By Drew Turney

There’s lazy horror like ”Nightmare on Elm Street” and ”Friday the 13th”, where the slimmest of plot strands give rise to yet another sequel that begs even more disbelief, but at least in the ”Saw” franchise the plot makes an effort to tell a whole story, not just tack another spate of killings on the end to squeeze more money out of teenagers.

Jigsaw doesn’t make a miraculous recovery or prove himself as indestructible as Jason – as the film opens, he is indeed still dead (as his gruesome autopsy shows). But as soon as the surgeons find a cassette labelled ‘play me’ in his stomach, you know the race is one again.

Like the ”Pirates of the Caribbean” series, you’d have to sit down to watch the whole thing from beginning to end to keep abreast of the characters and what they have to do with each other, but the series has lost none of its power to make you squirm and want to look away. It delves right back into Jigsaw’s origin story, thrusts more hapless cops into his cat and mouse games and delivers on the gore in bucketloads, including some not scene in cinemas.

DVD EXTRAS
If that doesn’t please fans, two commentaries, featurettes and deleted scenes should.