessly overt metaphor about smashing a clock, a trap set inside a public school classroom, Jigsaw's ex-wife talking about how "everything with [him] was carefully planned," or [the fact that autopsy technicians find a tape inside Jigsaw's stomach], this is prime cannon fodder for audience roasting. A personal favorite moment: a CSI worker is straight up taken out with a spike shot from an unused trap and not a single person notices or even mentions it.

This kind of movie can't go unmocked, so I'd urge anyone who wants to marathon only the best of the Saw franchise to consider tacking this one on to the meager list of "Saw and Saw II" that they've compiled.

Brennan out.

See you next time.

TL;DR: Saw IV is not good, but it is a decided improvement on the previous entry in the franchise.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1448

Reviews In This Series
Saw (Wan, 2004)
Saw II (Bousman, 2005)
Saw III (Bousman, 2006)
Saw IV (Bousman, 2007)
Saw V (Hackl, 2008)
Saw VI (Greutert, 2009)
Saw: The Final Chapter (Greutert, 2010)