If you can stomach the gore, Saw II is a well-made horror film.

One-part Silence Of The Lambs, one-part Ten Little Indians and still carrying a lasting dosage of Se7en, Saw II reveals a horror franchise to be reckoned with. A superior grade of actors and a virtuosic application of gore make the sequel more entertaining than the original even if the movie bogs down in it’s own Karo syrup blood and nebulous plot excursions. A group of eight strangers attempt to escape from a sealed house ingeniously booby-trapped by serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) while Detective Eric Mason (Donnie Wahlberg) attempts to rescue his teen son Daniel (Erik Knudsen) from among the trapped victims.

SAW II ( * * * )
Directed by Darren Lynn Bausman
Starring Tobin Bell, Lyriq Bent and Donnie Wahlberg.
(R, 91 mins.) At the Century Cinemas Del Monte Center, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas.

In the opening sequence, a man sits with a spring-loaded device attached to his head as he watches a videotape of his eye being implanted with a key to the contraption. Jigsaw taunts the man via intercom to slice open his eye and extract the key that will free him before the timed device impales his skull with innumerable spikes. The sequence gives a crucial clue to the anxious situation that the audience will be exposed to for the remainder of the increasingly gory thrill-ride.

Career Detective Eric Mason has an argument with his son that sets up the itching guilt that festers in him when he discovers that Daniel is among Jigsaw’s hostages. In a bold maneuver to get a leg up on their horror savvy audience, the filmmakers allow Mason and his S.W.A.T. team to uncover Jigsaw’s whereabouts and come face to face with our de facto Hannibal Lechter inside his hellish crack house lair. But the cops get much more than they bargained for because the terminally ill Jigsaw is running a live video feed from cameras inside the secured house where his victims run amok as poisonous gas creeps into their bodies.

It’s through this clever plot device that Jigsaw is able to command his interrogator’s attention and personally torment Detective Mason whose sins of planting evidence and physically abusing prisoners serve as Jigsaw’s motivation for this particular parlay.

Music video veteran Darren Lynn Bousman co-wrote the script for Saw II with Leigh Whannell (screenwriter and actor for Saw) and gets a more consistent level of performance from the actors than director James Wan achieved on the first movie. Although Saw II is Bousman’s feature film debut, the young director exhibits a facility for pacing and tone that enables the audience to trust him. Where a director like Rob Zombie alienates his audience, Bousman guides you like a master of ceremonies through a carefully designed exhibition of terror.  

The horror elements of the Saw franchise are based on key visceral ingredients of claustrophobia, inevitable death and a medieval fascination with mangled flesh and dismemberment. Nevertheless, it works against the audience’s potential for empathy that the victims here are ex-cons (however innocent), except for the boy protagonist who barely exerts any personality traits other than as a scared witness to unspeakable horrors.

The Saw films are members of an ilk of extreme horror movies like High Tension and Wolf Creek where victims are subjected to a nihilistic brand of brutal intimidation and fear. But the Saw films are different in that they have a presentational quality that function with a kind of winking humor.