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• Another Halloween, another bland Saw

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The Saw franchise has made more than half a billion dollars worldwide, almost double the GNP of Liberia. The next installment of the franchise will be filmed in 3-D. There is a Saw comic book, videogame, and European rollercoaster. Somewhere, a Hollywood executive is sitting alone in a dark room. The series’ antagonist, Jigsaw, crafts elaborate and brutal death-machines—this executive carefully designs each Saw movie to take no chances or do anything less than the expected. This evil, scheming executive guarantees these movies make lots and lots of money.

In Saw VI, Jigsaw returns to enact more macabre “justice” on whomever he sees fit. Even though he died at the end of Saw III, Jigsaw predicted the insurance and banking industries would cause the stock market crash of 2008—so he posthumously instructs Lt. Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) and his wife Jill (Betsey Russell) to torture two financial bankers and various insurance actuaries to get revenge for himself, and America. This movie uses political relevance the same way it uses a pipe-wrench; blunt and heavy-handed. Flashbacks develop Jigsaw’s complicated back story, but instead of seeing the serial killer as a complicated vigilante with a slanted sense of justice, Jigsaw appears to be someone who seriously misread Man’s Search for Meaning.

The victims may not deserve their grisly fates, but the death scenes try to be entertaining. A lady cuts off her own arm, a smoker gets his lungs crushed by a giant metal vice (cigarette smoking is a lame torture-warranting-transgression), a merry-go-round is connected to a shotgun, a giant bed of needles pumps hydrochloric acid into someone, and two characters have a fight with an electrical circular saw. Even the “Reverse Bear Trap” head-crusher from the first movie makes an appearance. All this violence takes place in dingy rooms, lit with red light bulbs and shot like a choppy music video. Occasional fast cut montages highlight important scenes from previous Saw movies, and even this one, in case you get confused. Gore abounds in the Saw universe; but quality is compensated with quantity. It doesn’t take a gastrointestinal surgeon to realize the melting organs of one character look suspiciously like strawberry yogurt. Saw VI caters to its primary demographic—fifteen year old boys

If you were on the fence whether or not to see Saw VI, you didn’t see the first five. This is cookie cutter film making at its finest—except this cookie cutter is jagged, rusty, and guaranteed to give you tetanus.