Plot: In the latest edition of the popular horror franchise, Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) though scarred has survived the trap from Jigsaw's wife Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) at the end of the last film. Vowing revenge Hoffman seeks to track down Tuck and bring about his own special brand of justice. Meanwhile author and fraudulent Jigsaw survivor Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flannery) is exploiting his tragic past for financial gain. But when Hoffman kidnaps Dagen and puts him in a real-life game of survival, detective Matt Gibson (Chad Donella) must protect Tuck and save Dagen before the game is over.
Review: Remember when you were young and wanted to eat all of your Halloween candy at once? What did your Mom say to you? "Too much of a good thing is bad for you." Obviously, the producers of the Saw franchise were raised by wolves because they continue to crank out these films long after the sweet taste of the original has been lost. The Saw franchise has become like herpes: it won't go away no matter how much Valtrex you throw at it.
Saw The Final Chapter (please God let it be so) is a plodding, formulaic, gore fest that barely resembles its 2004 originator. Full of predictable plot lines and the not-so-shocking twist ending, director Kevin Greutert's awful horror film left me wishing someone would slice me up with a power saw just to put me out of my misery.
Not that the Saw franchise was ever a subtle endeavor, but the movies have long since lost any amount of nuance or creativity. Like lunch in the high school cafeterias The Final Chapter is just more of the same old same old. Even the opening trap is pathetic. Set in a visible area this time, a decidedly poor attempt at innovation, the inevitable slicing of one of the victim's is more funny than shocking or upsetting. This tends to be par for the course for the film whether it is death from a car trap, blood-letting from a needle trap, or being baked alive by a heat trap. The result is still the same: awful production quality. The makeup effects look like something out of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And believe me when I say any one of the movies from that television show would have been exponentially better than this film.
Fortunately, Saw The Final Chapter makes up for its horrible visual effects (did I mention it was in 3D...crap in three dimensions awesome!) with equally putrid acting. Costas Mandylor should have his SAG card revoked. In no way is he creepy or menacing like the original Jigsaw (Tobin Bell). Instead he comes across as campy and pathetic. Yet even his underwhelming performance pales in comparison to the craptastic display of acting ability (inability?) by Chad Donella. His turn as detective Matt Gibson is Golden Raspberry worthy. Donella is so bad he makes adult film star Peter North look like effing Sir Lawrence Olivier by comparison.
Sean Patrick Flannery was the best of the bunch although to be fair a half dead camel could have put up better acting performance than the rest of the morons in this film. Flannery did as much as he could with the Dagen character. It wasn't much considering what he was given to work with by screenwriters (and I use that term loosely) Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan. Much like the weathermen who said Rochester was going to be hit hard by the recent mid-west snow storm, this script was an epic failure. If monkeys had thrown their own feces at construction paper, the resulting mess would have been ten times better than this debacle of a script.
In the end Saw The Final Chapter is a weak effort that demonstrates how dull and rusty this franchise has gotten and how desperately it needs to die.
My rating: 1/10
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