When I first heard that there was to be a Saw IV, I felt a kind of trembly panic deep in my gut.  I had enjoyed the Saw series, of course, but I had thought that the trilogy aspect of it was just fine.  Especially given the ending of Saw III, in which large chunks of the main cast had gone the way of the dodo, it was going to be a tricky proposition to get everybody back in the game.

How would they address this question?  How would they carry on?

I have no idea.  I don’t think THEY even knew.

Saw IV shows us, firsthand, that Jigsaw couldn’t be more dead.  So very dead, in fact, that he’s on an autopsy table.  But when they do the Y-cut, they discover, deep inside his stomach, a Play Me cassette sealed in candle wax.  Now, Sergeant Rigg is up to bat, working his way through (almost like the innocent bystander of the third installment) a series of games in which he is only peripherally involved in a bid to rescue a kidnapped Detective Hoffman and Detective Matthews from one of Jigsaw’s games.

But Jigsaw’s…dead…

You can see the problem here.  In order to counter it, they’re going to engage in a baffling series of flashbacks and other associated plot mechanics, to try and tell a story of how a serial killer can somehow live on through his copycats.

You could almost smell the desperation in this one.  They were trying, valiantly, to set something up here, and the problem is, it just plain old didn’t WORK.  The narrative was left confused, and trying to bring in Jigsaw’s menace without Jigsaw was a wasted effort.

The Screenhead Ten Scale scoffs at this pathetic installment and gives it an all too appropriate four out of ten.  It wasn’t unwatchable, but it was the worst installment in the entire series.