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Jigsaw comes to us courtesy of the Full Moon/Tempe relationship and like most of those movies, Jigsaw is entertaining and enjoyable, but stuffed full of padding and lacking in a lot of action.
To give you an idea of what’s going on – 4 college students and their skeevy pretty boy professor are finishing their ‘final project’ for an ‘art’ class at, get this, junior college. Clearly we are working with the finest academia has to offer both in students and faculty. The basic premise of this project is that each person gets a body part of a manikin and they have to personalize it and make it their own. Once everyone is complete, they will meet at a bar (classy) and put together their ‘jigsaw puzzle’.
Each person brings their personalized part of the puzzle to the bar and we not only get to see their creation, but get a bit of the reason behind why their part looks the way it does, and along we way we are treated to snippets of each of the characters’ lives. We get everything from the boring doubty girl who seemingly has no reason for hers all the way to the slut girl who’s leg represents some crap about her father abusing her and her sister and then her sister killing herself. Homegirl made a promise to kill herself directly after her sister, but ‘wimped out’ and I guess as a result can only repay her internal debt by being a total whore.
They burn Jigsaw as a symbol of some wordy crap from the professor, he’s full of a lot of this, and everyone kind of splits off. We think we are going to get some good stuff when the slore girl strips down to her skivvies, but alas it’s a tease as nothing more, unfortunately because she is quite attractive, comes off.
Jigsaw somehow gets down from the cross he was burned on and now the killin starts. Aside from a special gift for our slutty friend, everyone gets it with Jigsaw’s circular saw arm and not only do they get waxed, a piece of their body is removed as well. Looks like Mr. Saw is trying to build his own human jigsaw.
That’s enough for the recap, now to get down to business.
Jigsaw is terrible. Absolutely terrible, there’s no question about that. But it has some charm to it. The acting falls into the campy-bad category. All of the characters are over-done and stereotyped to the ‘enth degree. This is another movie shot on DV, but like a lot of Full Moon movies from this period, it’s done pretty well. I think the lack of proper lighting certainly helps in creating a more realistic feel. Many people would see it as a detriment, but I really dig the washed out colors, it makes the movie seem more honest.
The music is decent enough with some bands ‘unleashing’ what are undoubtedly straight-from-mp3.com cuts and a select few jukebox tunes along the way. Aside from that, Jigsaw is pretty devoid of sound effects sans the saw and audio during the kill sequences which is acceptable enough. Speaking of killing, the sequences and the gore are both pretty well done given the budgetary restrictions.
I didn’t like the super-mechanicalness of the Jigsaw character I realize the intended effect, but he’s almost too robotic..a bad example of things being done way over the top. I also was not too keen on the fact that absolutely nothing really happens in the first 50 minutes of the movie. That seems to be something that hampered almost all of the Full Moon/Tempe movies. The formula for the group of characters is also way played out.
The DVD itself is also a huge disappointment. No features or audio selection options, just the movie and 4 trailers. It really seems as though someone let their kid do the DVD authoring as it offers nothing in the way of menu art or anything, just an annoying neon-green background and a flick of the DVD box.
A couple of quick notes before I wrap this up – Jigsaw shares a lot with Vengeance Of The Dead. It was filmed in the same location and even shares Sneaky Pete’s Bar and it’s owner in common. Oddly enough, the last review I did was for Vengeance so it was kind of strange to see the stuff back to back.
So..I like Jigsaw a lot, perhaps I am slightly biased about this one, as it was one of the first Full Moon movies I watched and really got me into these films. While it offers nothing in the way of creativity and is extremely shallow, with no character development I think you will find it to be a fun time. It’s an easy to watch movie and definitely has its share or so-bad-it’s-entertaining moments.
***1/2 out of 5.
