HEN THE SAW FRANCHISE ENDS WITH PART VII THIS MONTH, it’s going to be a tough withdrawal for Jigsaw fans used to
(DAVID HACKL)
Hoffman’s plan from Saw IV goes perfectly, except for leaving Strahm alive. We get plenty of back story on Jigsaw, and his widow, Jill, gets a package from her husband containing “an item of great importance.” Strahm discovers Hoffman was in- volved with Jigsaw from the begin- ning... just in time to be killed. BODY COUNT: 5
SICKEST TRAP: A machine in which five people must stick their arms into chambers with rotating blades to extract ten pints of blood.
BELL: “Actors spend their entire careers looking to play King Lear or Hamlet. John Kramer is a giant guy, so it’s a role with great potential. You know, he has his finger in a lot of different pies. He’s interested in re- ligion and art and science. ... He’s interested in so many different as- pects of human life, and that’s the aspect of him that interests me the most. The level of my commitment to working on this never wavered.”
(KEVIN GREUTERT)
Jill gives Hoffman a message that her husband left a will with the stip- ulation that the games now be fo- cused on crooked money lenders and medical insurance scammers (apparently Jigsaw predicted the recession!). Strahm’s supposedly dead partner returns, determined to reveal the identity of the new Jig- saw, only to be killed by Hoffman. Jill confronts Hoffman, putting him in the jaw trap from Saw, but he narrowly escapes. BODY COUNT: 12
SICKEST TRAP: Flesh scale with head drill.
BELL: “I thought it tied in well with what had been estab- lished in Saw. It really wasn’t done as social commentary, although when it came out we were in a lot of discussion about the healthcare bill. It just happened to come out at that time. It was really more about alternative medicine in my mind. It was more about the absence of awareness on the part of main- stream medical people regarding alternative medicine.”
ringing in every Halloween with a new trap-apalooza, but it’ll be even tougher on Kevin Greutert, director of Saw 3D, Saw VI and editor of every preceding entry. For him, it’s like closing down the family business.
“Right now I’m mixing the new film with guys who have worked on all
the films since Saw II,” he says of his Toronto crewmates. “Even though most of the year they’re mixing things like Atom Egoyan films, I think there’s a part of them that looks forward to hav- ing their ears shattered every August when Saw comes to town.” It’s a franchise built heavily on flashbacks in
order to keep Jigsaw (who succumbed to can- cer in part III) in the series, and Greutert knows first-hand how tough it is to keep the storyline going. “I think we’ve done a good job of refolding the
history of the chronology continually into the episodes, but we’re four films removed from Jig- saw’s death now and it gets more challenging every time,” he says. “Saw 3D will be less flash- back intensive. There’s still more history explored,
but I think it’s the most general audience-friendly of all the Saw movies.” That said, Greutert also promises that the plot (written by Marcus Dun-
stan and Patrick Melton, who have shared writing duties since Saw IV) for the finale to the infamously convoluted series will give gore fans what they want: blood. The director explains that his particular approach to the traps favours intricacy. “I like to give my traps more of a grandiose feel than where the series
started, so you’ll get things like the carousel or the steam room, from part VI, that are more like Rube Goldberg machines.” While, he won’t give any of the film’s specifics away, other
than to acknowledge the return of Cary Elwes (Saw), he does point out that his tone is a mix of James Wan (co-creator and director of Saw) and Darren Lynn Bousman (parts II to IV). “I like a well-crafted jump scare and we hadn’t really
done a lot of those since Saw,” notes Greutert. “To some extent there were some jump scares in the Bousman films, but they’re not easy to do, and James is a master of that sort of thing. So I tried to combine those sorts of scenes with the very over-the-top manic energy-type scenes.” He adds that the addition of 3-D only
makes things nastier. “I actually think it made it harder to get the R-rating this year, because in 3-D the gore will make you go, ‘Holy shit!’”
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