Good, grisly fun

Rating: 5/10 (12 November 2005)

Jigsaw (Tobin Bell ) is a psycho who makes good on his promise - "There will be blood." If inventive sadism is your idea of a fun night at the movies, "Saw II" delivers ninety minutes of relentless screw-tightening shocks.
In spite of its nonsensical conclusion James Wan's "Saw" was a engagingly grisly, brutally graphic thrill ride that delivered box office gold. With a twenty-five day shooting schedule forcing inventiveness and a tad more logic thrown into the mix, "Saw II" is a rarity among sequels: it's as good as the original. Instead of two characters and a corpse, we now have eight tortured victims united by one common bond.
Bad cop Mark Wahlberg can't seem to reign in his teenage son (Frankie Munoz substitute Erik Knudsen) who seems well on his way to a guest spot on "America's Most Wanted." That's all the impetus Jigsaw, a scientist when it comes to preying upon the weakness of his victims, needs to set the sequel's mechanics in motion. "Saw II' plays a clever twist on the original by placing the hero and villain, instead of the two victims, in one room. With a handful of TV monitors broadcasting closed-circuit coverage of the action, Jigsaw delights in watching the detective squirm.
The gut-churning parade kicks off with a pre-credit sequence in which the key to freedom is surgically implanted in the eye of it's victim. Two choices: either pull a Bunuel and slice wide your retina or suffer the fate of a Mario Bava-inspired spiked black mask timed to turn its victim's head into a colander. A pit of hypodermic needles, gallons of coughed-up blood and thoughts on serial killers and their quest for immortality suggest a game of "Clue" gone terribly wrong.
Casting "Saw's" Shawnee Smith, the only survivor of Jigsaw's game, in a key role proves that a sequel was never far from the mind of the franchise's creator. Instead of limiting the gore to one room, "Saw II' gives us an entire tenement in which to splatter about. Nerve gas, the film references the terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subway, is being pumped into the vents and Jigsawagrees to unlock the door one hour after the poison takes full effect.
With the exception of Tobin Bell, the rest of the actors were cast according to type. As the soft-spoken ringleader of carnage, Bell provides the prerequisite of every good horror yarn: a truly despicable antagonist. Quiet revelations of his gut-shot illness will have you cheering on the cancer.
It should come as no surprise that only a few characters live to see the final fade out and credit the filmmakers with devising several new sado-masochistic kinks. Not content to simply rearrange the narrative order of its predecessor, "Saw II" will not disappoint fans of the original.