Jessabelle

This movie is the plot of Peter Medak's Changeling with the final twist of Iain Softley's The Skeleton Key. If you've ever seen those movies, you know pretty much what happens in this film. If you haven't I fear this review may spoil three movies.

Jessabelle “Jessie” Laurent (Sarah Snook) is moving into her fiance's (Brian Hallisay) house, when they're both in a car accident, killing her fiance, causing Jessie to have a miscarriage, and leaving her wheelchair-bound. Jessie's only option is to move in with her father (David Andrews) in Louisiana, who she barely knows. Jessie's mother died when she was a baby, and she was raised primarily by her aunt.

Once in her father's home Jessie discovers a box of tapes that her mother made while pregnant, reading tarot. The tapes were supposed to be given to her on her 18^th birthday if anything happened to her mother, but her father had failed to do so. He claims that her mother was suffering from brain cancer while making them, and watching them will only upset Jessie.

The readings are notably inaccurate. Her mother incorrectly predicted that Jessie would not leave their town, was associated with water in some way, and was a home-body. However, she also predicts that there's a female presence in the house that wants Jessie out, and this prediction seems to come true, as a mysterious ghost (Amber Stevens) begins to attack her.

Jessie's father attempts to destroy the tapes, but is attacked and burned to death by the spirit himself. This leaves Jessie to investigate the spirit with her High School friend Preston (Mark Webber). They eventually discover an infant's grave, marked with Jessie's birthday, and her full name, Jessabelle. The police examine the skeleton, and determine that the baby was born alive, but murdered. They also encounter members of a local Voodou-practicing church, all of whom have a strange hatred for Jessie, and by extension anyone associated with her.

The final tape, hidden in the wall, reveals the truth: Before marrying Jessie's father, her mother slept with the black man who taught her to read cards (Vaughn Wilson). When the baby, Jessabelle, was born black, her father murdered her, and adopted Jessie to cover the crime. Her mother then killed herself as part of a ritual that would make it possible for Jessabelle to possess Jessie.

This plot twist has some fairly obvious holes in it. We're shown the baby being born in a hospital, meaning there should be numerous doctors and nurses who knew that Jessabelle was black. It's a small town, she never ran into any of them again? No friends came to congratulate them at the hospital? I'd also be curious to know how her father was able to just get his hands on a white baby so quickly. There's absolutely no attempt to explain where Jessie came from.

As I said at the beginning, the movie has an influence from The Changeling, but that movie did it better. There was actual effort made to explain how the father was able to switch out the babies. Furthermore, The Changeling portrayed the spirit as a confused child. When we're shown Jessabelle, she's portrayed as an adult, who should be well-aware that Jessie had nothing to do with her murder. If she's going to take over Jessie's life, she has to have the faculties of an adult. That removes a lot of the ambiguity of the situation, leaving us with just a murderous spirit.

Beyond that, a lot of the set-up doesn't seem to go anywhere. Preston is married, but his wife (Larisa Oleynik) appears in a single scene. It's strongly implied that Jessabelle intends to seduce him in the body of Jessie, and the issue of his marriage seems like a non-factor. Jessie's fiance is rarely mentioned after her death, as is her pregnancy.

Jessie's limited mobility only comes up in one or two scenes as well, because most scenes either happen around the house, or happen with Preston present. Her father takes away her wheelchair at one point, and throws it in the bayou, but then either fishes it out or gets her a new one by the next morning. The final sequence has her wheelchair being rolled into the bayou with her in it, but she was possessed by a spirit, so the wheelchair seems fairly unimportant to that. Is it really different from just jumping?

The movie certainly isn't horrible, but it isn't great either. It felt like it either had too many re-writes, or not enough. It needed to either have the extra plot-threads expanded, or cut entirely. Still, I've seen much worse.

Saw: The Final Chapter

 

Saw: The Final Chapter is easily the best Saw film from outside the original trilogy. I would even argue it to be better than Saw III in terms of raw entertainment value. This isn't exactly intentional. Rather, with the Box Office haul of Saw VI dropping off they decided to compress what otherwise would have been a two-part finale into a single movie, leaving us with a product that, at minimum, doesn't' waste a single second of our time.

It took me a while to accept the opening sequence, in which two men (Sebastian Pigott and Jon Cor )decide to let their ex-girlfriend (Anne Green) die. However, having watched the sequence a number of times, there's no denying that “Dina” is a psychological abuser who would happily watch both of them die for her own convenience. It's not the first time we've seen abusers in this series.

The film revolves around three major players: Hoffman (Costas Mandylor, as always), seeking revenge on Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery), a man who became rich pretending to be a Jigsaw survivor, who finds himself in a real trap, and the return of Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes). Intermixed with these we get at least two other traps that don't really tie into anything, except to say “look what we were planning for a later movie!” At one point Jill Tuck even dreams about Hoffman killing her, so that the filmmakers can squeeze in yet another death sequence.

The ending of Bobby's storyline is controversial among fans, to say the least. His series of traps, much like Saw VI, revolves around trying to save people who knew the truth and choose to remain silent, and Bobby proves to be astoundingly incompetent, failing every test (you can't help but wonder if Jigsaw intentionally gave him all the hard ones, because he couldn't stand the thought of a faker actually pulling it off). The final trap, however, required him to re-enact his own fictional trap (lifting himself up by hooks inserted into his pectoral muscles), to save his trophy wife (Gina Holden), who never knew he'd lied.

First of all, it's debated whether Jigsaw intended for this trap to fail, because Bobby described an impossible trap, or if the trap's failure wasn't Jigsaw's intention. I don't personally feel that Jigsaw would give someone a trap that was unwinnable, so I favor the theory that the trap was intended to work. But his pectorals rip, and Bobby's completely innocent wife is burned alive.

Either way, I think ending at this point was a bad idea. If there was an out, I'd like to know what it was. If there wasn't, I'd like someone to give us some form of exposition of Jigsaw's failure. If Jigsaw was just being a vindictive prick prepared to kill an innocent for the pettiest reasons imaginable, then I'd like to see him say that in flashback. Either way, if there's ever an eight Saw film, I want Bobby back for more.

This is probably Mandylor's best performance as Hoffman. That's probably the result of finally giving him a clearly defined motivation: revenge on the woman who tried to kill him. Hoffman seems to have finally given up on the games themselves, and is instead focused on Jill.

Some say that Russell's character became weaker in this film, but I disagree. In the last movie she exuded confidence because she caught Hoffman off-guard. She knows it isn't going to happen again. She seeks out the protection of Matt Gibson (Chad Donella), an Internal Affairs detective who, while trying his best to protect Jill, seems to view the entire Jigsaw affairs as a bizarrely homicidal dysfunctional family...and he's not actually wrong...

Gibson is a nice new addition to the cast, almost like a more emotionally stable version of Strahm. He held a grudge against Hoffman long before the latter became an Apprentice, reporting him for brutality, and arresting men under him for the same after joining IA. He's probably the single most noble law enforcement officer in this entire series...and he's killed off when he and a number of other men are lured into a trap, and machine guns and poison gas come out of the walls to kill them all...

Gordon makes a cameo at a survivor's meeting at the beginning of the film, but his reappearance comes at the end. I don't think there was a single fan who didn't know why he was in this movie. Gordon as the final Apprentice had been a popular fan-theory for years, based on the fact that many of the traps' preparations required extensive medical knowledge that none of the existing Jigsaw killers possessed.

The final twist of the story: Hoffman is using traps and other misdirection throughout the film to draw the police away from headquarters, while switching himself with the corpse of a neo-Nazi killed in a trap in order to get close to Jill Tuck, with as few police officers to kill as possible. With his capture of Jill Tuck, the Reverse Bear Trap finally gets to claim a victim after seven films of waiting. I like the scenes between the two, particularly because Jill refuses to speak a single word to Hoffman. She's defiant to the end, even knowing that she's screwed.

However, just as Hoffman destroys his lair and attempts to flee, he's ambushed by Gordon and his own apprentices (originally the entire survivor's group would have joined, but instead we get two masked men, who the creators say were from the trap at the beginning). Gordon locks Hoffman in the same room where Gordon himself was tested, says “Game Over,” and locks the door, with the movie ending.

I don't exactly consider this a satisfying conclusion. Hoffman was able to get out of the Reverse Bear Trap in slightly more than sixty second. I find it unlikely that he can't get past a chain on his leg, and a locked door, when his only limitation is how long it takes him to die of thirst (or possibly of hunger, if the water still works in the bathroom).

This movie is cool. Yes, there are better horror movies out there, but I challenge you to find any others that are more energetic and just plain entertaining. I hope the Saw series eventually comes back. As I said, I don't consider Dagen's story truly complete. However, for now, this is where it ends. And with that I move onto the series that replaced Saw at the Halloween Box Office.

Saw VI

When comparing Saw VI to Saw V find myself in a conflict. Is it worse to have no substance, or to utterly fail in your attempt to bring substance? As with the previous film we have a series of traps that only tangentially tie into the main story, while Hoffman's (Costas Mandylor) story continues in parallel. This time, however, we get a few more shots of Hoffman watching the victims.

This movie came out in 2009, five months before the Affordable Care Act was passed. So, the filmmakers gave us a Saw movie designed to beat you over the head with the need for healthcare reform. I certainly agree with this message, but John Kramer (Tobin Bell, in recordings and flashbacks) is not the person I want lecturing me about it.

That said, this is clearly a movie that had a lot more effort put into it than the material really called for. I particularly loved Shauna MacDonald and Devon Bostick in minor roles as a mother and son (will elaborate on that later). It's clear that both of them put their heart and souls into these roles.

It's at this point that we're really getting a sense of how unbelievably petty Jigsaw was in life. An insurance executive named William Easton (Peter Outerbridge) is selected for a game because he didn't let John take part in an experimental treatment for his cancer...oh, sorry, he's selected for a game because he “chooses who lives and who dies” without considering “the will to live.” So, all of his traps are themed around the idea of choosing who he could save. He experiences four traps, two of which pit his survival against someone else's, and another two simply make him choose between victims.

Eventually, having made it through the traps, William comes to a an enclosed room. He can see his sister on one side (Samantha Lemole), and Tara and Brent (MacDonald and Bostic) on the other. Tara and Brent are the wife and son of a man William denied coverage to based on an application mistake. They have been watching his entire journey through a monitor, and are told to decide whether or not to throw a switch that will kill William.

Tara attempts to rationalize this by arguing that William might deny someone else coverage (...as opposed to the person that the company will hire to replace him doing it?...), but it ultimately unable to kill him. Brent then steps forward and pulls the switch for no reason other than pure revenge, injecting William with dozens of syringes of acid to dissolve him. I'm a bit surprised Brent didn't face any consequences himself for doing this, given Jigsaw's past distaste for revenge, but apparently he believed Brent had suffered enough.

While I don't want to go into every trap, there are two theories about this film that I think need to be addressed. The first is the theory that William's test was designed so that, if he had acted differently and abandoned his existing way of thinking, all of the victims might have survived. Each trap has a specific theory about how this would have been possible, and the theories vary in terms of plausibility. Most notably in the single largest trap, a carousel with six victims and a shotgun that can be directed upward when William pushes one of two buttons and stabs himself in the hand, we're told by Jigsaw that “only two” can survive. There is absolutely no evidence other than Jigsaw's word that all six can't be saved by pushing the buttons repeatedly, and William makes no effort to go against Jigsaw's claim.

The other theory is that Brent killed William out of a belief that his father's death was related to sexism. Notably, over the course of the film two women die, along with five men, and three women are saved. The fact that William never saves a single man is commented on exactly once. At the end of the aforementioned carousel trap, William chooses to save two women. The latter of the two claims to be pregnant, and the final surviving man, now doomed, yells “a bitch says one thing and it's all over!”

Whether or not William is actually sexist is open for debate. Either way, I do like the theory that Brent thought he was. It means that William's actions in the test did, at minimum, have some influence over Brent's decision. The story isn't as interesting if there was literally nothing he could do to save himself.

This is probably Hoffman's finest film, mainly because it's the first film in which he's legitimately challenged. Hoffman continues in his attempts to frame Strahm, but reality ensues and the police are able to detect indications of the frame-up. By the end of the film Hoffman has been found-out, killed several other police officers, and been forced to go on the run.

More importantly, we find out that John promised his fiance Jill (Betsy Russell) “a way out.” He left her the reverse bear-trap from the first film. After his escape, she tasers Hoffman, straps him to a chair, and attaches it without a key. He's able to escape by breaking his hand, and ripping open his cheek.

Whatever you think of the rest of the film, Hoffman escaping from that trap is one of the most legitimately badass things ever seen in this series. It's the thing that made me oddly root for him entering the final film of the series. Even more so, because Jill left the room, saying “Game Over.” There's exactly one other character in this entire series who overcame a “Game Over” (discussed in the next film), so Hoffman's status is fairly elite.

Ultimately, I feel I have to judge these stories separately. The main story, William's, is a political rant disguised as a story not worth telling, but told extremely well. However, Hoffman's story is down-right compelling, even as Hoffman is a truly despicable human being.

Overall, I'd say this is the first Saw film to represent a real uptick over the previous movie. It is more enjoyable than V easily, even if it fails by any normal standard of filmmaking. It has all the subtlety of a sack of bricks to the head, but at least that's something, where V was simply a bore.