10 To Midnight (1983)

JANUARY 21, 2019

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER, THRILLER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Back in 2010, I had planned to make 10 To Midnight my movie for the day via a midnight screening at the New Bev, but the film (or projector itself? Can't remember) broke and I didn't get to see how it ended. It wasn't available to rent at the time (and I had already started trying to pare my collection down), so I had to wait until another screening happened, but when it did something came up and I couldn't make it at all. So now it's been so long that I couldn't even really remember the part I had seen or where I left off; watching via the new Scream Factory blu-ray was pretty much like seeing the film for the first time. Incidentally, I also revisited Predators this week for my BMD column; it was 2010 where I had my one viewing of that film and that too jogged almost no memories. Long story short, it seems my memory only goes back (at most) eight or nine years now, so maybe I can just start re-reviewing all the movies here since I won't remember any of them.

Anyway, this is a delightfully odd little movie. It's from Golan and Globus, and was somewhat hastily made after the success of Death Wish II prompted the Cannon gents to stay in the Charles Bronson business, but what they made wasn't exactly a "Charles Bronson movie". But if you're an astute movie viewer you can probably tell that just from watching the trailer, as they use the same shot of him firing his gun like six times because it's the only shot he fires in the entire film. See, there's only one bad guy in the plot, and he obviously can't be killed until the very end, so there's not much opportunity for Paul Kersey-esque action beats, and instead Bronson just spends most of the movie bickering with his partner and - in the second half - taunting the killer in order to get him to screw up.

Why does he need to do that, you ask? Well I'll tell you - it's because the killer is too damn good at covering his tracks, but since Bronson is blessed with Bronsonian skills, he just KNOWS the guy is the killer but lacks the hard evidence needed to put him away. So he plants some, but screws up because of all the things he could have done, he opts to douse some of the victim's blood on the killer's clothes - which couldn't possibly be legit because our guy strips to his birthday suit when he commits his crimes. Actor Gene Davis should have won a bravest actor of the year award for sure, because while they usually obscure his junk we can tell perfectly well that he's running around in the woods, around the sets, and even on city streets with the thing dangling around where it could be easily mangled if he tripped or zigged when he should have zagged. So anyway, Bronson has to admit he planted the evidence, and gets fired while the guy goes free.

So for the rest of the movie we watch these two guys antagonize each other - Bronson follows him around to make sure he doesn't do anything, and in turn the killer calls him up and leaves vague threats. Caught in the middle are Bronson's daughter (the incredibly charming Lisa Eilbacher) and his younger partner, McCann (Andrew Stevens) who is also involved with the daughter but keeps blowing her off for reasons I can't quite follow. The film's a bit long for its type, running over an hour and forty minutes when 85 would have done just fine, but it rarely bores and switches gears so many times it's hard to even notice. It's a procedural! It's a serial killer thriller! It's a courtroom drama! It's a buddy cop movie! Hell if they spent a little more time on it it could even count as a character study, since Eilbacher's character has a rocky relationship with her dad on account of his commitment to policework, yet pursues Stevens' character hard, possibly working through some daddy issues.

Alas, we don't get much time with that sort of thing, because director J. Lee Thompson is happy to cut back to Davis doing his thing. He's got a pretty great alibi for the opening kill sequence - he goes to a movie, makes his presence known to a pair of girls, talks to the box office clerk, etc. before sneaking out of the bathroom window and killing a woman. He then returns to the movie (the Aero theater in Santa Monica, to be exact) and again bugs the same girls, so when he is inevitably brought in for questioning, they are located and confirm that he was at the movies during the time of the murder. But after that we rarely see that much cunning - he does something similar with a hooker in the film's final reel, but naturally Bronson's on to him by then so he doesn't get a chance to put the alibi to use, and in between he's mostly just making creepy phone calls (with a bad Mexican accent for "good" measure) and going about his day, where he seems to be the only male employee in an office full of women who rightfully hate him.

In other words, the actual plot/narrative thrust kind of meanders and isn't particularly interesting, but all the weird little details make the movie a blast. You get Bronson angrily presenting a sex toy for men (called an "Acu-suck" - use your imagination), Bronson mocking a guy for being a virgin (actually that's the same scene), Bryan Cranston's brother as a goofy party attendee, Carmen "Reverend Sayer" Filpi as the world's least effective hotel clerk, and - if you're a Los Angeles resident or aficionado - lots and lots of vintage scenery, including the reveal that the Aero hasn't really changed much in 35 years even though the area around it is nearly unrecognizable. Ditto the LA Courthouse, which I recognized instantly despite not having been there for ten years (for jury duty, don't get too excited). Less fun but still interesting - it pretty much boils down to a guy killing women because they won't go out with him, which is still a huge (bigger?) problem today, and unfortunately in the real world we don't have Charles Bronson risking their career to keep these clowns off the street. Some old movies have a weird charm because we see things that aren't really an issue anymore; it's a bummer this can't join that crowd.

Scream's Blu-ray comes with a few interviews and a pair of commentaries. One has a guy I can't stand so I skipped that one, but the other, by Paul Talbott (author of two books on Bronson) is chock full of fun info about the film's production and stars, including the reveal - one I could have guessed myself - that the film's opening scene with Bronson was not intended to be the film's opener, but moved up because the producers were afraid that audiences wouldn't like having to wait a whole ten minutes to see Bronson. So the film opens with this dull scene of him typing out a report, then cuts to a murder, then we get a traditional introduction to the actor when he comes to investigate. It's a bit of a dry listen since Talbott is by himself and reading from notes, so it can be a bit hard to stay focused on, but he goes all out - noting car models, street locations, the wardrobe selections, the whole nine yards. He also offers script passages of scenes that didn't make it for one reason or another, so it's a highly recommended listen if you're a fan. Stevens' interview is also pretty fun; he relates a great anecdote about getting the notoriously quiet Bronson to open up and shoot the breeze with him, clearly (rightfully) proud of his accomplishment.

So it's a pretty nice release for the sort of movie that fans would be happy to just finally be able to own on high def, which is the sort of thing Scream Factory excels at. I'm still on the fence about keeping it, however; it's a fun movie but not one I'm likely to watch over and over, since most of its charm stems from the out of nowhere wacky moments as opposed to its compelling characters or crafty narrative. In fact, I suspect the film's reputation is largely due to how the audience gets sent out of the theater; I won't spoil the particulars, but I will say I'll never forgive myself for missing out on that rescheduled screening and losing out on the chance to watch it unfold with a crowd. I laughed and cheered by myself *at home*, so with the energy of the crowd I might have started crowd surfing or something, it was just that great. Even if the rest of the movie was junk it'd be worth watching for that moment alone, so enjoy!

What say you?

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Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

GENRE: RELIGIOUS, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Of all the major horror franchises that came along (or at least had their biggest showcase) in the 1980's, Hellraiser was the one I never particularly got into the way I did for the others. I was late to the party in even seeing them; I think I was in high school before I watched the first three, only watching them once or twice before the release of Hellraiser: Bloodline, which was the only one I saw theatrically until Revelations in 2011. And most of the others I only bothered to watch for HMAD entries, having heard nothing good about any of them (and then, adding more negative reviews to their coffers), so now that I'm only updating sporadically I probably wouldn't have exactly rushed to watch the tenth film, Hellraiser: Judgment if not for two things. One is that I was offered a copy, so I could save myself a rental fee or blind buy down the road, and - more importantly - the other is that I heard from a number of people that it was a surprisingly decent entry, not quite hitting the highs of its theatrical releases, but certainly a step up from its DTV brethren.

And they're right! I mean, I wouldn't exactly refer to it as a "good" movie, but it's the only one of the DTV films (and I'm including Revelations in that group, despite its one-week limited release) that feels like a legit addition to the mythology that was established in the first four films. Even the one where Kirsty showed back up didn't really feel like a new chapter in an ongoing story (however loosely it was depicted), but a gimmick used to lure in folks who might be disinterested, like how Marvel (unnecessarily!) threw in Falcon and a setup for Civil War to entice people into seeing Ant-Man. But here, the scenes with Pinhead and some of his fellow Cenobites/demons/angels/whatever almost feel like they could have come from Clive Barker's imagination, and it's a shame the entire movie couldn't revolve around them as these sequences (which make up maybe 25% of the 80 minute film) are clearly where all the budget went, and now that I've seen it for myself, obviously the reason for the film's better-than-average reviews (it's actually got a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than Hellbound as of this writing, insanely enough).

Alas, that other 75% focuses on a trio of cops investigating a Seven-y serial killer who is killing people according to the Ten Commandments, even though "Thou Shall Not Kill" is one of them, the hypocrite. Maybe if we ever really saw him in action and/or the film gave us a few red herrings as to his identity this material would be more enjoyable (if still cliche; how many Biblically minded killers have we seen over the past 20 years or so?), but we mostly only see aftermath. The MO for these scenes is as follows: the detectives arrive on a scene to look at a dead body or some other kind of tableau, talk about this or that clue, then retreat to their wood-paneled office that looks suspiciously like one you might find in a used car lot or construction site. The murder sites are fine, but their office and some of the other sets are so phony looking (again, probably because all the money went into the Pinhead scenes) that it was hard to care much about their (and only their, as no other cops are seen in the film, despite the fact that this killer has seemingly earned a citywide manhunt) investigation into this vaguely defined, rarely seen killer.

It also lacks much in the way of surprises after its first (and best) ten minutes. In the opening scene we see Pinhead lamenting (heh) the advance of technology, and how he is becoming obsolete as people can just go to the internet to have their desires fulfilled instead of going to him (kind of like how we don't really need travel agents anymore when we can just head to Expedia), and I loved that concept. Unfortunately not too much is done with it, but at least it leads into the introduction of The Auditor, who looks like a Cenobite version of Claude Rains as the Invisible Man. His job is to interview would-be victims about their crimes and type them out on a typically monstrous typewriter, at which point the pages will be consumed by the Assessor (played by John Gulager!). He then pukes the results into a funnel where a trio of naked women with their faces ripped off scoop up the gross mixture in their hands and pass judgment. Why they go through all this trouble, I don't know, but I like the idea of them having their own pointless bureaucratic process for what they do.

But then our protagonist Sean (Damon Carney, who I dubbed "Michael Fauxbender" due to his mild resemblance to the actor and that their boring serial killer plot reminded me of the woeful Snowman) follows a couple of clues and ends up in the house, where we see the process again, too soon after the first and more or less spoiling the film's mystery before the halfway point. His "audit" is largely unheard by us, but the lengthy results cause the Assessor to choke during his consumption, and whatever he did has gotten the OK from the higher-ups, who instruct the Auditor to let Sean go. At this point the film starts to resemble one of the later episodes of Supernatural, with angels and demons arguing over jurisdiction and the like, but since it was at least moving away from the serial killer plot I was happy to watch it even if it was largely a repeat of a sequence we just saw 25 minutes or so ago.

In fact, if I had to guess, this sequence (or the earlier one) was added to get Pinhead and the other creations into the movie more. Since 2000's Inferno, the common complaint about these films (besides just kinda sucking in general) is that Pinhead isn't in them enough, even though that's the one thing that they share with the original (where he isn't even named Pinhead yet, but "Lead Cenobite"), so I'm sure there was a push to find a way to include him in more sequences (hilariously, at one point during the serial killer investigation they briefly cut to him spinning a Lament as he sat around waiting, as if to remind us that he was there). And unlike the more expensive Doug Bradley, new actor Paul Taylor (thankfully replacing the guy who played him in Revelations) was probably easier to pay for more days of work, so the reasons to limit his appearance were presumably based more on narrative than money. And Taylor is actually pretty good in the role; his physique is similar to Bradley's, which helps, and he's got a similar enough voice that it's easy enough to accept the transition. Whereas the last guy felt like seeing a kid in a costume, Taylor is someone who could conceivably continue playing the character for future installments and be accepted by the fans, not unlike the initial hesitance/eventual championing of every new James Bond or Batman (remember when everyone cried about Ben Affleck being cast? Some of the same people are now upset he might not come back for more).

Speaking of winning fans over, the makers cast Heather Langenkamp in the film and touted her involvement back when the film was first going into production in 2016, but if you're planning to see it for her, I'd advise against it, as her role can barely even be considered a cameo. She plays the landlord of one of the victims, and her on-screen time is limited to just two shots (one from behind!) as she walks down a flight of stairs, mutters a few things about the tenant, and opens a door. It's the kind of role that would usually be filled by Central Casting and perhaps not even meet the director until the day of shooting, yet she is given fourth billing for this nothing appearance. I'm not even joking when I say that an extra standing behind one of the cops as they wait in line for coffee is actually on-screen more than Ms. Langenkamp, and it's pretty lame of them to use her name/our affinity for "Nancy" to sucker in a few folks who might otherwise have no interest in another (or even their first). I was thinking she'd show up in one of the deleted scenes, but that's not the case. There are only two, and one is just an extension of the opening with the Auditor (played by writer/director Gary Tunnicliffe himself), letting things go on a bit longer but otherwise offering nothing of note. The other is more substantial, showing Sean and the other detective (Egerton, played by Alexandra Harris) talking about God while in a church, which clues us more into Sean's motives and gives Egerton a bit more to do than just ask for or deliver exposition (per Tunnicliffe, she wasn't even in the original story concept, but added at the producers' request, which helps explain why she's fairly extraneous in the narrative). With the the movie being so short I can't say it needed to lose scenes for pacing, but I doubt anyone will watch it and think it should have been in the movie, either. There's also a gag reel which provided some minimal amusement.

Tunnicliffe and his crew should be proud of what they've done here. It's no secret that this film (and the last one) were made quick and cheap by Dimension in order to hang on to their rights to the series (the contracts require them to make a movie within a certain amount of time; failure to do so for the Halloween series is why it ended up at Blumhouse), but he clearly wants to restore the series to its former highs instead of just playing studio lapdog and putting in the bare minimum that they require. The effects are practical, the designs are solid, and the scripts (yes, even Revelations') are far more interesting than the previous entries, where they were rewriting unrelated spec scripts to include Pinhead, which would be fine if the series was more anthological from the start, but there was this cool world opening up (particularly in the 2nd and 4th films) that got unceremoniously dropped when the series went DTV. Even if the results are imperfect, the attempt to get things back on track is admirable, and I hope that Dimension's money woes clear up somehow or (far more likely) the series is handed over to a studio that might realize the potential and give Tunnicliffe (or his replacement, if that was the case) the money to live up to the standards the series set in its initial entries. Until then, at least we have, for the first time since 1996, an entry that is actually worth watching (uneven as it may be), though I should stress that it might take suffering through the likes of Hellworld to really appreciate it.

What say you?

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Jigsaw (2017)

OCTOBER 25, 2017

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (PREMIERE SCREENING)

Not for nothing, but when I asked anyone who'd listen (OK, let's be honest: I just complained on Twitter) to make another Saw movie, I thought it was understood that I wanted one that resolved Hoffman's fate, showed how Gordon would carry on the legacy, etc. Indeed, the original title for Jigsaw was "Saw: Legacy", which seemed to point in that general direction, though I knew it would likely be more accessible to new fans given the seven year gap since the last one (in fact, the time between the original Saw and its "Final Chapter" was less than the time in between it and this next installment). A blend of easy to follow continuity payoffs and a standalone story would seem to be the best way to go if they wanted to revive the series while also satisfying the fans who wanted it in the first place, right? Alas, they leaned very heavily toward the "standalone" part of the formula, offering a decent enough entry with regards to "A bunch of people in traps get killed while the cops solve a mystery" sort of stuff, but a crushing disappointment when it comes to how it fits in the overall story.

Note that I will be getting into spoilers later in the review, but for now I'm only going to talk about the basic plot. I'll warn you again when the real spoiler-y stuff comes up.

As we all learned in the trailer, a new game has seemingly started, and it all points to being the work of Jigsaw. But they tell us he's been dead for ten years, and everyone has modern cell phones and such, so we're dealing with a present day story as opposed to one that picks up right where the last one left off, which has always been the series' forte. We're also dealing with an entirely new cast of characters - the first time since the original Saw that every single person on-screen was a stranger to us, as opposed to a returning favorite or ongoing sub-villain like Amanda or Hoffman. Again, I knew it wouldn't be super continuity-heavy, but I was legitimately stunned at how disconnected everything was from the ongoing saga, to the extent that when they actually do mention another character (Jill, to be exact) I felt like cheering. Not keeping up with the later entries or having an iron-clad memory of their revelations is one thing - this movie doesn't require you to have seen any of the films at all, even the original. As long as you understand the basic idea (a guy named John "Jigsaw" Kramer places flawed/bad people in death traps and tasks them with earning back the life they've wasted) you're as caught up as you need to be; even the mention of Jill won't confuse anyone - the entire reference is something like "Jill Tuck - you know, Jigsaw's wife? Her family owns this place."

"This place", by the way, is a farm that is housing the current game. It's part of what is actually one of my favorite things about the movie - it's the most visually distinct entry in the series, as it has a number of exterior scenes (always a rarity in these films; some of them never step outside at all), and rarely lets its characters wander around grimy dungeons. The barn setting also allows for different kinds of weapons/tools for the traps - such as two characters who are trapped in a silo that is rapidly filling up with grain, and then things like hoes and metal rakes are dropped on them for good measure. It's also got one of the more nerve-wracking traps in the series: a sort of razor sharp spiral that our victim is being lowered through in order to get the key to his escape, forcing him to refrain from the slightest bit of shifting or else he'd get sliced apart. All this stuff works well; it's very reminiscent of Saw V (their first trap is so similar looking that I thought it might end up being a point of some sort), but the new setting and less hateful characters make it an easier sell. And they're not as self-serving, either - when one person figures out how to bypass the first trap (with shockingly little harm required), she runs around trying to help the others succeed as well, rather than just leave them to rot as some of her trapped predecessors might have done in the past.

As for the other plot, we are introduced to a cop named Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie), a sort of "breaks the rules to get the job done" kind of guy not unlike Erik Matthews, who gets involved early on and shortly thereafter is alerted to a body that seems to be the first victim of the game that's under way inside the barn. The thing is, the body that has evidence on it suggesting that John Kramer is the killer - but he's dead (right?), so Halloran starts trying to figure out who the real killer is. For reasons that escape me, he instantly zeroes in on Logan, the coroner who inspected the body - I assume the thinking was that Logan lied/faked evidence to pin it on Kramer in order to cover his tracks, but that's never actually suggested aloud. Halloran just instantly suspects the guy and his partner Eleanor (Hannah Emily Anderson), with her being under suspicion because it turns out she's a fan of Jigsaw's work. It's one of those things that inorganically happens in movies, where they just need to get to that point and they skip over any meaningful logical path to get there. Anyway, the movie more or less unfolds like all the others, cutting back and forth between the cop-driven mystery and the game that's slowly but surely killing off the cast members, building toward the point where they converge and we get a twist.

If you grew weary of the series' increasingly complicated mythology, and/or bailed before the "final" entry, but enjoyed the general idea, then you're the ideal mark for this particular installment. It's basically a greatest hits album in movie form, taking ideas from the other entries (I, II, and V mostly) and offering them up in rapid succession to maximize the audience's potential for enjoyment. But like a greatest hits album, it lacks the soul that makes that band's actual albums so essential - the movie doesn't really offer anything we haven't seen before on a narrative level. Sure, the "There's blood under the fingernails that matches John Kramer" kind of stuff is interesting, as we've never really seen how this world moved on from Jigsaw as an ongoing threat (as Hoffman and co. kept his games running without pause), but who could possibly believe that Kramer really might be alive? Saw IV's opening was seemingly designed to beat us over the head with the idea that he was definitely not faking his death, so barring some sort of supernatural hooey (or worse, a twin brother) we know it's not that simple and that someone is pulling the strings in his name.

This is where the film's insistence on being a coherent entry point for newcomers sort of handicaps it, as the film only has so many suspects and we can't count on any of our old pals to be involved. I was hoping for something along the lines of Curse of Chucky, where it seemed like a soft reboot for a while only to reveal its ties at the top of the third act, allowing the likes of Hoffman or Gordon to enter the picture (given the film's secretive shoot and the fact that we were the first audience to see it as they didn't do public test screenings, anything was possible), but after a while it became clear that they really did not want to risk alienating anyone by requiring them to... uh, be Saw fans. And if you know how these movies work, you can probably figure out what's really going on long before it's spelled out, and even if you don't it likely won't really shock you when they do. In the earlier entries, I was almost never able to get ahead of the characters, but here I just kept waiting for them to get on with what I already suspected (and then confirmed, albeit in a slightly different manner at least). I mean, it's not the film was bad or poorly made or anything, but after seven years, I just feel they could have come up with something better than this. It's just too safe.

And now we're gonna get into spoilers, so back out now if you don't want the twist ruined for you! You've already gotten more than you need to know to decide if you want to check the film or not, so the rest of the review is specifically for those who are just curious, or have already seen the film and want my take on it!

I'm warning you!!!

OK now that it's just us, let's talk about how the twist not only makes zero sense in the context of the film, but also how the big reveal bites off more than it can chew with regards to the series. At a certain point near the end of the farm-set game, with only two players left, a Pigman enters the scene and fiddles with some shit, then takes off the mask/hood to reveal... John Kramer! Alive and well, and giving the audience reason to let out a big cheer. Again, this is not a supernaturally based series, and even they can't be so dumb as to pull some twin brother shit (they almost seem to be trying to get us to think that, with the minor reveal that John has a nephew), so anyone with a good sense of these things would probably understand right away that this game has been set in the past, seemingly even before the one we saw in Saw II (with Tobin Bell having naturally aged nearly ten years since, it's hard to tell based on his appearance where in the timeline it might be, which was usually how we could more or less place the flashback scenes in the overall chronology). But wait, how can Halloran and Logan be finding their bodies in the present day (established beyond a shadow of a doubt) if this game is at least ten years old? Wouldn't the corpses be pretty rotted out by now?

Turns out, the corpses that are being found in the present day are just more or less freshly killed "stunt doubles" for the original victims in the barn. When the bodies are found, they're all mangled up, so the viewer doesn't notice anything is different and goes along with it just fine. But here's the problem: no one is monitoring the game, and therefore no one involved with finding/inspecting these bodies has any idea of what the original victims looked like (as those original bodies are still just collecting maggots and dust in the barn). So it's basically a cheat for no other reason than to trick the audience, whereas the best twists in the other films always made sense for our characters as well. The closest exception would be Saw IV's reveal that it was taking place at the same time as III, but that wasn't something that any character would have a reason to comment on, and best as I can recall there was never an attempt to make us really believe otherwise - it was just a "hiding in plain sight" thing that didn't really have much of a bearing on anything. When the characters are setting complicated plans in motion for no other reason than to trick the folks on the other side of the fourth wall, I can't help but bristle a bit (another example would be The Village, where the characters inexplicably didn't have medicine on hand for their children, despite the fact that they would have no reason to believe medicine wasn't a thing that existed "yet"), and I expect better out of these movies.

Anyway, by now we know that Logan is yet another one of Jigsaw's apprentices, and has been engineering all this stuff in the present to ensnare Halloran the dirty cop (they really blew it by killing off the series' longtime coroner in Saw 3D - if HE turned out to be one of Jigsaw's guys, it have been a fun little ret-con, plus given the film a much-needed tie to the others). Even if you ignore the idea that Jigsaw had yet another person helping him out (he apparently helped to create the first bear trap, if I'm following one climactic scene properly), there's still the question of what exactly he's been doing all this time. We've seen Gordon, Amanda, or Hoffman setting up pretty much every other trap in the series thanks to the various flashbacks along the way, so what exactly Logan brought to the tabel is a mystery, as is why he apparently waited ten years to spring into action and take down this cop that he had a vendetta against. Yes, I know Jigsaw II: Saw IX can answer these things, but that's a bit presumptuous for an attempted revival of a series that only stopped in the first place because of dwindling grosses. If you're going to rewrite history once again, you gotta shine a light NOW on how some of it changed what we already knew, while leaving a few things left open for the next film. This might be part of the problem with having an entirely new creative team (this is the first time in the series that neither Leigh Whannell nor Dunstan/Melton had any involvement with the script), because those guys could plant things in one movie to answer later, knowing how it would work, but that's not an option here. Hell they don't even answer the questions we still had (i.e. is Hoffman alive?), let alone find a way to successfully meld their own reveals with the others.

The word I keep coming back to is "lackluster". It's not a bad movie, really - I just can't see anyone being excited by it, fan or not. Besides the spiral slicer the new traps aren't really all that memorable, the twist is equally obvious and overly complicated (Logan explaining the dummy bodies is possibly the clunkiest exposition this series has ever offered), and I just spent too much of the movie thinking "is this it?". Not the entire time, mind you; I got real excited when the (really kick-ass!) new version of the main theme kicked in (Charlie Clouser joins editor Kevin Greutert as pretty much the only holdovers from the other films, besides the producing team), and it was fun to be back in this world for a while. But once the novelty of "Yay! A new SAW!" wore off, I found myself less and less invested in the film's storyline, ultimately just kind of waiting for it the obvious twist out of the way in optimistic hope that there would be another that was more worthy of the series and more satisfying to the hardcore fans that live for the silly ret-cons. Alas, that better twist never came; the movie ends exactly like Saw V (albeit with a new tagline) and sitting through the whole end credits will only tell you what its MPAA registration number is. As a revival attempt, it's as safe as you might expect - but this is a series that lived by its surprises and ability to trick its fans, so when it fails to do that, what's the point of it even being a Saw?

What say you?

P.S. Despite the ads having a more playful vibe, the film isn't really any more "fun" than the others, and one of the victims' backstory involves rolling over on a newborn in the same bed and suffocating it, which might be the most upsetting thing in the entire series. Just fair warning in case you thought this might be less grim than the others.

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