IslandGuru Who payed the critics

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

SnoopyStyle The coroner is performing an autopsy on the body of John Kramer. A tape is found in his stomach and police detective Hoffman is called in. Elsewhere, a man with his eyes sewn shut is chained to a man (Louis Ferreira) with his mouth sewn shut attached to a machine. Hoffman and Lieutenant Rigg lead the SWAT team to find detective Kerry's dead body. Later, Rigg is attacked at home and wakes up to find himself in one of Jigsaw's games.The franchise do two things excessively to the point of distraction. The first is the jumping around with time, places, and protagonists. It's an annoying aspect of the franchise that they like to make a jigsaw puzzle out of the plot. The other is the flashy jump edits during the gruesome reveals. It's both cheesy and limits the actual shock. It's more horrifying to slowly linger on the bloody torture. We should leisurely enjoy the grotesque reveals. Despite all that, I really do love the idea of a dead Jigsaw while his games continue and the first torture is really sweet. The first half is great with that female victim but the movie slowly drifts away from me until I stopped caring somewhere in the second half.

rooprect Saw IV gives us more gore, less brains. Wait, poor choice of words. I should say we are *shown* more brains but not required to use our own. Jigsaw, having been killed in an earlier movie, comes back but in the stupidest, most anticlimactic way possible. Almost as if the writers were sitting around 5 minutes til deadline, having elaborated on all the gory stuff, then suddenly realizing 'whoa wait, jigsaw is dead. Who's going to be behind all this crap? Aha..!' (I won't spoil it)Aside from that, even the killings lack the poetic irony that made all the other movies so fun to watch. The whole gimmick of the Saw franchise is that the killings are each part of some twisted morality lesson, sorta like Mother Goose on psychotic drugs. But here, there didn't seem to be much effort put into the karma content; instead they focused on wacky gadgets that mutilate people in interesting ways. Cool stuff, but you're left wondering 'What did that have to do with anything?'Example: Some drug addict is put into a contraption where the only way to free himself is to slice his face up with knives. Get it? I didn't either. But as the killer hastily explains: "Because you've acted so UGLY in life, now you'll have to live your life being UGLY!" Get it? I didn't either.Ultimately the movie wasn't all bad because it held my attention hoping for some grand epiphany at the end. There is indeed a "surprise twist" but it seemed to be thrown in just for the sake of a surprise twist.I'm pretty bummed because I bought the whole Saw set and was enjoying them all up until now. But SAW 4 threw a real WRENCH in the works.

swilliky Moving the franchise into a trilogy, the third brutal torture horror film explains a bit more how Jigsaw pulls off the sick games while showing even more gore. The film begins with Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) breaking his leg in an attempt to escape captivity. Detective Kerry (Dina Meyer) searches for Eric but she also falls victim to Jigsaw's awful torture. The main story consists of John Kramer (Tobin Bell) and his pupil Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) kidnapping a surgeon Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) in order to keep John alive. Jigsaw wants to oversee one last game before he finally passes away so attaches a deadly necklace to Lynn's neck that has shotgun cartridges all around it and will go off if John's heart rate stops.The test revolves around Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) who must go through a series of awful tortures. He lost his son in a drunk driving accident and has never recovered. His first test is to help the woman who witnessed his son's death, Danica (Debra McCabe), from freezing to death. She is hung up naked in a frozen locker and has water sprayed on her periodically unless Jeff grabs a key. He burns his cheek grabbing the key but doesn't save her in time. The next round is the judge who let the killer go, Judge Halden (Barry Flatman). The Judge will be drowned in rotten pig guts if Jeff doesn't burn his son's possessions to get the key. Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

GL84 Finding one of the newest crime scenes, an FBI profiler tries to track down the truth about the murders while attempting to make sure a fellow officer caught in another game doesn't become another victim of Jigsaw's legacy.While this one certainly had its moments, this one ended up being quite a troubling effort as well. What really stands out here is that the gore, as usual, saves this one with a multitude of brutal, bloody scenes here that are rather entertaining and fun. Starting with the opening autopsy of graphically removing many of the interior organs from his corpse and cutting the body open to reveal the contents of the new game, the first game to be played here where the two disfigured and chained figures are playing a demented version of tug-of-war that gets very messy as it goes along and the later scenes of the traps from the previous games all give this one some rather gory times though it's the main game featured here that gives this the most gruesome moments. The apartment encounter and the motel sequence are fine, while the biggest one here is the game at the school where the previous victims are found and really give this some solid and twisted moments here. While the final game results in some fine moments, just about everything else about this one serves it up even lower. The biggest flaw here is the continuous going's back to the past three films to try to make sure that whatever piles onto it makes sense. This was attempted previously in the last installment which really made no sense there and continues on here by instead making it clear those should be watched instead while offering the same problem as the previous one did in halting the traps to clear-up something from another film entirely. This also ties into another crippling factor here that there's so many subplots here that's just not that interesting at all, ranging from the relationship between the two and how he turned into a killer which is just annoying and not at all scary, the traps aren't confined like they used to be as leaving his handiwork out in the open in order for others to see and follow him is almost as if they just decided to throw them in there in order to stay connected to the series since they've all had them so this one should've as well which makes no sense if he's such a masterful serial killer while dealing with the current lesson, and there's so much to keep track of it's just not that worthwhile. The last problem here is that the lessons are stupid based on his own dubious morality that frankly doesn't seem all that likely to make an impact on someone at all based on how they're utilized here which is carried over from the others. These all help bring this one down from what it could've been.Rated R: Extreme Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.