Saw 3D

Saw 3D (released on home media as Saw: The Final Chapter) is a 2010 3D horror film directed by Kevin Greutert, written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, and starring Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Cary Elwes. It is the seventh and final installment of the Saw film series, and the only film in the series to be in 3D. The film focuses on a man who claims to be a Jigsaw survivor and writes a book detailing his experience, becoming a local celebrity. He soon finds himself part of a real Jigsaw game where he must ultimately save his wife. Meanwhile, Jill Tuck explains to an internal affairs officer that rogue Detective Hoffman is the man responsible for the recent Jigsaw games; Tuck is put under police protected custody while officers search for Hoffman.

An eighth installment was planned, but the decrease in the box office performance for Saw VI compared to previous installments led to Saw 3D being the final planned film in the series, and the plot concept for Saw VIII being incorporated into Saw 3D. Saw V director David Hackl was to direct the film, but two weeks before filming Lionsgate announced that Greutert, who directed the sixth film, would direct. Principal photography took place in Toronto, Ontario from February to April 2010 and was shot with the SI-3D digital camera system, as opposed to shooting with traditional cameras and later transferring to 3D in post-production.

Saw 3D was originally scheduled to be released on October 22, 2010, but was pushed back a week to October 29, 2010, in the United States and Canada; it was released a day earlier in the United Kingdom and Australia. The film was initially rated NC-17 (no children 17 and under admitted) by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and had to be edited and re-submitted six times to finally receive an R rating while in Australia, the film received an R18+ rating despite all the previous installments having an MA15+ for their theatrical release. Saw 3D opened at number one making over $22.5 million. It received largely negative reviews from critics.

Plot
In a flashback sequence following the first film, Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) crawls from the bathroom to find help after sawing off his foot. Along the way, he reaches a steam pipe and uses it to cauterize his ankle stump. In the present, Ryan (Jon Cor) and Brad (Sebastian Pigott) awaken in a storefront window in a shopping area in front of a crowd of people, their wrists bound to a worktable. In front of each man is a buzz saw, and their mutual lover, Dina (Anne Lee Greene) is suspended above a third saw. Jigsaw's puppet tells them that they can either kill one another or allow Dina to die, and after realizing her betrayal, they decide to save themselves and allow her to lower onto the saw, killing her.

Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell) goes to Matt Gibson (Chad Donella), an internal affairs detective at Mark Hoffman's (Costas Mandylor) precinct, and offers to incriminate Hoffman in exchange for immunity and protection. Meanwhile, Hoffman abducts four racist skinheads and places them in a trap in an abandoned junkyard that kills all of them. After a gathering of past Jigsaw survivors takes place, Hoffman abducts Bobby Dagen (Sean Patrick Flanery), a self-help guru who achieved fame and fortune by falsely stating that he survived a Jigsaw trap. Hoffman sends videos to Gibson throughout the film, offering cryptic clues to his location and promising to stop the games if Jill is given to him.

Bobby awakens in an abandoned insane asylum and is informed that his wife Joyce (Gina Holden) has also been abducted and will die if he does not save her in sixty minutes. After escaping a cage hanging over a floor of spikes, Dagen navigates his way through the asylum, finding his publicist Nina (Naomi Snieckus), his lawyer Suzanne (Rebecca Marshall) and his close friend Cale (Dean Armstrong) all in traps representing their respective sins. Despite his efforts to save them, all three are killed. Gibson soon discovers the location of the asylum and sends a SWAT team, who are sealed in one section of the asylum and killed by toxic gas. Gibson also finds Hoffman's command center, where he discovers that Hoffman has hacked the police security camera system, and is killed by automatic turret gun along with both of his men. Hoffman, who had been posing as one of the junkyard corpses, infiltrates police headquarters and kills Dr. Heffner (James Van Patten), Detective Rogers (Laurence Anthony) and several officers before finding Jill. After a brief struggle, he restrains her the same way she restrained him, then secures the original Reverse Bear-Trap to her head, which kills her.

After removing two teeth to retrieve a combination to a locked door, Dagen reaches Joyce and is forced to drive two hooks through his pectoral muscles, the trap he claimed to survive, then hoist himself up by the chains to deactivate her trap. However, the hooks rip through his muscles and he falls to the ground, and a brazen bull capsule slams shut around Joyce and burns her alive. Moments after Hoffman destroys his workshop, he is attacked and captured by three Pighead-masked figures and the leader reveals himself as Lawrence Gordon. Flashbacks reveal that John Kramer (Tobin Bell) found Gordon by the steam pipe and helped him recover, and Gordon had worked in secret with John ever since. Tasked to watch over Jill after John's death and to take action if anything happened to her, Gordon brings Hoffman to the bathroom from the first film and shackles him by the ankle. He throws away the hacksaw he had sawed his foot with, then leaves Hoffman to die.

Development
Variety reported in July 2009 that Lionsgate greenlit Saw VII and announced David Hackl would return to direct, his last film being Saw V. Producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules, and writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan also returned. Brian Gedge replaced series' cinematographer David Armstrong. Pre-production began on September 14, 2009. According to Melton, there were plans to title the film Saw: Endgame.[5] Originally two sequels were planned after the sixth, but in December 2009 Melton stated in a podcast interview with the UK radio station Demon FM that Saw VII was the final installment and would address unanswered questions from previous Saw films, such as the fate of the first film's protagonist Dr. Lawrence Gordon and other Jigsaw survivors from previous films, while bringing a final resolution to the series. The storyline for a Saw VIII was combined into Saw VII; this decision was primarily due to Saw VI ' s below average box office performance. On July 22, 2010 in an interview with USA Today the producers confirmed that Saw VII will officially end the film series. Burg told Reuters that, "In every Saw movie, we left questions open and in Saw VII we answer every question the audience has ever had". He added that, "even new viewers will be able to follow and get caught up to speed".

In January 2010, Kevin Greutert, who made his directorial debut with the sixth film, was about to begin work on Paramount's Paranormal Activity 2 when Twisted Pictures suddenly dismissed Hackl and forced Greutert on the project by exercising a "contractual clause" in his contract, much to Greutert's dismay. When Greutert arrived on set two weeks before filming began, he performed a "compressive re-write" of the script. Melton explained that, "He has a lot of ideas, but it’s a bit hard and extreme to implement all of these ideas because sets have been built, people have been cast, props have been bought or created, and with the Saw films they are so specific in set design because of the traps. It becomes very problematic and difficult to change things a whole bunch right in the middle of it".

Casting
Casting began in mid-December 2009. On February 22, 2010, Cary Elwes was listed on the Toronto Film & Television's official list of personnel website for Saw 3D but on March 8 his name along with other cast members were removed from the list. The following month, Lionsgate confirmed his reprisal of the role of Lawrence Gordon, last seen in the first film. Dunstan and Melton said that Elwes filmed new scenes. The filmmakers wanted to bring Elwes back earlier, but Elwes wanted to wait until the last film. He described his character as having Stockholm syndrome. Chad Donella appeared in the film as Internal Affairs Detective Gibson, who was also Hoffman's former partner.

Gabby West, who won the second season of Scream Queens, plays Kara in the film. Chester Bennington, the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band Linkin Park, has a role in the film playing Evan, a white power skinhead. Bennington met with an acting coach to prepare for his role. He said, "It was actually a little more difficult than I expected because it took a lot for me to figure out how to portray this guy and what exactly his motives were going to be throughout. I thought maybe I was overthinking it, and I met with this really great acting coach who helped me walk through and make sense of the, 'Motivation' ". Devon Bostick was offered to reprise his role as Brent from Saw VI, but turned it down due to scheduling conflicts.

Filming in 3D
Saw 3D was shot entirely in RealD 3D using the SI-3D digital camera system; rather than filming on set traditionally and later transferring the footage to 3D. Before choosing 3D, Burg and others viewed a minute of the original Saw film rendered in 3D and were pleased, which led to them choosing 3D for the seventh film. The sets and traps were designed to take advantage of 3D. To continue the fast pace of the previous films, the SI-3D cameras' lightweight allowed three-quarters of film to be shot handheld. Saw 3D was Greutert's first time directing a 3D film. He said in an interview with Popular Mechanics that composing a shot in 3D was tricky compared to 2D; he explained, "If you've got both cameras looking at a subject and there's a very bright sheen on the side of the person's arm that only one camera can see, there's a good chance that when you look at a composite of the two images that sheen will not register in 3D space. It looks like a mistake. These things aren't an issue at all in 2D but in 3D are obsessively problematic". Given the cost of filming in 3D, Greutert said the budget was $17 million, the most expensive of the series. Principal photography began on February 8, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario and wrapped on April 12, 2010.

Trap
Filming of the trap scenes, which was done last, began in March. The film's opening trap scene was filmed at Metro Hall in Toronto, Ontario, just outside of Roy Thomson Hall, and included 400 extras. In the trap, the circular saw blades were actually real and functional, but safety precautions were taken for the actors. One actor that was in the trap, Jon Cor, told Demon FM that he had scars on his hands from the shackles, and said the other actors, Sebastian Pigott chipped his tooth and Anne Lee Greene lost the feeling in her feet and had to receive medical attention. Producer Oren Koules told horror news website ShockTilYouDrop.com that there are eleven traps in the film, the most ever in the franchise. There is one "trap" scene in the film that producers would not allow in previous Saw films that they described as "too violent", "too disgusting", and "just wrong". Melton later confirmed that was the "Garage Trap", which involved a car and sets off a "chain reaction" with other characters. Gabby West was part of the trap. She told VH1, "They molded my entire face, and basically my entire upper body after my belly button. They put layers and layers of different materials on you and you have two straws in your nose so you can breathe. It was so scary! They put so much of it on, you can't see and they put it in your ears so you can barely hear anything. That was part of the prep for the film, which was really cool, to have a dummy made of yourself. But scary."

Crew

 * Kevin Greutert – director
 * Gregg Hoffman – producer
 * Mark Burg – producer
 * Oren Koules – producer
 * Patrick Melton – screenwriter
 * Marcus Dunstan – screenwriter
 * Brian Gedge – cinematographer
 * Andrew Coutts – editor
 * Charlie Clouser – music composer
 * Anthony A. Ianni – production designer
 * Peter Grundy – art director
 * Alex Kavanagh – costume designer

Music
The Saw 3D soundtrack is "inspired by the film" and features music from rock bands including Dir En Grey, Boom Boom Satellites, Saliva, Krokus, Hinder, Karnivool, My Darkest Days and Chester Bennington's Dead By Sunrise. It was released through SonyMusic Independent Network (SIN) and Artists' Addiction Records on October 26, 2010. The film's score was composed by Charlie Clouser and released on iTunes through Evolution Music Partners on November 2, 2010.

Marketing
On July 8, 2010, in some press materials for San Diego Comic-Con, the film was referred to as Saw 3D: The Traps Come Alive, which led to the media assuming it was the final name. The following day, Burg and Koules said that "The Traps Come Alive" was simply a tagline that had been misinterpreted as part of the title. Koules said that if they included the seventh roman numeral followed by "3D" (Saw VII 3D), it would have been "cumbersome" and not made the impact they wanted. He explained, "It was such a process in 3D, so much hard work was put in. Saw VII 3D is too much. This is like a new movie. [...]"

In the same interview, the producers addressed Saw ' s presence at Comic-Con 2010 in San Diego. They said that the footage that was going to be used for the convention could not get approved for the audience; Koules explained, "It's going to be different than what we've done before, we're going to be at Comic-Con but we're not in Comic-Con"." The Comic-Con teaser trailer was released via IGN on July 22, 2010. The next day of the convention, the first eight minutes of the film were screened for the press and a few fans.

The trailer shown in the United Kingdom during a break from The Gadget Show was banned after a 10 year-old child complained that it was "distressing" and "inappropriately scheduled". Clearcast had cleared the trailer for 19:00 GMT, but did not actually air until 20:29. In one scene of the trailer people in a cinema become trapped to the seats by metal restraints with a hand coming through the screen pulling a person in. The Advertising Standards Authority said it was "likely to cause distress to young children". In Massachusetts a branch of Showcase Cinemas showed Saw 3D instead of the cartoon Megamind, which was being watched by a 7 year-old celebrating a birthday. It took several minutes before the cinema employees fixed the mistake.

Release
Saw 3D was distributed theatrically by Lionsgate Entertainment in the United States and through Maple Pictures in Canada. The film was originally scheduled to be released on October 22, 2010, but in July 2010 the date was pushed back to October 29. It also had preview screenings on October 28, 2010 in 2,000 locations. Since the release of Saw IV, each film has been released a day earlier in Australia and New Zealand; Saw 3D continued the tradition in Australia, though the New Zealand release was not released until March 3, 2011. The film was initially rated NC-17 (no children 17 and under admitted) by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and had to be edited and re-submitted six times to secure an R rating. In Australia, the Australian Classification Board gave a heavy R18+ (restricted to 18 and over) for "high impact violence, blood and gore", whereas all previous Saw films were rated MA15+.

Home Media
Burg said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on October 25, 2010 that the DVD will only be released in the 2D version. Lionsgate Home Entertainment released Saw 3D: The Final Chapter on January 25, 2011 in three versions. The first is a standard DVD release consisting of the theatrical version of the film, a selection of bonus features and a second disc with a digital copy; a second edition is a 2D combo pack that includes an unrated Blu-ray, DVD and digital copy of the film. The last edition of the release is a 3D combo pack consisting of an unrated Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital copy version of the film. According to the Nielsen VideoScan chart, the DVD and Blu-ray formats placed number three in its first week.

Box Office
Saw 3D had preview screenings on October 28, 2010 in 2,000 locations and made $1.7 million. It opened in wide release the following day in 2,808 locations playing on 3,500 screens, the second smallest release behind the first Saw. The film earned $8,976,000—$3,197 per theater its opening day taking the number one spot from Paranormal Activity 2. It grossed $22,530,123—$8,024 per theater its opening Halloween weekend, with 92% of tickets coming from more than 2,100 3D-equipped locations and 57% of the audience was under the age of 25. It had the fifth best opening weekend in the Saw series. After only four days of wide release Saw 3D had out-grossed Saw VI's $27.7 million final domestic gross. On its second weekend the film dropped 66% in ticket sales and made $7,731,075—$2,753 per theater. It moved down to the number five spot with Megamind taking its number one spot. By its third weekend it had a 63% decrease in ticket sales and was removed from 832 theaters, grossing $2,862,449—1,976 per theater. On the fourth weekend it took in $846,029—$1,050 and was removed from a further 1,170 theaters. For the Thanksgiving 5-day weekend, Saw 3D earned $182,025—$1,255 per theater, a 79% drop in ticket sales and was removed from an additional 661 theaters. Saw 3D was closed out of theaters on December 2, 2010, after 35 days of release in the United States and Canada

Saw 3D opened in 25 territories with $14.4 million (including preview screenings) placing first place in the United Kingdom (UK) with $5.8 million, beating Saw III ' s $4.7 million UK opening. It opened in second place in Russia with $2.2 million; Australia and Japan grossed $909,000 and $864,800, respectively. Saw 3D grossed $12,878,181 in the UK, Ireland and Malta; $10,999,677 in Germany; $7,037,160 in Italy; $5,370,092 in Russia; and $2,424,417 in Australia. The film has grossed $45,710,178 in the United States and Canada, with $90,440,256 in other markets, for a worldwide total of $136,150,434. This makes Saw 3D the highest grossing film in the series in the foreign market. Also, it made more than double the amount of the previous installment Saw VI and is the most successful film in the franchise since Saw IV.

Critical Response
As with the previous four Saw films, Saw 3D was not screened in advance for critics. The film received largely negative reviews from film critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 10% of 67 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 3.1 out of 10, making it the poorest reviewed film in the series.[72] On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a rating score of 24, based on 17 reviews. CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade moviegoers gave the film was a B minus on an A plus to F scale.

Luke Thompson of E! Online gave the film a "B". He called the film's gore "over-the-top" and "in your face" while admitting the film had an "unusual amount of self-parody". He said the central storyline of the films was beginning to feel "played out". Rob Nelson of Variety gave the film a negative review. He called the film "relentlessly repugnant" that would please fans, but offer no surprise. He went on to say, "Apart from these limb-pulling setpieces, tech credits appear fairly shoddy, as do any 3D effects that don't include flying viscera. The editing relies on lazy flashbacks, while the dialogue remains as horrific as the killings." Kim Newman of Empire gave the film two out of five stars, calling it a "a step down from last year’s much more pointed Saw VI". He criticized the repetition of the plot but thought bringing back Jigsaw survivors was a "nice idea". He closed his review with, "There are a scattering of infallibly cringe-making horrors, but on the whole Saw 3D could do with more depth".

Eric Goldman of IGN Movies gave the film two out of five stars. He was unhappy with the little screen time Bell and Elwes had been given, saying that the time the film did spend with them, didn't have much impact. He said the traps were a step down from Saw VI, but did point out his favorite and highlight of the film as the "garage trap". About the film's 3D effects, Goldman said "The 3D is used as you might expect it to be - which is to say, this is no James Cameron immersive experience. Instead, blades jut out of the screen, and there is some fun had with blood and guts literally shooting forward at several points". Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a mixed review. He said Saw 3D is "consistent both stylistically and thematically with previous editions", but said most of the film's traps lack the "Rube Goldberg-style cleverness that marked the series". Scheck went on to say that it was "unfortunate" the creators killed Bell's character so early in the series and called Mandylor's character (Hoffman) an "exceedingly bland stand-in". He called the visual impact of the 3D "negligible".

Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel gave the film one out of five stars saying, "It’s all bunk and has been for years. These are all no-win scenarios. Whatever moral lessons were presented in the earliest Saw films seem to have been dispensed with as the movies grow more and more gruesome, with filmmakers caught up in 'What would it look like if somebody’s jaw was ripped out, or their skin was glued to a car seat?' Pandering to the 'Cool, let’s see that again' crowd has made Lionsgate rich but done nothing for this unendurable endurance contest of this long-enduring film franchise". Mike Hale of The New York Times called the film the most "straightforward" of the series and the "most consistently (though not inventively) violent". He ended his review saying, "If you see the film in a theater equipped with RealD 3D and Dolby sound, you’ll come away with a pretty good idea of what it would feel like to have flying body parts hit you in the face".

Elizabeth Weitzman of the New York Daily News gave the film one out of five stars. She criticized the lack of Bell's screentime saying, "What the filmmakers of the last four Saw movies have somehow overlooked is that Tobin Bell's Jigsaw is the linchpin of these films. It's right there in the title, so you'd think they'd realize what they lost when they killed him off in Saw III. But it's been downhill ever since, and we hit bottom today". She admitted that the performances have become "painfully stilted" and called the script "a jumble of nothing punctuated by barely-trying death traps". She went on to say, "It's also disappointing to watch a once-original franchise morph into a generic slasher series, in which random people are killed in banal ways just to up the body count" and closed her review with, "No matter how much money The Final Chapter makes over Halloween weekend, it's time to acknowledge that this game is over".

Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe called the film the "most gruesome and least coherent of the seven movies". He felt that some of the film's "games" were just randomly forced into the film, saying that kind of "episodic approach" and 3D works for a "far more innovative series like Jackass 3D". Morris closed his review by saying "This alleged final edition trashes the perverse morality of [Jigsaw's] legacy to make him the Jerry Springer of gore". Jason Anderson of the Toronto Star gave the film two out of four stars. He praised Saw 3D ' s plot for not being as confusing as previous films, for which he described as having to "generally require an encyclopedic knowledge of the series' many plot strands" in order to understand them. He thought Greutert gave the film a "pulpy energy" and described the film's traps and gore as having an "unpretentious sensibility" to films by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Alan Jones of the Radio Times gave the film a positive review saying, "though the film initially borders on parody, once the ever-ingenious trapping begins — using fishhooks, superglue, ovens and dental equipment — the chills run on turbo drive right through to the greatest hits flashback finale". He implied that the "shock scenarios" were borrowed from sources such as, A Man Called Horse and the work of Lucio Fulci. Jones said the 3D did not add to the experience saying "the CGI blood splatter something of a distraction to the almost Shakespearean crescendo of anguish and carnage".