20. January 2008 by Ria.

The movie starts off with Detective Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) arguing with his hard headed son, Daniel (Eric Knudsen). Cute kid. Must get his looks from mom. Anyway, Daniel finally walks away, I guess he’s off to be captured by Jigsaw, while Matthews gets called to a murder scene. A clue left on the victim leads Matthews and his posse to an abandoned warehouse where he finds the infamous Jigsaw sitting at a table withering away from cancer.

Good, let’s take this rat bastard into custody, and that’s that. Well, not exactly, a computer monitor shows several people that Jigsaw has captured in a room somewhere, with one of them being Matthew’s son. There is also a timer present showing a little less than 2 hours left for them to be rescued. Matthews is mortified at this time, so lets leave him for a second and zoom in to the people trapped in this room.

 All the victims wake up, including emo Amanda, and then the fun starts. A micro cassette is found, and its no other than Jigsaw himself stating that they are slowly breathing in a toxic nerve gas that is leaking into the house and will kill them in two hours unless they find antidotes, one in which is locked in a safe in the room they’re in. All they have to do is find the combination, which they all possess somewhere in the back of their minds.

They find a key with a note attached, stating that it shouldn’t be used to open the door in that room. Needless to say, Gus (Tony Nappo) pays no attention to the note, and gets his face blown off after using the key, then looking out of the peephole. Now I can’t fault Gus for this, I would have used the key too. But then, I would have immediately jumped out of the way of the door, just in case a device went off.

My review is crawling along, so let’s fly through this: Obi, the guy who helped in the kidnapping of all the others (yeah, but how was he able to take Xavier, the muscular guy?) ends up dead by trying to obtain two of the antidotes, Jonas (Glenn Plummer) dies by Xavier’s hands, and Laura (Beverly Mitchell) dies from gas exposure, so there. Oh, I forgot about Addison (Emmanuel Vaugier), who finds what she thinks is an antidote, but who knows what it could be? Without thinking, she slides her hands through a glass box, to obtain it, gets stuck, and is left to suffer and die.

Xavier (Frankie G) is actually smart enough to realize that the combination for the antidote is a number written, or painted on the back of everone’s head, so he gets the numbers off of all the deceased, then pursues Amanda, and Daniel. Let me add that from a photo Jigsaw left lying around, everyone finds out that Daniel is Matthew’s (the officer that also framed all of them) son, but since almost everyone is dead, who in the hell cares? Xavier slices the skin from his own neck in order to read his number, which is up once Daniel slits his throat.

Back to distressed father Matthews who tries to chum up to Jigsaw in order to find out where his son is, this doesn’t work. Next, he destroys drawings, and other works of Jigsaw’s in order to make him talk, that doesn’t work. Finally Matthews loses it and gives Jigsaw a well deserved butt kicking, then he finally decides to talk. He’ll take Matthews to his son, but he must go alone. Sir-Dumb-A-Lot Matthews agrees to this, and off they go. Now if I was in the same position, and Jigsaw asked me to go alone, I would have just smiled and nodded, while flashing some sign language behind his back alerting my posse to follow me.

 So they get to the house, and Matthews decides to play hero, and goes charging into a booby trapped house with no backup, and leaves Jigsaw out in the car. Another dumb move. If you’re not going to alert your boys as to where you are, at least have enough common sense to take Jigsaw into the house with you and use him as a shield. 

But no one ever listens to me, and Matthews ends up a prisoner. Oh well, I tried to help out. Then we find out that emo Amanda will be taking over Jigsaw’s work. Fine. Can’t wait to see her go down in the sequel. 

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20. January 2008 by Ria.

I made sure to watch SAW III in broad daylight, so that I wouldn’t go to sleep immediately afterwards and have nightmares. When the movie ended, I promptly listened to ten Frank Sinatra songs so that my subconscious could reprogram itself and I wouldn’t be left emotionally traumatized by the extreme brutality in the movie. Let me start from the beginning. I pop in the DVD, and in the first scene, I just hear a guy hollering and screaming, lights flashing, and I’m like, “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” Oh, its just Detective Eric Matthew’s (Donnie Wahlberg) big mouth. Somehow I manage to grab a glimpse of a foot in a shackle, and some kind of a saw.

Then I hear all this crunching, and I thinking to myself, “IS THIS GUY TRYING TO CUT OFF HIS FOOT? Then I hear all the screaming, then the movie starts. Well, that’s it, I’m emotionally scarred for life, but for the sake of bringing you this review, I watched on.

Saw III takes over where the second one left off, when Detective Matthews does stupid stuff and ends up being captured by Jigsaw’s emo assistant, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith). Detective Matthews didn’t cut his foot off, he just broke his ankle in order to escape, but I’m not so sure that was a good idea. What was he going to do, hop or crawl to safety? And where would that be, I reckon? What he should have done was calm down and play dead, so that when Amanda comes to check up on him, he can knock the crap out of her. 

Now there is another death near the beginning of the movie, but its relatively unimportant, so lets move on now. Two more people are captured, a man (Angus Macfadyen) grieving over his deceased son (victim of a hit and run), and a doctor (Bahar Soomekh). You know, these people must live in the suburbs, because us city folks are trained for combat. I mean, just think about it.

If Emo Amanda, and old goat face Jigsaw are the only ones doing the kidnapping, I could do some serious kung fu on both of them before they even thought about capturing me. Moving on, Amanda attaches a booby trapped collar to the doomed doctor. Her test? To keep Jigsaw alive until her husband (oops, I just gave it away, yes, she is married to the man with the grieving son, however, you don’t find that out until the movie is almost over) pass his tests.

Oh, I forgot to mention, the collar that the doomed doctor is wearing is hooked up to Jigsaw’s heart monitor, so if it flatlines, or if she tries to escape, then boom! Okay so doctor starts surgery in this dungeon-she splits open his skull after giving him a local anesthesia. Huh? Is this a new procedure or something? Whatever, okay doomed doctor, this is your chance, you don’t have to end his life, just give him a drug to make him slip into a deep sleep, then deal with emo chick.

Sigh. Must I do all the thinking here? Of course none of my brilliant ideas are utilized, and to make a long story short, she ends up dead near the end of the movie. Now to grieving man. There’s not much to say about him. He goes from one test to another, encountering people who were involved (directly and indirectly) to his son’s death. His job? To forgive and rescue them from the traps set by jigsaw. Needless to say, he does a horrible job at this, and is the last man standing. He finally makes it to Jigsaw’s room, shoots Amanda, and now he has two choices.

Does he allow Jigsaw to call an ambulance to rescue doomed doctor that’s fading away fast, or does he takes his nasty revenge, and send Jigsaw to the Rubix Cube in the sky? Needless to say, he takes the dumb route, slicing Jigsaw’s throat, who ends up getting the last laugh by activating the collar, and locking the door they’re occupying.

I see I’m gonna have to write a couple of books. First one, How Not to Get Captured by Weirdos, and the second, How to Stay Alive as a character in a horror film. I give the movie four stars, minus 1 1/2 stars for the extreme and unnecessary torture. So lets see 4 minus 1 1/2 equals 2 1/2.

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