Bookmonkey Saw: Day 23

Saw VI

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 500^th 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.)

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 7

Saw II in a nutshell - everything I really liked about the first film seemed absent from the sequel.

Saw II in a slightly longer synopsis - a year after the events of Saw, eight people are trapped in a house and must make horrifying live-or-die-style choices to escape, while a police officer (and the father of one of the eight) captures and questions the jigsaw killer.  Although the film was not well received by critics, it did quite well and therefore another sequel was quickly ordered.

The original movie poster actually drew a bunch of media interest as it was banned by the MPAA - in the original picture (not shown right), it was apparent that the two fingers are severed.  The approved poster (as seen to the right), is therefore quite acceptable to put in the same theatres where kids were going to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire around the same time. (Quick side note, my oldest daughter is equally upset by both the banned and approved posters, entirely due to the ragged fingernails - apparently manicures are not that expensive and even severed fingers deserve a little extra care).

The story was originally written as The Desperate, by Darren Lynn Bousman (who would go on to direct Saw III and IV), but due to it’s inability to get green lit on its own, due to it's violent nature and being considered "...too saw-ish" (1) it was passed over until the sequel to Saw was green-lit and it was found that The Desperate could be adapted into a workable script.

Also I feel it is important to note that Saw II was a Canadian-American Horror film (as were the rest in the series, with Lions Gates Films partnering with the Ontario Production Services Tax Credit) so on behalf of my nation, sorry.

Eight months after the film was released, star Tobin Bell was nominated for an MTV Best Villain award (along with Voldemort from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Scarecrow from Batman Begins, The White Witch from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe) but lost out to Hayden Christensen in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith for best on-screen villain.

The only thing I really liked about the sequel?  Just as Saw had a bizarre reference to Alice in Wonderland, Saw II does the same with The Wizard of Oz (the 1939 MGM film, not the original novel) when the Jigsaw killer informs his eight victims that “ The Clue to their [escape] can be found Over the Rainbow” 

Internet Movie DataBase. "Trivia" in Saw II.  Retrieved October 7 from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432348/trivia