With Saw VI, the legacy of Jigsaw continues. You know, I went into this movie thinking that I was the wrong person to review Saw VI because I was not the biggest fan of horror movies and I had only a small interest in Saw ever since Saw III. But I came out of this movie thinking that I was the wrong person to review Saw VI because I apparently gain an inordinate amount of sick pleasure from watching people die in convoluted ways. While the rest of the audience was jumping in their seats, cringing at the horrific deaths before them, I was sitting there, tweeting my ass off (never mind the new “tweeting during a movie is rude” advertisement that played before the movie), pumping my fist at every horrible kill, rating them on my own scale of 1 to 10, and devising my own ways to make them more gruesome. Everyone wins!

I have empirical proof that Saw VI was a scary movie. Hell, everyone else in the movie theater was scared. In fact, judging by the smell, I’d say the guy in front of me pissed his pants right after the opening death trap in which two loan sharks had to cut parts of their own bodies off to prevent a head vice from boring screws into their skulls. Personally, however, I didn’t find the movie frightening. I would instead call it cathartic. Last week when I interviewed the movie’s writers, Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, they said they’d made a concerted attempt to make each trap one-up the last, and boy, did they succeed. The rest of the audience was damn near vomiting as they saw a man get crushed in a full body vice, a guy get nearly choked to death by barbed-wire noose, a woman getting a spike through her skull before being cooked alive by steam, a shotgun shoot four people through the chest at point-blank range, and a man get dissolved from the inside out by a tank of hydrofluoric acid. Then there was me, who amidst all the vomit was giggling like a schoolgirl and shouting for more. Startling self-revelation: I am apparently a sick pig. Marcus and Patrick also said that they wanted their traps to hurt moviegoers through the eyes, but oddly enough, I wasn’t hurt through the eyes as much as I was with the traps in previous Saw movies. I agreed with Marcus’s assessment that pushing a junkie into a pit of needles was marvelously entertaining irony.

Saw VI wasn’t all about the gore though … OK, it was all about the gore, but it did have a nice sprinkling of plot on top of it all to add flavor. Saw VI was all about resolving the unresolved plot holes left open in Saw IV and V (and a little from I, II, and III). Most of the movie is told in flashback and involves John Kramer’s interactions with Hoffman, Amanda, Jill (his wife), and one major douchebag of a health insurance CEO played by Peter Outerbridge. Everyone from the previous movies comes back in their previous roles, and many scenes from previous movies were reused. We saw plenty of interaction between John Kramer’s wife and Amanda (and we all know how much love-triangle Saw fan-fiction there is on the Web), plenty of scenes detailing Hoffman’s relationship with John and Amanda, plenty of scenes showing just how much of a dick Hoffman really is, and tons and tons of loose ends tied together. Scenes in the present (that aren’t torturiffic) generally involve Hoffman fucking up and eventually getting caught by the police (oooh, spoiler, spoiler). In fact, the movie is so committed to servicing its diehard fans that it ends with the mouth-vice trap, a fan favorite, which really makes the whole franchise feel like it has come full circle.

In fact, I’d have to acknowledge that even the movie’s plot was very entertaining (which is saying a lot, considering that most people think of Saw as little more than torture-porn), except for two very blatant problems. First of all, the plot involving Peter Outerbridge’s douchebag insurance CEO, and the plot involving Hoffman’s eventual downfall, are completely disjointed. They don’t tie together at the end as they have in Saw movies past; Hoffman just gets screwed in one series of events, and William (Outerbridge) gets screwed in another, and never do the twain meet.

Secondly, the movie is astoundingly preachy. Granted, it is preachy about worthy subjects like health insurance reform and the evils of sensationalist reporting (which is sooooo ironic considering this is a Saw movie), but still, a horror movie is not really the place or time to address these issues, is it? In fact, the movie seems to be saying, “Health reform now, or Jigsaw will kill everyone!” We get it. We get it. Health care reform is a good thing. Get on it, Obama, or apparently the Jigsaw killer will be paying a visit to the Oval Office.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing that bothered me. In the beginning of the movie, a character from previous Saw flicks whom you assumed was dead turns out to be alive through … magical plot hooey, I suppose. I don’t know — I was paying too much attention to the murder devices at the time to really figure out why she was alive, but it doesn’t matter because her presence doesn’t have much effect on the outcome of the story. She says a few things, acts very dramatic, and then dies without really accomplishing anything. That, in my humble opinion, was a bit of a gyp.

However, outside of these small plot malfunctions, I had a lot of fun with Saw VI. The torture devices were pleasurable to watch, the conclusion had an interesting plot twist that I didn’t see coming, and the ending sets up Saw VII for not one, not two, but three possible Jigsaw killers! Awesome! Also, Saw VI did successfully tie up all the loose ends from John Kramer. We understand how Hoffman was going to be tested, we understand what he left to his wife in his will, we understand what his final plot was, and we truly understand his inner motivations. Everything from here on out is uncharted territory, which is actually quite exciting. I wonder what we will see next year in Saw VII in 3-D!?

In other news, the special effects were actually quite glorious, and I have to wonder how much money they spent building these gigantic death traps, because some were really really big, so much so that I described one in my tweets as “American Gladiators with hot steam and a lawyer.”

So let’s wrap this all up in a nice neat little package, shall we? What have we learned today, classz/

1. Saw VI is a decent movie with its fair share of plot malfunctions that still does the series justice.
2. The two things you will enjoy most in Saw VI are the tied-up loose plot ends and the cleverly conceived, convoluted death traps.
3. I am an incredibly sick human being.

That’s about all I have to say on this matter. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tie a sex offender up to a device that will rip out his scrotum if he gets aroused. Hey! Idea for Saw VII, screenwriters! Use it!

Check out the first part of our Saw VI interviews and learn about a recurring character and the series’ plans for 3-D, here!

Check out the second part of our Saw VI interviews, and the death trap that the writers have planned for us, here!

Check out the third part of our Saw VI interviews, and find out how fake death traps can become real death traps, here!

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• Exclusive Interview: Saw VI Writers Spill Gory Details on the Franchise’s 3-D Future and a Major Recurring Character (Part 1)
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