Saw VI (2009)

Tongue twister time! “I went to see Saw VI. I saw Saw VI. Saw VI sucks!” Say that three times fast.

I watched Saw on DVD a few years ago after hearing all the fuss, and I thought the locked room mystery scenario might be intriguing. Besides, Cary Elwes and Danny Glover were in it, so how bad could it be? Instead, I endured one of the most vile and repellent movies I’ve ever seen. I try my best not to be a prude about such things, as torturous violence and judicious use of gore can be quite effective in the right narrative context; see, for instance, Michael Madsen cutting off the cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs, as Tarantino pans his camera away so we don’t see the act (but we can hear it all too well), and we’re privy to the grisly aftermath.

In contrast, Saw wallows in gore and torture like a pig in swill. It repeatedly sets up ridiculously elaborate mechanisms of torture and painful death, far beyond any semblance of reality, and attempts to justify it all as righteous vengeance from a misunderstood sociopath who doesn’t actually kill anyone himself, but rather forces people who’ve wronged him to make their own life-or-death choices. I was particularly appalled by the scene where a young woman has to remove a jaw-breaking apparatus locked onto her head by cutting into someone else’s body to get the key, and she later confides that the experience “helped her.” That’s a very unhealthy justification, both for the character and the audience. The Silence Of The Lambs featured two nasty serial killers, but it never attempted to make the audience empathize with either one of them or justify their actions; Jodie Foster’s FBI agent saw to that. Saw was just an extended exposure to pain, gore, and — gee, the “dead” guy in the middle of the floor was the killer the whole time? — illogical, utter stupidity.

After that, you couldn’t pay me to sit through Saw II to Saw V; however, my boss did pay me to sit through Saw VI, and I did — barely. If I missed anything “important” from the intervening Saws, no matter, for this one pads out its running time with lots of choppily edited flashbacks to fill in those irrelevant details. The killer known as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) is theoretically dead, but his minions continue to carry out his nefarious tortures. These include a duplicitous cop (Costas Mandylor), Jigsaw’s wife (Betsy Russell) — aww, Jigsaw was married, how humanizing of him! — and the headgear-wearing chick from the first film (Shawnee Smith, whom I always remember as the psychotic Julie Lawry in the miniseries The Stand). And we see enough of Jigsaw via flashbacks and grainy videos that it doesn’t really matter whether he’s alive or dead. This time around, possibly inspired by the national health care debate, he and his murderous pals are targeting an insurance company figurehead (Peter Outerbridge) and his lawyer and actuaries who denied coverage for treating Jigsaw’s cancer. (Aww, po widdle Jigsaw had cancer. What a perfect motivation for killing people.)

This gives the filmmakers carte blanche to combine lots of grunge-covered industrial-looking sets, ridiculously elaborate torture devices that couldn’t have been constructed by one person or even four, screaming and gore and shotgun blasts and fire jets and hydrofluoric acid, plus pointless scenes and dialogue throughout. The movie starts with two people forced to participate in a macabre race to see how much of their own flesh they can slice off within 60 seconds, with the loser getting bolts drilled into their skull. This repulsive excuse for a scene is present only to sate the audience’s bloodlust while they sit through the subsequent predictable exposition and what passes for a plot.

What particularly appalls me is how this series is marketed as “scary,” as well as good Halloween entertainment. While the films are gory, bloody, and mean-spirited, they’re not the least bit scary. That’s because they’re so overblown with gore and unrealistic mayhem that they lose any sense of believability. Hey, they’re only movies, you say, not real life; so are Paranormal Activity and The Exorcist, and yet they both succeeded in scaring the crap out of me because they had stronger grips on reality and thus believability. I encourage everyone to enjoy Halloween this year by seeing Paranormal Activity rather than this God-awful film.

I thought about composing a review of Saw VI by merely copying the thesaurus entry for the word “disgusting,” but that would be plagiarism. The tenets of our movie review website compel me to give this film one star as our lowest rating, but I do so under duress; if I could give this movie zero stars, or a negative number of stars, I would. (Perhaps an irrational or imaginary number would be appropriate, like the square root of -2.) I remember in elementary school — back in the stone age — when some poor kid would get sick and vomit in a classroom or hallway, the janitor would sprinkle this sawdust concoction to absorb it all. I would rather watch a video camera focused on sawdust-covered puke for 90 minutes — in smell-o-vision, even — than see another entry in this franchise. I just can’t hack Saw.