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Review: Saw II

by Robert Newton Oct 27th 2005 // 5:59PM

Filed under: Horror, New Releases, Lionsgate Films, Theatrical Reviews

Saw II

I thought I had dodged a bullet. My day job, which I've had for nearly a decade now, is writing film reviews for an alternative newsweekly here in Central Massachusetts. Due to a tight word count and the occasional abundance of releases, some movies fall through the cracks. Movies like 2004's Saw, however, reside in the cracks. I am content to leave them there whenever possible, but I never go so far as to entirely disavow their existence, like certain lackluster video chain stores do when you ask them for a copy of the too-controversial The Last Temptation Of Christ or the NC-17 rated Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Being relatively new to Cinematical, I am happy to pay my dues by taking the assignments that no one else wants, even when it is an all-out assault on my senses (and sensibilities) like Saw II. Since part of film criticism is conveying the experience, knowing full well that very few people will see every film you review, I always do my best to convey the existential joy or abject dehumanization that a movie might provoke. So from here it goes...

It's sad to see what passes for horror these days. Before you go labeling me some stiff obsessed with glorifying to the point of fetishizing the days of classic horror when Karloff and Lugosi ruled the world, hold on. Sure, like anyone, there are otherwise laughable movies that scared me as a kid for whatever reason. Like the end of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, when the vampire tore the monster's head off and left it in the woods. Or throughout Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster, when Hedorah, the creature made of pollution, would ooze over a person and leave just a pile of bones behind. And don't get me started on the psychedelic, chicken head-chopping "Wondrous Boat Ride" sequence in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (it still comes up in therapy from time-to-time). As far as really scary movies go, I think my scope is pretty wide. Halloween is simple, near-perfection, and Argento's terror-ific Suspiria has one of the most insidious and haunting sound designs ever. And never mind Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – his Poltergeist continues to frighten, whether or not the rotting corpses popping out of the kitchen floor traumatized you as a child. The short of it is that I like horror movies – good horror movies.

In Saw II, though, there is no good, no goodness, no hint of an affirmation of the value of life to make its gruesome destruction worth a damn. All its unhinged cruelty only incites the kind of "ooh-ick" with which film students react when they see Buñuels and Dali's Un Chien Andalou when that cow's eye is slit by a straight razor. Just like in the first Saw, a psycho known as "The Jigsaw Killer" is on the loose, kidnapping his victims and forcing them to be instruments of their own demise in an effort to teach them the value of life. A crooked cop (Donnie Wahlberg) must find his estranged, wayward teenage son before he and a handful of other unfortunates expire from a nerve agent dispatched by The Jigsaw Killer in a fortified old house (like the one in the cheapie Kolobos) in an undisclosed location only viewable by remote cameras.

I got another kind of icky feeling when watching this, and I'm pretty sure it's not what director Darren Lynn Bousman and executive producer Leigh Wannell (who shared writing duties) intended. The embarrassing dogma spewed by John (an expressionless Tobin Bell), or "Jigsaw", is so seemingly heartfelt that I began to wonder if the screenplay was a psych profile of its writers rather than a remarkable approximation of darkness. The latter would suggest a formidable versatility and certain mastery of screenwriting, but since their script fails on virtually every other front, I tend to believe the former.

Others have made their psychos accessible, like John McNaughton did in his fascinating Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, or downright likeable, like Jonathan Demme did in Silence of the Lambs. In that film (and Hannibal and Red Dragon), Lecter served as an extreme champion of decency and good manners. The sort of social engineering that Jigsaw does feels more like the sort of pontificating that child molesters, with all their misunderstood, I'm-so-unique torment, do, to try to sway the rest of us to seeing their world as they do. Speaking of which, I just placed that other icky feeling of which I spoke earlier – it was when I saw misunderstood and tormented Powder writer-director Victor Salva's first Jeepers Creepers. It wasn't the part when the otherworldly Creeper swooped down from above to carry off a human meal; it was when Salva lingered on the supple, hairless forms of pubescent boys as they took their shirts off in slow motion.

Is this sequel as bad as the grating, one-note Saw (which I rented last weekend and endured out of duty)? Not quite. A slight effort is made to socialize the sociopaths, but everyone is just so shrill and self-obsessed that you practically root for Jigsaw's elaborate, Rube Goldberg scavenger hunt to end in demise. Saying that it is better than the original is a little like saying that you'd rather have nails through only one of your big toes, or that Hitler was a better man than Stalin because he executed less of his continent's populace. Bousman and Wannell have made the equivalent of a snuff film in which all humanity is not just extinguished, but doesn't appear to exist on-screen in the first place. This is what Josef Mengele's home movies must have looked like, and you turd-peddlers at Lions Gate better not use that quote on the DVD box.

Ultimately, this self-congratulatory piffle is masturbatory twaddle, no more than a pointless grab at pop culture immortality. The true horror here is that someone at Lions Gate actually read the script and said, "Sure, you can have $10 million so that you may continue to build your little kingdom of filth." For fear of alienating others who may have taken some kind of pleasure in this sort of thing, I don't want to say that this is entertainment made by sadists and enjoyed by masochists, but hey – if the zippered leather mask and ball-gag fit...

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