Welcome back to the second part of our great Saw review series, leading up to the premiere of Saw VI this Friday. Today, we’re tackling Saw II, and this is where it starts to get interesting.
Once again, we’re back with Jigsaw in the midst of his biggest game yet. He’s got about a half dozen people, give or take, locked in an old house (where does he find all these abandoned properties he can quietly fix up to become gigantic murder pens?) that he’s slowing filling with gas. The good news is that, in three hours time, the lot of them will be set free as the doors are all opened automatically. The bad news is that the gas slowing permeating their lungs will kill them in roughly TWO hours. But Jigsaw’s left little vials of antidote all over the house–the only problem is that getting them is going to really, REALLY suck. Meanwhile, the cops finally descend on Jigsaw, and discover that one of the participants in Jigsaw’s newest game is none other than one of the detectives investigating Jigsaw’s son.
I actually liked this one just slightly more than the first one because I have a personal soft spot for amateur mechanical engineering, and there is an ungodly LOT of that in this movie. The first time I saw the automatic key-driven revolver my jaw just dropped.
Oh, sure, it’s hardly perfect. Frankly, a good chunk of the dialogue is so wildly overblown that it almost hurts to listen to, especially pretty much any time Shawnee Smith opens her mouth. I really don’t like Shawnee Smith much, as if it weren’t for Saw, she would have virtually NO horror cred whatsoever, but somehow everyone’s calling her a scream queen. That’s a steaming pantload, as far as I’m concerned, and this chick is not fit to carry an ACTUAL scream queen’s tiara. Chick spent like three seasons on a doctor show with Ted Danson, for crying out loud.
Anyway, back to the movie. The big draw of this movie isn’t Shawnee Smith’s godawful acting, it’s the menace Tobin Bell projects. it’s the incredible array of traps and ghoulish devices. This is horror for geeks, ladies and gentlemen, plain and simple.
The Screenhead Ten Scale admits that this rating will sound a smidge hypocritical, but it awards Saw II a seven out of ten. I know we just gave the first one a seven too, and said this one is slightly better than the original. And yes, it is–that’s why the seven is slightly darker.
Popularity: unranked [?]
