Don't bother to see 'Saw V'

After we watched every zombie movie we could find in the Columbia Basin, me and my buddy's great plan for the summer was to watch complete horror franchises.

Don't judge. While you were out talking to girls and getting tan, I was enriching myself with Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.

And where are your girls and skin cells now? Dead, that's where, while I'm still furious about Nightmare 2. After the brain damage subsided, I started to wonder: why don't we have horror franchises these days?

We have plenty of other terrible holdovers from the '80s, like those leg warmers and crimped hair you always see people walking around with. We might never have known what would it be like if we had a horror series of our own if Saw hadn't come along and answered that question with a resounding "It would be awful."

The Jigsaw Killer's latest massacre is, for him, something of a mixed bag: it takes down several cops on his case, but he ends up dead, too, taken down by hero cop Costas Mandylor.

Scott Patterson, the only other cop to survive the slaughter, smells a rat. Though he doesn't know it, five more people have been kidnapped and stuffed into a Jigsaw-esque torture dungeon -- and unless they can save themselves, Patterson's rogue investigation is the only thing that can bring them home.

"Rogue" might be a strong word for what Patterson is up to. Showing the deductive skills of eight Sherlock Holmeses packed into one personality-free set of street clothes, Patterson's entire search for the new killer consists of...shuffling papers. It's a bold move by writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, choosing to realistically depict the office drudgery of policework rather than going with something suspenseful, dangerous, or in any way interesting, and that choice sure doesn't pay off.

Wait, Patterson's search isn't realistic, either, considering he completes it over the span of about an hour. Or that time-compression could be the product of first-time director's David Hackl's hamfisted storytelling, a minor cinematic miracle which makes even the simplest of plots needlessly confusing.

And make no mistake, the plot is simple. Sometimes that's cool for a horror movie, like earlier this year when The Strangers was pretty much just a couple people terrorizing the hell out of a couple other people and also everyone watching it. It's way less cool here, where five connected strangers are kidnapped and brought together for reasons which don't begin to be explored until after most of them are dead and forgotten.

No biggie, though, because it turns out their entire backstory is as shallow as a damp sock. Jigsaw's philosophy of teaching people to appreciate life by torturing the bejesus out of them was never that deep, but at least it's an ethos. By Saw V, there's no understanding behind it, just parroting what came before.

Most of it's trash, then. But how about the bloodshed and mayhem? Excellent question. That's the first thing I ask whenever anyone recommends me a movie, book, or TV show: How graphic is its violence? Brutal enough to make me laugh, then feel bad? So creatively disgusting I kick my heels against my chair like a toddler?

Nah, no such luck. Just a few mechanical deaths sprinkled around as if they have to be there rather than that they want to be there.

A lot of the fun of watching horror franchises is stumbling on a fresh take on the series or a movie so wonderfully bad it's a mystery how the next one was ever made. Saw V is neither of these things. It's not worth the bar napkin it was scribbled on.

Grade: D-