Richard Crouse

In the world of franchises when a character dies, they’re not really dead until people stop buying tickets to see the movies. Such is the case with “Saw X,” the latest instalment of the nineteen-year-old torture horror franchise.

Serial killer John “Jigsaw” Kramer, played by Tobin Bell, is the main antagonist of the “Saw” flicks. He’s the mastermind behind the ingenious traps, like the elaborate Laser Collar, the aptly named Knife Chair or the self-explanatory Shotgun Carousel, designed to inflict maximum physical and psychological trauma on his victims.

He is a bad man who communicates the bad news to his quarries through the creepy Billy the Puppet, a nightmarish ventriloquist’s dummy with garish red swirls on his cheeks.

Or I should say was a bad man. They killed the character off in “Saw III,” but in the “Saw” Universe, death isn’t enough to keep a good sadistic serial killer down, so he appears via flashback in subsequent instalments, and was the inspiration for a new killer in 2021’s “Spiral.”

Now through the magic of prequels, he’s back in the flesh, picking up the story where the 2004’s “Saw” left off.

The new film begins with Kramer, riddled with cancer, decamping to Mexico in the hopes of a miracle cure. The procedure is risky and experimental but, “The results have been stunning,” says Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund).

When it turns out the whole thing is a scam, designed to provide hope, but no actual medical benefit to patients, Kramer gets even in his own, terrible way.

“You all pretended to cure me,” he says, “but what I have planned for each of you is very real.”

The “Saw” movies pretend to have a moral, a manifesto driven by Kramer’s twisted sense of finding atonement through pain via deadly games of “Truth or Consequences.” That high minded philosophy is given lip service in “Saw X,” but takes a backseat to the graphic kills.

Put it this way: “Saw X” is less about the moral code and more about using a person’s intestines as a rope or sucking someone’s eyeballs right out of their sockets.

After a drawn out first hour of set up, the ick factor is notched up, making this the juiciest and goriest “Saw” film to date. Trouble is, it’s stomach-turning with very few scares. It’s unpleasant by design, but the dopamine hit you’re looking for, the rush of feeling scared in a theatre where you are safe, is replaced by a queasy feeling.

Each test is timed, and there are countdown clocks galore, ticking away to the end of the games, but there isn’t much tension, just an uneasy sensation that something terrible is coming.

It might be different if there was some kind of inventive symbolism in the games, a sense that there is something happening to stimulate the brain, not just the gag reflex.

For a movie that is all about games—Kramer refers to each of his tests as “games”—the R-rated “Saw X” is all gory games but very little fun.