Saw V (2008)

Directed by David Hackl. Starring Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Julie Benz, Greg Bryk, Meagan Good, Tobin Bell, Carlo Rota, Mark Rolston, Betsy Russell, Laura Gordon. [R]

The Jigsaw killer is long dead, but these movies just keep on chugging (and chunking) along. Turns out that Mandylor’s detective was one of Jigsaw’s apprentices, which puts Patterson’s federal agent on his tail; meanwhile, more desperate strangers wake up in another implausible series of booby-trapped rooms that slaughter them one by one. Déjà vu runs rampant, and not just for the fact that the prologue and finale once again trot out brief archival appearances from a handful of now-dead characters…or are they currently dead? Maybe part of this entry takes place concurrently with a previous chapter, or even before. Because so little related to character and chronology is concrete, and because the filmmakers fail so badly at creating visual clarity and storytelling logic, who’s to say if all of these double-back twists and convolutions had been planned all along or are simply invented each time a new sequel gets the greenlight? That it’s even harder to care than it is to know with absolute certainty says a lot; that we’re five films deep and there’s still no let-up to all the uninspired horrors suffered by a bunch of interchangeable dullards says even more. Hackl, who had worked on a few of the previous films as a production designer, makes his directorial debut, and it became the last time to date he was involved in the franchise.

27/100