Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Jigsaw

Porn has gone mainstream, and not just because it accounts for 15,000% of all the traffic on the Interwebs.  Iowa grandmothers talk about "food porn," "gun porn" and even "torture porn" without so much as blushing.  You can thank Saw for that last one.

On Halloween weekend back in 2004, the low-budget, high-concept horror flick snuck into theaters.  Two strangers wake up trapped in a room.  They're chained to the walls and told via a microcassette tape that they're going to play a game.  The game turns out to be having to decide whether to use a hacksaw to cut through their legs in order to escape their chains and survive.  The guy that orchestrated the "game" is called the Jigsaw Killer (Tobin "Taco" Bell), and he did it to teach his prisoners the value of human life . . . or some such bullshit.

Saw rang cash registers all over the world and ushered in the age of torture porn.  Lionsgate puked out a sequel every Halloween for six years after.  Each one was more spaghetti-logiced and confuckulated than the last.  2010's Saw 3D appeared to have bled the series dry.  But Hollywood is nothing if not predictable, so after a seven year hiatus, Jigsaw is back in the rebooted, uber-creatively titled Jigsaw.

Or is he?  He was supposed to be deader than dodos.  Could he have pulled a Jesus, or is someone copycatting his signature punish-the-wicked-by-making-them-maim-themselves-or-kill-each-other-to-survive games of very fucking little chance?  It could be the dirty cop, Halloran (Callum Keith "Daniel Craig's Stunt Double" Rennie).  Or maybe it's the seemingly upright widower/doctor, Logan (Matt "Winning Football Teams" Passmore), or his Jigsaw-obsessed, tattooed hottie assistant, Eleanor (Hannah Emily "Serial Killers Always Have Three Names" Anderson)?  The only person it can't be is good cop Hunt ("Treble" Cle Bennett) because the only time the Black guy is the killer is in the Candyman series.  Or Blacula.

Fans of the Saw movies will get all the expected slicing and dicing, bleeding and screaming courtesy of Jigsaw's (or his stand-in's) Rube Goldberg death traps.  And let's face fucking facts, only Saw fans and dumbass 15-year-olds who sneak in after buying tickets for Geostorm are going to see this shit-stained retread of a one-hit wonder.

But given that the only other new release "horror" movie from the past week is Tyler Perry's Boo 2!, Jigsaw is going to own Halloween once again.  I predict four sequels, the last of which will just be 90 minutes of the creepy, paper mache clown doing donuts on his tricycle.

October 27, 2017