If you haven’t seen Saw, stop reading this and move your pale ass in front of a television where you can do so.  Immediately.  There’s no need to begin discussing Saw II if you’re not intimately familiar with the original, just like there’s no point in seeing the second film if you’ve not mastered the first, since the importance of the finale will be completely lost on you and your sorry little brain.

Now that we’ve lost the deadwood, we can get down to brass tacks (what the hell does that mean, anyway?).  Saw II ain’t as good as Saw, but it’s still way better than the rest of the slash-by-number horror films we’ve seen so far in 2005.  The gimmicks – Cube-like "immunity challenges" designed by a criminally-insane Jeff Probst – are the same.  Most of the talent behind the camera is the same.  Just about all of the characters who survived the first picture have returned (hint: there aren’t many).  Like the original, the acting here is laughable, and the police interrogation scenes are filled with enough clichés to threaten certain derailment.  The only thing that’s missing is that awesome feeling of surprise that somebody finally made a horror film that’s actually horrifying.  Because none of this stuff is as much of a surprise this time around.

My only other complaint is that Saw II’s story is even less plausible in this incarnation.  The movie’s first grisly death taunts Detective Eric Mason (Donnie Wahlberg; now officially twice the actor brother Marky will ever be) to catch the wily Jigsaw, leaving an obvious clue about how he should do so.  Ten minutes into the proceedings, Jigsaw’s sickly alter-ego (Tobin Bell) is in police custody, but that doesn’t stop him from unleashing his carefully-constructed plan to toy with Mason.

The cops find a bank of monitors, which show a group of people trapped inside a house of horrors complete with a steady stream of poisonous gas that will lead to death via bleeding from the ears and rectum; and a series of the aforementioned immunity challenges (literally) that will grant winners a hypodermic needle full of the poison’s antidote.  They’re a Rainbow Coalition of photogenic youngsters, including Mason’s rebellious teenage son (Erik Knudsen), the young woman who managed to best Jigsaw’s game in Saw (Shawnee Smith), and a ‘roid-rage freak who looks like he should be kicking someone’s ass in a Yankees Stadium men’s room (Franky G).  The clock starts ticking, the hands start wringing, and somewhere in there, we get to learn the Origin of Jigsaw, too.

The connection between the prisoners, though quite obvious, requires a distracting suspension of belief that made my brain start picking apart other aspects of the script instead of filling me with dread and wonder like its older brother did last fall.  I don’t want to get into any of that here, since it all involves spoiler information.  Saw II is still definitely worth checking out, and here’s to hoping its viewers are still too dim to carry out any kind of Jigsaw copycat killings.

1:33 –

for grisly violence and gore, terror, language and drug content