Get Jiggy With It

Saw III

(R)

originally published November 1, 2006

After watching the Jigsaw Killer teach gory life lessons to the flawed and self-absorbed for the bone crunching, stomach churning third (and final?) time, I really think the Saw franchise - cheap, bloody, inventive - is brilliant. Two decent sequels in the can, Saw has proven itself better than Friday the 13th (Jason and I go way back, but frankly, the lumbering maniac just is not that inspired) and Nightmare on Elm Street's equal. Though no film will ever remotely challenge the original Halloween’s genre domination, a couple more entertaining, macabre entries will match everything Michael Myers has done since Halloween II (I hope Rob Zombie can save that franchise with its ninth incarnation).

Saw was cut-rate, though what it lacked in scale was more than made up for in cheap thrills. Saw II traded scares for explicitness. Saw III recaptures the first flick’s claustrophobic sense of abandonment (Jigsaw recruited too many people for Saw II) and the grisly upped ante of the first sequel (III’s vengeful haunted house could’ve been designed by Dante). Where the third outing may lack its predecessors’ ingenuity, Jigsaw’s newest contest is easily his bloodiest. Yet Saw III doesn’t belabor its unpleasantness. You’re quite glad for the quick cuts and flash edits; you see less of the nasty stuff that way and have to flesh it out yourself.

On the brink of death, Jigsaw/ John Kramer (Tobin Bell) stages his final test, or game, as he calls it. His apprentice/ former victim, Amanda (Shawnee Smith), has nabbed a depressed doctor, Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh), to keep Amanda’s reason for living alive. Lynn’s motivation is an explosive choker linked with Jigsaw’s heart rate. If he dies before the game ends, she dies. The other player is Jeff (Angus Macfadyen). Despondent and rancorous over his son’s death, Jeff has withdrawn from his wife and daughter. As we see in flashback, Jeff is so far gone that he emotionally beats his living child with the memory of his dead one. Jeff is a prime candidate for Jiggy’s cruel mind games; the good doctor - a pill-popping adulterer - is no better. Both are in need of a Jigsaw-induced moment of clarity, the sort of revelation that turned Amanda from a junkie to a killer-in-training.

An intriguing conceit woven throughout the entire Saw series is its hesitancy to convict Jigsaw of complicity in his victim’s deaths. This puppet-making master of ceremonies is no murderer. He even claims to despise their breed in Saw III. His diversions always leave the players with an option. “Live or die, make your choice,” Jigsaw cruelly offers. Of course, to live you might have to face your greatest fear - nothing in Saw III tops II’s dip into a needle-filled pit - or risk having your chest ripped open by some medieval-looking torture device. Nevertheless, Jigsaw seriously believes his victims will exit their predicament changed people. Think of him as a sadistic Morgan Spurlock hosting a particularly dangerous episode of "30 Days."

Is this psychotic, strangely idealistic pedagogy the result of the fatal tumor pressing against Jigsaw’s frontal lobe? Probably not. Still, despite the misanthropic sadism of series creators Leigh Whannel and James Wan, both of whom returned to supply Saw III’s series-changing arc, this franchise has some brains not scattered all over the wall or the floor or the ceiling. A subtextual idealism pervades. Make people fight for their survival and they’ll do it. No matter how self-medicated they are by society’s countless intoxicants, people are wired to stay alive. When television’s top-rated show of the past few years, "CSI," is bloodier than any old horror movie and the nightly news looks like Faces of Death (a valuable currency in the prison population that is male adolescence), people just need a more graphic wake-up call. It’s a service available from all three Saw flicks and their fraternal “gornos,” the new exploitation flicks of Aja (High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake) and Zombie (The Devil’s Rejects).

Horror is all about economics and economy. The first film cost a little over $1 million and grossed 50 times that. The second film accumulated 20 times its estimated $4 million budget. The most expensive Saw to date, III still only cost $12 million and grossed over $34 million on opening weekend. So long as the films generate a profit, Saw will keep on whirring. And they’ll keep making money hand over fist as long as director Darren Lynn Bousman and writer Whannel put their resourceful minds to efficiently conceptualizing increasingly gruesome (puree of maggoty pig), twisty (but not codependently so) set pieces. With the terminal Jigsaw already playing well into OT, the viscerally entertaining second sequel makes me wonder if the game will ever end.

Drew Wheeler