jigsaw

A young artist travels to a remote Italian village to restore a painting in a small out-of-the-way church. As soon as he begins his work he receives threatening phone calls warning him against restoring the painting, and a friend who had some information about the original artist, is murdered by being pushed out of a window. Later on the artist meets a young teacher and they begin to have a romantic affair while he works on the painting, as the inhabitants of the village begin to make their plans for him known.

Nearly two-thirds of the way through "Saw 3D" there comes a scene wherein the primary target of one of Jigsaw's traps must extract two of his back molars in order to find a numerical code etched on them. Let's put aside the fact that etching numbers onto someone's back molars, while still in their mouth, without them realizing the numbers are there, goes well beyond the realm of fantastic. What's more interesting about the sequence is that it almost immediately begins to feel like a snickering metaphor for the "Saw" franchise.

"If it's Halloween, it must be 'Saw.'" That's what the commercials have been trumpeting. And being as this is the sixth straight fall to play host to a "Saw" release, it's hard to argue with the facts. That message's recipients, however, will likely be sharply divided on its intentions: celebratory rallying cry or menacing threat of inevitability.