Editorials
Ranking Every Twist in the ‘Saw’ Franchise!
If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw! For seven years, Lionsgate made Halloween even more of an event than it already was for horror fans. From 2004 to 2010, a new Saw movie was released at the end of every October. In preparation for Jigsaw (read my review), the eighth film in the franchise, I went back and re-watched all of the Saw films. I was flooded with memories of how excited I used to get when Charlie Clouser’s score (specifically, “Hello Zepp“) used to play over the plot reveals, starting quietly before building up in intensity as the franchise’s signature erratic editing sped up and revealed the big twist. This is why people came out in droves to see these films, and the success of each installment hinged on whether or not its twist(s) was/were effective. With Jigsaw being released this weekend, I thought it would be appropriate to look back on the previous seven Saw films and their twists to see what the new film has to live up to. Which twist was the best? We’ll tell you!
***MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW***
7. Saw V – The Fatal Five Could Have Survived If They Had Worked Together…and Strahm is Framed/Murdered
First, big thanks to the Saw Wiki for naming the central victims in Saw V the Fatal Five. That’s clever. Unfortunately, the twist in Saw V is not. Saw V is the only entry in the film that could be wiped from the face of Earth and, save for the death of Agent Strahm (Gilmore Girls‘ Scott Patterson), it wouldn’t make a difference to the overall continuity of the series. The bulk of the film is devoted to the aforementioned Fatal Five as they traverse through the rooms in one of John Kramer’s (referenced as Jigsaw from here on out) traps. One member of the group is killed in each room, but the film climaxes with the realization that they were meant to work together to move from room to room as opposed to killing one of their own in each room. What hurts this twist is that its so far removed from anything having to do with Jigsaw (they are being tested because they all had a part in covering up an arson that has no relation to anything else) that it holds no emotional weight whatsoever. That’s saying something because the fablous Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dexter) is one of the victims. What’s shocking is that Clouser’s score starts playing after that when Strahm, who has spent the entire film running around talking to himself, learns that he has been framed by Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) and is killed. It lacks the “oomph” of the twists from the other films. While by no means the worst film in the series (that honor would go to Saw 3D), Saw V is certainly the most superfluous. This unexciting “twist” perfectly illustrates why.
6. Saw 3D – Dr. Gordon is an Accomplice
What makes the twist in Saw 3D disappointing is that it is telegraphed so early in the film (and had been rumored long before the film’s release). After being absent for the past five films, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) reappears in the pre-title sequence of what used to be the final film in the franchise. He then disappears again for the majority of the film before popping up in its closing minutes to show us that he’s been working with Jigsaw ever since he escaped his bathroom prison in the first Saw. It make no sense. I mean, sure, Jigsaw would need the help of a skilled surgeon to assist with many of his traps (the skull behind the guy’s eye in Saw II is given as an example), but why would this man join up with this psychopath? It just doesn’t hold up. At least the series finally rid the world of Hoffman with this twist, but it was still a predictable way to end a franchise that has prided itself on its unpredictability up until that point.
5. Saw IV – Takes Place During Saw III, Hoffman is Jigsaw’s Apprentice and Rigg Could Have Saved Everyone By Doing Nothing
Saw IV is the first film to show the Saw franchise losing its grip on its own story. After all, what do you do with a franchise that just killed its antagonist? Set the sequel in a parallel timeline as the previous film, that’s what! Or at least that’s what Saw IV does anyway. Clues are peppered throughout the film, like a random doctor casually mentioning that Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh, Saw III) just went missing, but it still plays well and manages to be quite the jaw-dropping reveal. The way in which the timeline is revealed (Strahm walking into the room where the climax of Saw III is taking place) is well done too. As if one twist weren’t enough, Saw IV crams in two more, the best of which is introducing Jigsaw’s successor: Detective Mark Hoffman. Rather than stop there, it also reveals that Lt. Daniel Rigg could have saved his comrade Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg, Saw II) if he had just sat at home and not played the game. Saw IV tries to cram so much into its climax that it nearly falls off the rails (and Lyriq Bent is not a compelling protagonist), but 2 of the 3 big reveals work, so that’s something.
4. Saw VI – Easton’s Family Isn’t Who You Think They Are
Like Saw V, the bulk of the story in Saw VI is essentially a standalone affair. What makes it more compelling than that film is that it A) serves a commentary on the healthcare system and B) is actually surprising. Throughout the film, William Easton (Peter Outerbridge), an insurance agent for Umbrella Health (haha), moves through Jigsaw’s various trap rooms, sometimes killing and sometimes saving his co-workers during various trials. During all of this, Tara (Shauna MacDonald) and Brent (Devon Bostick) are watching Easton’s game from their caged-in observation room. We are led to believe that they are Easton’s wife and son. Also watching is a reporter named Pamela (Samantha Lemole), who seemingly has no relation to anyone involved. When “Hello Zepp” begins, Easton makes it to Tara and Brent, who are revealed to actually be the wife and child of Harold Abbott, a man that Easton denied insurance coverage to and basically sentenced to death. Pamela is actually Easton’s sister, who is forced to watch as Brent kills him with some strategically placed needles filled with acid. It’s a great, blood-soaked finale, but Saw VI also squeezes in a smaller twist with the reveal that Hoffman blackmailed Amanda (Shawnee Smith) to kill Lynn Denlon in Saw III. The film ends with Jigsaw’s ex-wife Jill (Betsy Russell) putting Hoffman in the reverse bear trap that Amanda wore in Saw. Hoffman escapes and the film cuts to black. Weirdly enough it’s the storyline involving Easton that proves to be more successful, with Hoffman’s story wearing out its welcome by this point. The fact that we know he survives in the end causes Saw VI to end on more of a whimper, a pity considering the film was such a huge step up from the previous sequels.
3. Saw III – It Was Amanda’s Test the Whole Time and Jeff & Lynn are Married
Saw III has the distinction of being the longest film in the Saw franchise. At 108 minutes, the film is the definition of a bloated sequel, as evidenced by its 10-minute climax (it takes up two YouTube videos, seen below). In all honesty, Saw III could have served as a solid capper to a trilogy, but it made $80 million domestically on a $10 million budget so a sequel was inevitable. Anyway, Saw III follows two seemingly separate stories: 1) Dr. Lynn Denlon is captured by Amanda (revealed to be Jigsaw’s protégé at the end of Saw II) and forced to keep Jigsaw alive while a man completes one of his trials. Strapped to Lynn’s neck is a collar that will destroy her skull if Jigsaw’s heart monitor flatlines. 2) Meanwhile, Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) is forced to face all of the people who failed to send the drunk driver that killed his son to prison. In the film’s final moments, the whole ordeal is revealed to have been Amanda’s test. When Jigsaw was no longer able to make traps (due to his inoperable brain tumor), Amanda started doing them for him, but she made them inescapable. Because of this, the victims never learned anything. They just died. Jigsaw knew this and set up an elaborate game with Lynn and Jeff as a test for Amanda. Unfortunately, she fails when Jeff kills shows up and killers her and Jigsaw. Jeff is also revealed to be Lynn’s husband, but since he kills Jigsaw Lynn’s collar explodes and she dies too. Saw III ends in a bloodbath that is both gruesome and cathartic. It’s overstuffed in the best way possible.
2. Saw II – Amanda is In on It & The Video Feed Was Pre-Recorded
The best sequel has the second-best twist(s) in the franchise! In all honesty, it would probably be the number one spot on this list if one of the twists didn’t completely rip of The Silence of the Lambs. In Saw II, eight victims wake up in a house and are told that there is a poisonous gas flowing through the vents that is slowly poisoning them. There are antidotes hidden throughout the house, but each victim must pass a test before acquiring the antidote. Among the the victims are Amanda Young, back in one of Jigsaw’s traps after relapsing some time after the events of the first film, and Daniel Matthews (Erik Knudsen, Scream 4), son of Detective Eric Matthews. While the victims traverse the house, Eric and his team catch Jigsaw, who tells Eric that he will see his son again in a “safe and secure state” if he agrees to talk with him alone until the two hours are over. During their conversation, TV monitors are showing Eric and his team the video feed from the house where the victims are. If there’s one thing that can be learned from the Saw films it’s that you should always do what Jigsaw tells you. Eric Matthews learns this the hard way, as he beats Jigsaw to a pulp and drives him to the house where his son supposedly is. While that is happening, his team tracks down the source of the video and discover that the video feed of the victims was pre-recorded and the game ended long before they even found Jigsaw. A safe opens in Jigsaw’s safe house and Eric is inside, bound and breathing into an oxygen mask. As if that weren’t enough, Amanda is revealed to have been under the tutelage of Jigsaw and she locks Eric in the same room where Adam and Dr. Gordon were locked in the first Saw! Sequels are supposed to outdo the original, and Saw II‘s way of doing that was adding an extra twist into the mix. Making Amanda an accomplice instead of a victim was a fantastic way to one-up the original. It may not be quite as shocking as the moment when Jigsaw stood up in that bathroom, but it comes damn close.
1. Saw – Jigsaw is the “Corpse” on the Floor
What makes the twist ending of James Wan’s Saw so effective is that no one was expecting it. Because of Saw, everyone walked into the sequels expecting some big twist, which automatically dilutes their impact. The ending of Saw works because it still has that element of surprise. Helping matters is that Saw is more of a mystery film than a torture porn gorefest (Saw II is also admirable for this trait), which means the plot is the focus rather than the violence. The plot of Saw is simple: Adam and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Leigh Whannell and Cary Elwes, respectively) wake up in a dingy bathroom chained to the wall with a corpse in between them. Adam is instructed to escape the bathroom while Lawrence is instructed to kill Adam by 6pm or else his wife and daughter (Monica Potter and Makenzie Vega, respectively) will be killed. The man holding them hostage is Zep (Michael Emerson), an orderly at the hospital where Lawrence works. We are led to believe that he is Jigsaw. In the twist that defined the franchise, Lawrence cuts off his foot and escapes the bathroom and Zep is revealed to have also been a victim of Jigsaw, being coerced to hold Lawrence’s family hostage and kill them in order to receive the antidote for a slow-acting poison that was injected into his body. The corpse in the middle of the room then stands up and is revealed to be Jigsaw. That’s right! Jigsaw was in the room the whole time! The twist may seem like small potatoes compared to the batshit insanity that would pervade the franchise moving forward, but it earns its place on the top spot simply for being the first one to do it.
What is your favorite twist in the Saw franchise? Let us know in the comments below! And don’t forget to catch up on the Saw films before seeing Jigsaw this weekend! All of them are currently on Netflix and the Blu-Ray set is just $9.99 on Amazon!
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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