All right, Saw VI, first thing first – the winner of the first season of Scream Queens appears in her breakthrough role in the first scene! Her character and a co-worker are trapped in joined cages and can only save themselves by feeding bits of their bodies to a machine and do it faster than the other.
Yuck.
It is a big scene, and although she doesn’t get to use her skills she learned on Scream Queens to be seductive, angry or the girl who defeats the villain, she does get to look terrified and then crazy as she works to out-do her coworker.
Also, the two of them are locked up because they are bankers, and bankers are bad. I guess because the sometimes make unfair mortgages with customers.
Actually, that might be the biggest beef I have with the sixth film, the victims are (the two previously mentioned) bankers and a whole lot of health insurance company workers. Because those people are bad, and take advantage of the poor and sick.
Seriously, the writing at this point in the series is pretty awful and entirely inconsistent with the original concept. Originally, the Jigsaw Killer kidnaps random people and claims they don’t appreciate their lives enough, and then he gives them a horrible decision to make and (I honestly believe) hopes that they will succeed at their challenge.
By this point in the series, only bad people are caught, people who need to be taught a lesson. In fact, this movie actually uses retroactively continuity to show us that the Jigsaw Killer planned this all along, making the whole series about a vendetta killer, effectively removing one of my favourite aspects of the first film, the killers motive.
The "evil" health insurance company in the film is called Umbrella Health (in Saw’s equally prolific contemporary horror franchise Resident Evil, The Umbrella Corporation is behind the zombie plague which is the focus of each film), and unlike the previous films conceit of using flashbacks to describe how the victims were kidnapped, this film shows everything in chronological order.
Also this is by far the most disgusting of the films in terms of on-screen violence – I thought Saw V was bad, but this film really takes the cake (the gore-cake, if you will, which I hope isn’t an actual thing in the final Saw film).
The only positive thing I can say about the DVD is that in addition to the all the special features focusing on the horrible traps of the film (and actually, they are pretty poorly conceived in the film, most of them being shotgun traps with few of the mechanized grinding parts that seemed to appeal to fans of the previous films), was one focusing on how actor Tobin Bell worked to make his performance of the Jigsaw Killer more believable, and I found that eight minute segment to be pretty interesting.
(Quick side-note - this review of Saw VI actually marks my 500th post to this blog since I started in August of 2009 – Pretty Cool! Sorry it was about Saw VI, but hey – at least you didn’t have to watch it.)
