Welcome back to the second part of a four-part series as I yammer on about Saw for four posts.

We now come to my favorite part of the Saw series, Saw II, or as the movie poster’s numerical system calls it, Saw Two Fingers.  The Saw Blood Drive was in full if controversial swing, and I was the better part of a year into a new job that I was actually both enjoying and was good at.  Strange how that works, isn’t it? If you would have told me when I walked into Saw that I would be both employed and loving it within just a couple months I would’ve laughed in your face.

But anyway–on to Saw II!  I was just spectacularly charged up over this one, and so were a whole lot of other people considering that this Saw installment would do nearly twice the business of the first.  DIrect to video horror had somehow mananged to go on stronger than ever, and the horror picture in general looked brighter with every passing minute.

Some truly great pieces were released that year: the thrill-a-minute Exorcism of Emily Rose, the surprisingly good Amityville Horror remake, even Tim Burton got into the act with a little shot of our lovely Corpse Bride.  But as much as I liked those, I was definitely looking forward to more of that sweet white-hot Saw joy, and indeed, I would not be disappointed.  Marking the introduction of future dead-horse-flogger Darren Bousman, I had high hopes. And then they threw a half-dozen people into a trap-filled house and proceeded to just RUN AMOK.

I was hooked from the moment I saw that revolver / bicycle assembly installed at the door’s eyepiece.

You have any idea how many times I saw mechanical engineering play a large part in a horror movie?  NONE, that’s how many.  I could not recall the last time I saw something so fantastically deadly made from something so mundane.  Indeed, the whole house was like that, from the skin-crawling needle pit to the razor box to the furnace in the basement, everything was traps, traps, traps.  It was the traps that were the stars of Saw II, and their presence ratcheted up the cool factor by one million percent for the horror geeks in the audience like myself.

Even better, seeing that the mastermind behind it all–an emaciated ruin of a cancer patient–was indeed an actual mastermind who had ZERO physical capability (even AFTER the nerve gas got started anybody in that house could have taken him and broken him in HALF.  LENGTHWISE.) was just a masterstroke that could almost make you cheer until you remembered that he was killing people in truly horrifying ways.

Leaving Saw II left me with high hopes for Saw III, and left me beginning to wonder…would we get something like this every year?  A wonderful new horror movie…EVERY YEAR?  One beautiful shining beacon of terror and rampaging and ACTUAL SCARES occasionally that would elevate the entire genre?

The answer, of course, was to be, sadly, no.

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