By Bob Grimm

The producers of the Saw franchise are looking for all sorts of ways to continue the series. They gave laugh man Chris Rock a crack at it with the subpar Spiral (2021), an attempt at a Jigsaw-less sequel.

However, Spiral faltered financially—so it was time to take craggy Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), with his droning voice and silly bike-riding puppet, out of his box again.

By my count, Jigsaw has died of terminal cancer 563 times in this series. He showed up in the first film, way back in 2004, deathly ill. He eventually died in one of the following chapters, but they’ve found ways to bring him back again and again.

Saw X tries for a fresh start by going back to near the beginning, just as David Gordon Green did with his Halloween (and will do again with his soon-to-be-released Exorcist movie). This film takes place directly after the original, before Saw 2, so it doesn’t disregard the existence of the other sequels like Green did with Halloween. This is just filling in a time gap near the beginning, so the other eight films remain canon.

This all falls into the category of “Who gives a shit?” for me, because I hate the Saw movies. That said, this one looked promising, and it was getting favorable reviews before I sat myself down for another helping of sadistic and extremely elaborate torture porn, Jigsaw-style.

I do declare: Saw X is the best film in the franchise. I also declare: It’s still not good.