October Horror Challenge 2023 #66: "Saw X"

i heard this movie was coming out and that it would retcon the whole Saw franchise and pretend that the fourth through the seventh movies never happened and it's supposed to take place somewhere between the first movie and the second, and that made me even more excited to see it. Sometimes I like to pretend that the fourth through the seventh movies never happened too, so i get it. I was ready for another gory splatterfest like the Saw movies are famous for, so I was eager to see this movie in theaters like i saw parts 4 and 5 (can you believe this franchise has ten movies in it already? and they're still making enough money to be released theatrically instead of just direct to video). I convinced my friend that we needed to see this movie, so last night we drove to the theater and watched it.

It's going to be really hard to summarize this movie without giving too much away and spoiling the experience for the rest of you, but I'm going to try. So in this movie, Tobin Bell plays John Kramer, the infamous Jigsaw killer. He'salso pretty weak and feeble in this movie, since he's dying of brain cancer. He hears about an experimental treatment and travels to Mexico in hopes of finding a cure that will save him. Unfortunately, things don't go according to plan, and Jigsaw is forced to come out of early retirement to get retribution and punish those who are guilty once again. Will Jigsaw's plan succeed? Will The guilty parties learn their lesson, or will they die painful deaths?

Everone looks so much older in this movie. And they should, because it's been almost 20 years since the original "Saw" came out. I know for the purposes of this movie it's supposed to be taking place sometime between the first and the second movie, but all the actors look 20 years older. It's a small thing, but it really distracted me while i was trying to enjoy the movie. If that's the worst thing i can say about this movie, though, that's pretty high praise. When you take into account what a tangled mess these movies became by part 7, it's remarkable that the tenth movie in this series is so good. The other sequels got worse and worse with the gore as they yried to one-up each other and be gorrierand grosser with each new movie, particularly in the opening sequences of the movies that were always drenched in blood, but this movie takes a step back from that. Don't worry, this movie has plenty of gore, but this time around the filmmakers too a page from the first movie's book and made the gore actually relevant to the plot, which was a refreshing change frome gore for gore's sake. I appreciated this movie a lot. If you see it, make sure you stick around after the end credits, because there's a scene hidden among the end credite and everyone in our theater missed it except for my friend and i, because we were the only ones who stuck around.