Last Halloween, a wave of grotesque amazement swept the theaters of America as hordes of teenagers snuck past theater security to catch a showing of what was hailed as the most ingenious horror movie in years. Both revered and mocked for its limited budget, set, and acting (all of which was balanced out by the obscene amount of self inflicted violence), the original Saw made quite the impact on cinematic America.

A year later, the much anticipated sequel hit theaters during that special time of the year when murder turns from an atrocity to good TV and people reach back into that dusty section of their video collection and pull out classics like Halloween and Nightmare On Elm Street. Needless to say, Saw II had an amazing opening weekend at the box office, and it was well deserved, though some major flaws kept it from achieving a reputation anything more than “a great gross-out flick.”

Opening with a grisly venus fly trap scene, Saw II made itself perfectly clear that it is not a film for even the remotely squeamish. As the plot advances, the protagonist Detective Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg: Dreamcatcher, The Sixth Sense), once a less than textbook police officer, now a pencil pusher desk cop, tracks downs the “elusive” Jigsaw (Tobin Bell: Saw, Mississippi Burning) with relative ease to an abandoned warehouse. There he discovers that the killer has eight people, one of which is Matthew’s son, trapped in a house somewhere and observed through scattered cameras. These prisoners have inhaled a deadly nerve gas and will die in a matter of hours unless they find the antidotes hidden around the house.

Enter the motley assortment of story-less characters, most of which who are basically just fodder for Jigsaw’s assorted traps and goodies he has laid around the house. As much as this rag tag group cries and screams as they stumble around Jigsaw’s twisted house of horrors, we can never really feel sorry for any of them. Half of them are hardened criminals who the audience feels deserves to die, while others don’t even earn themselves names or utter more complex sentences than “I found a door!” or “We’re all going to die!” Cut the number of prisoners in half and give them a back-story to let the audience identify with them, and then there would be a much greater sense of concern during the many scenes of torment, though the majority of the audience is more interested in the deaths of these individuals than their life stories.

Unfortunately, Saw II lacks the creativity of its predecessor. After the opening scene, the ingenuity of Jigsaw’s puzzles takes a major nosedive, leaving the majority of the characters to die through random acts of violence rather than the ironic and planned torture we learned to love from everyone’s favorite terminally ill murderer.

The main flaw of the movie, in my opinion, is the flip-flopping between the mad dash escape from the house and the tediously slow interrogation of Jigsaw by Detective Matthews. The audience is captivated, watching Jigsaw’s prisoners perform disgusting acts to save themselves, and then we’re abruptly dropped in the middle of a battle of wits between Jigsaw and the Matthews.

But all these flaws really have to do with the underlying plot of the movie, which matters very little to the target audience. The movie does have a very good twist ending going for it. Though not original, but definitely unexpected, it lives up to the phenomenal ending of the first Saw. Beautiful Fincher-esque visuals of grime and decay are prevalent throughout the house, adding greatly to the unsettling mood that makes every new room a horror, whether it contains a deadly trap or not. With Charlie Clouser of Nine Inch Nails fame, the composer for the original movie’s score, back for the sequel, the music adds a subtle touch of panic to each scene, placing the viewer right in house along with the victims.

Overall, as long as you don’t go into the movie looking for an amazing plot, you should leave happy. Fans of splatter flicks will have a field day with this movie, while the more artistically driven viewers will grumble about the downfall of American cinema as always.

3 out of 5