All posts by The Kingston Executioner

The original Saw executed such a stunning and unexpected villain reveal - that the Jigsaw Killer was a cancer patient, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), hidden in plain sight - that the sequel had to pull out all the stops to have a chance of living up to it. For the majority of the movie it appears that Kramer is again working alone, no matter how implausible it might seem that a man increasingly ravaged by terminal cancer could set such a complex "game" up. But at the end of Saw II, it's revealed that Kramer had a secret apprentice helping him run the game all along: Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), the drug addict who Kramer tested in the original movie. Amanda appears to be trapped in Jigsaw's new game throughout the film, though at the end it's revealed that she's been working with Jigsaw ever since she survived her original game, all with the intention of carrying on Kramer's legacy after he dies. Basically, she was put in Saw II's central game as a ringer to keep nudging the test subjects in the right direction. It was a fun reveal that worked because the audience simply wasn't suspicious of Amanda at all, and though the "secret apprentice" twist was wildly overused in the later sequels, here it felt totally fresh.

The Saw series is something you either love or hate, and those who loved it were ecstatic when they found out a new movie was coming. Spiral promised a fresh plot, a different setting and, best of all, a brand new villain. But in the end, fans got a borderline average flick with a reveal so obvious it felt like a joke. During the film, you watch as Detective Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) and Detective William Schenk (Max Minghella) try to solve the mystery of a new killer who uses Jigsaw-like traps. Unfortunately, the killer was very clearly Schenk. The first clue came from Saw’s infamous love of twist endings, with surprise villains permeating the franchise. In Spiral, Schenk was the only character close enough to the protagonist to feel like a valid option. The movie tried to throw you off the scent by "killing him off", but his fake-out death didn't feature a trap. Why would someone die in a Saw film off-screen when they could produce some good old-fashioned gore? Additionally, he talked about his family a lot, yet you never actually got to see them? Why would that be, is it because they didn't exist? Oh yeah, probably! To make matters worse, those are only a few reasons why this twist was obvious, as there were somehow even more.