Saw 3D

If there’s one big difference between Jackass 3D and Saw 3D, it’s that no one was hurt making Saw. Except, maybe, for the disillusionment suffered by audience members fool enough to believe previews explicitly promising we would be part of the action: that saws would come out of the screen, along with giant monsters who would steal a screaming woman from the crowd as we watched in terror. Sad to say, nothing remotely like that occurs. Not even to the people in the film.

In the light of the patently dishonest Catfish ad campaign, and this exorbitant overstating of what turns out to be just the usual gore-core material, it’s time some kind of truth-in-mayhem-making advertising legislation gets enacted. It may sound like a joke, but it’s just another reason people are so angry at the film industry nowadays.

What does happen in Saw 3D is Grand Guignol chills and thrills. You know, dismemberment, sheets of blood and intestines flying (though, surprisingly, not out at us). And the 3-D effects are equally unremarkable. Some have suggested that Saw and Hostel constitute a kind of pornography, but that’s unfair to the sex trade. These films are closer to gross-out humor than cheap turn-ons, more like Brüno than porno.

This chapter ends the Jigsaw saga, a creepy moralist who designs satanic punishment for minor sinners. It begins as a cavalcade of seemingly unrelated blood-lets but comes to a surprisingly dry trick ending. In other words, the traps are the same, but somebody must have asked a real writer to contribute, because the final comeuppance has wit and enough psychological terror to make up for mediocre slash effects. Just the same, it’s not exceptionally imaginative, and the acting is about as good as a standard skinflick. It’s just another way to trick us into spending hard-earned money on a cheap thrill ride, and at best leave thankful we didn’t loose an arm and a leg along the way.