John Kramer has returned in the eighth installment in the Saw Series and this is a very entertaining, sometimes cringe inducing, return to form for the franchise.
10 years after the Jigsaw killer was announced dead a new game is beginning. Five strangers, all with criminal pasts that has not be atoned for, find themselves trapped in a room with chains on their neck and buckets on their heads. Across from them is a wall of circular saws. Yep that's right, the extreme starts high in this one as the chains pull our 'victims' towards the saws as they must figure out Jigsaws cryptic clues.
On the outside the police are faced with the return of a dead man as bodies begin to appear all with signs that John Kramer has returned. But he is dead! I hear you cry. Well the evidence is very clear that this is our killer but who is he working with? This is what gives you a secondary plot to run beside the action in the torture escape room, I mean we don't really give too much of a shit about the 5 people in the room, and as one by one they fall victim to their own selfish ways you find out why they are they and just want them to face a grizzly death. So on the outside this gives the 'who is Jigsaws accomplice? Is it Eleanor? the morbid young woman who works in the morgue and has a collection of Jigsaw death machines hidden in a secret location, or is it the corrupt cop Detective Holloran? a man grizzled and an all round dick bag. It is up to Logan Nelson to figure this all out!
Jigsaw, is much better than alot of the later Saw movies. It gives a good cop hunting killer who-dunnit story without taking to much away from the slice, dice trap fun we all have come to see. The acting is questionable at times, Tobin Bell being the top one in this, but it is your basic horror acting and to be fair this is not what we all came here to see.
On a personal note the whole bucket on the head trap made me laugh as it just reminds me of this scene from the Simpsons: