RECENT WATCHES: Saw VI (2009)

The common wisdom is that the first entry in a long-running horror series is some sort of critically acclaimed genre classic while the endless sequels were increasingly derided by the mainstream press as nothing but senseless gore. This is sometimes true but I was actively reading a lot of critics in the 2000s and recall the original "Saw" as being considered pretty dumb by most professionals even then. Once the moral panic around "torture porn" kicked in, the yearly "Saw" sequels became an excuse for writers to clutch their pearls and search their thesaurus for as many synonyms for "mindless drivel" as they could find. That was certainly the case by the time we got to "Saw VI," which Liongates did not bother to screen for critics. However, to considerably surprise, the sixth film actually received some better notices than the previous sequels by incorporating some social commentary into its explicit violence. The installment is also beloved by fans, with many considering it a late-in-the-series highlight for a franchise that was terribly close to being totally wrung out by this point.

With the FBI agent on his tail dispatched, Mark Hoffman has officially established himself as the successor to the mantle of the Jigsaw Killer. He tries and frames his dead nemesis for his crimes while harassing John Kramer's widow, Jill, for hints about the latest game. Director Erickson and Agent Perez – who survived her encounter with an exploding Billy the Puppet doll in part four – are quickly putting the pieces together about Hoffman's deception. Meanwhile, Jigsaw's most elaborate game is getting underway. William Easton, the health insurance executive who denied John's policy, awakens in a labyrinth. His colleagues are strung up in fatal devices that will force Easton to confront the life and death decisions he makes every day up close, as he moves towards rescuing his family in the maze's center.

As I remember it, horror fans were very receptive to the annual tradition of new "Saw" movies. I seem to recall posters on the Bloody Disgusting and MovieManiac.net forums enthusiastically accepting Hoffman as the new Jigsaw. This is funny as the sequels themselves increasingly seem to regard him as unworthy of this legacy. Maybe the clear gulf in charisma between Tobin Bell and Costas Mandylor was more evident to the producers. Either way, "Saw VI" agrees that Mark Hoffman sucks. While John Kramer kept the authorities fumbling around in the dark for years, Hoffman seems to have screwed up by the start of his second "game." Rather than attempting to teach people the value of their own lives and push their will to survive to the limit, Hoffman acts more directly as a vigilante punishing criminals. More pressingly, Hoffman is using the Jigsaw identity to destroy his enemies, get revenge, and get himself promoted at work. Incoherent and contradictory as his philosophy was, John Kramer was a fanatic with a mission and a point to make. Hoffman is a self-interested bully, a power-hungry supervillain, and kind of an idiot who has given himself a lofty, unearned sense of superiority. 

Saying this engineer of sadistic torment machines is morally sounder than this other torture master is ridiculous, of course. While the initial hook of the "Saw" series was that Jigsaw's justification for his crimes were unreasonable, the sequels have aligned himself more and more with his twisted mission. Now, in this pitch black moral universe, we are rooting for one serial killer to fail to confirm himself as the heir to another serial killer's title. I have to wonder if this isn't Kevin Greutert – promoted from editor to director – making some sort of commentary on the different audiences for these movies. Is he comparing the gore hounds who show up every October merely to see more elaborate methods of mutilation to Hoffman, who uses Jigsaw's games for selfish or petty purposes? As opposed to those that actually engage with the twisted lessons John Kramer was trying to teach his victims? Horror villains becoming fan favorites is basically impossible to avoid but Jigsaw becoming an antihero this admired suggest somebody's wires got crossed along the way. Or maybe this is Twisted Pictures throwing shade at the other "torture porn" films that imitated "Saw" and deeming them unworthy. Whatever the purpose, "Saw VI" is clearly distinguishing one type of bloody maiming as holier than the other. 

Whether this was intentional or not is debatable but "Saw VI" clearly does have weightier ideas on its mind. The sequel came out five months before President Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare Act into law, prompting unfounded fear mongering from the right-wing noise machine and endless debate about how healthcare is distributed in America. A humble horror sequel has no deep reflections on this but clearly communicates one message: Health insurance workers are fucking assholes. Jigsaw turns his wrath on the executives and pencil pushers who cynically decide who lives and who dies, forcing them into grisly challenges as a metaphor for their own corporate greed and lack of empathy. Literally, as Jigsaw has Easton decided whether a healthy young man with no family is more worthy of life than a woman with pre-existing conditions and several kids. In this current era, where Luigi Manigone can become a folk hero overnight for capping the CEO of UnitedHealthcate, it's not hard to be on Jigsaw's side here. The sequel's most stirring moment isn't any of its brutal gore sequences. Instead, it's when Tobin Bell goes on a fiery rant about the callousness of insurance companies, ending by directly comparing them to predatory fish. 

Taking target at the kind of real life villains that probably do deserve some torturous lessons in humanity brings something back to the "Saw" series that hasn't been present since the second film. There's a kind of joyful ridiculousness to the grim traps that are thought up this. A Billy the Puppet doll swings towards a glass window, as if the protagonist is venturing through a jump scare filled haunted attraction. The central set piece of the film involves people tied to a rotating platform with a shotgun pointed at it, a very silly set-up that actively invites the comparison to a carnival spectacle. While the traps in the last two movies could get a little too conceptual at times, Greutert cuts the scenarios down here. Having to chop off a literal pound of flesh or navigate a corridor full of spewing steam are straight forward enough concepts. The climatic murder device is so over-the-top that it pushes "Saw," for the first time, almost into the realm of campy gore comedy. It's not only CEOs and insurance agents that are punished here but also some predatory lenders and a gossip magazine columnist, all played as thoroughly despicable characters by leaning on overwrought emotion. 

Not that this was an intentional move on "Saw VI's" behalf. As always, these movies take themselves very serious. The degree of continuity between sequels and the number of past events to keep track of remain dense. Whenever "Saw VI" focuses on Jill trying to fulfill her husband's twisted plans or Hoffman's manipulative tactics, we've definitely reached soap opera territory. The level of melodrama, when added to the grim subject matter, does result in the first decent twist ending in a while and a finale that puts a novel spin on one of the classic "Saw" gimmicks. Greutert sticks to the hyper-grim visual palette that has been long established by now. Admittedly, the spastic montages and dingy lighting aren't utilized quite as much, these visual clichés starting to fall out of popularity by 2009. 

Honestly, one has to wonder if Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures themselves weren't aware of how silly this series was starting to get. Before "Saw VI" went before cameras, there was an accompanying VH1 reality show entitled "Scream Queens," in which the winner got to be a special guest victim in the sequel. Competing to be graphically tortured in a horror movie strikes me as a weird premise for a game show but I guess that was the state of both the horror and reality TV genres at the time. (The winner, by the way, was Tanedra Howard, who does a decent job of hacking her own arm off in the opening trap.) Whether "Saw VI" knowingly started to embrace the overly edgy element of the series for humor or at least incorporate a tiny bit of social relevance, it did inject some energy into a horror series that was starting to run its course. [7/10]