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Talk about Eye Scream...
Once again, Jigsaw has created plenty of new traps, with some old favourites like the Bathroom coming back as seen from teaser images and the trailer.
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In General
- The fact that a group of people are scamming innocent cancer patients out of their money while tricking them into thinking their cancer has been cured is a level of Realism-Induced Horror that's almost as horrifying as the traps themselves, and a frightful reminder of the Humans Are Bastards moral common to the franchise.
- As John later reveals while confronting them, over the last 8 years they had done this to 34 people. And the most gut wrenching part? Amanda reveals that she looked up all those past patients, and every single one of them is dead.
- Dr. Cecilia Pederson quickly proves herself to be among the most (if not the most) vile characters in the entire franchise, surpassing even the likes of Anna from Jigsaw. The sheer callousness she displays throughout the film is disturbing; while there's horrific gore, she calmly watches it and then reveals herself to be even worse than John.
- For starters, she is the mastermind behind the scam that involves tricking cancer patients into thinking they've been cured, all for her own selfish gain. Unlike any of her subordinate and/or fellow conspirators, she shows no remorse for her actions.
- She disembowels the (dead) Valentina to use her intestines as a rope. You may forgive on this singular instance, since Valentina was already dead and she *was* trying to use it to get free from the traps, however...
- She murders Gabriela (who survived her trap) to stop her from exposing her crimes. Gabriela was the most sympathetic of the film's trap victims, with even Amanda taking pity on her, but that didn't stop Pederson from straight-up murdering her to save her own skin. And if that wasn't enough, she also callously remarks that when her companions died she was actually happy, as it would have been one less person to split the bounty with.
- It’s heavily implied that this is the start of Amanda’s nihilism that we see in Saw 3. Seeing the absolute worst of humanity who cannot be redeemed, starting with Cecilia.
- Perhaps her most cruel action occurs near the end of the film, when she not only puts Kramer in a trap, she also abducts an innocent child (specifically Carlos, the one John had met at the beginning of the movie) and puts him in the same trap, purely to spite Kramer.
- This trap, by the way, involves Waterboarding both people inside it with blood until one of them dies from oxygen deprivation. Waterboarding is a form of torture so brutal it’s banned by many governments for being excruciatingly painful. While one could argue John deserved to go through what he puts his victims through, poor Carlos, an innocent child, certainly didn’t.
Traps
- The Eye Vacuum Trap as shown in the page image. Granted it's just John having a twisted Fantasy Sequence, but still...
- First alluded to by the teaser poster (which shows the victim having an agonized expression on his face), as well as confirmed in the trailer, it features a hospital janitor having weird pseudo-goggles forced over his eyes connected to hoses. As confirmed as early as a sneak peek, if he doesn't break all five fingers on his right hand in 60 seconds, the hoses will suck his eyeballs out the sockets!
- If you look closely
, as the vacuum starts up, the victim's eyes start to bulge out of his sockets. - Even after this trap was revealed to be an Imagine Spot from John watching the janitor attempting to steal a patient's belongings, the entire situation remains horrifying for one reason: This is how John’s mind works. Make a mistake? Do something that Kramer disapproves of while he’s there to witness it? He is literally imagining your torturous death as we speak.
- The Pipe Bomb Trap. Diego is strapped into a chair and has scalpels duct-taped to his hands. Doesn't sound so bad, right? He then finds that John has lashed a pipe bomb to each of his forearms using wires that the scalpels can't cut. The only way for Diego to save himself is by cutting away enough flesh from his arms to let him slip the bombs off. He eventually is forced to use his teeth to pull one bomb free. Fortunately, he manages to survive the ordeal.
- Usually, John is somewhat detached from his victims. Here? We are ‘treated’ to seeing the kind of traps that John puts victims who have personally wronged him and robbed him of hope through. The results are some of the most torturous and unforgiving traps in the Saw franchise.
- John has shown, on some level, sympathy for even the worst people out there, and at least giving them some opportunity to survive and learn from their mistakes. This has included even other people who have, on some level, personally wronged him, like Cecil, Mitch, Logan and William. Cecilia and her team get to see what John's like when his only motive is retribution.
- The Bone Marrow Trap. Possibly the most brutal Saw trap since The Rack or the Bedroom trap. Valentina is placed in a wire saw device that will decapitate her if she doesn’t escape in 3 minutes. Her means of escape? She has to cut her own leg off with a Gigli saw, then immediately stick a bone marrow pump in the bloody stump and extract 3 ounces of bone marrow in time. Valentina does all of this, screaming in painfully realistic agony the whole time, only to barely not make it by about a gram of bone marrow, causing her to get well, decapitated, and not quickly either, the device moved slowly and starts with her neck, leaving her to feel the whole thing. Her body then flops onto the floor in 3 pieces. Yuck.
- Another particularly gruesome example is the Brain Surgery Trap.
- It involves a person restrained in a chair, who has to rip out part of their own brain with a bone cutter and dump it into an enzyme where it will dissolve to escape. If that wasn't enough, there's a very brief close-up of the victim, Mateo, drilling into the back of his own head as everyone else looks on, horrified. The part where he cuts out the piece of the brain itself is also terribly realistic and watery.
- Mateo's death is no picnic, either. It turns out the piece of brain he cuts out just isn't large enough to pass the test. The mask he's rigged up to is lined with heating coils that snap shut on his face, burning him to death as he screams in agony. We don't see the aftermath, but that's probably a blessing… or maybe a curse?
- The Radiation Trap. Gabriella is lifted up into the air by an arm and chained to the ground by one of her legs and is in front of a massive radiation machine blasting her, which is also increasing in power every minute. She is forced to break both of her shackled limbs with a sledgehammer in order to get away. Cecilia, in a rare moment of decency tells her to break her foot to swing out of the way, and she does so, but John prepared for this and moves the machine to her new position, and it begins burning her again. When she breaks her arm to free herself, she collapses to the ground. Her prone, broken body, along with her radiation burns, are painful to look at.
- The Bloodboarding trap. Possibly the most disgusting trap since the Pig Vat, involving, well, waterboarding someone with fetid animal blood, until either one person in the trap dies or the emergency exit condition is triggered. Not just incredibly painful, with waterboarding being a UN-barred form of torture widely condemned for being needlessly painful and traumatising, but also utterly disgusting. Imagine how that congealed blood tastes while you’re being drowned in it. The worst part? A child has to go through this along with John, thanks to Cecilia’s pettiness.
- The Gas Chamber might not strike you as this, especially since it comes as a moment of relief in the overall plot and the victims utterly deserved every second of it, but imagine having to beat your lover to death to be able to breathe, in a room full of deadly corrosive gas, that painfully melts your skin to the bone and kills you by melting your lungs? It’s really horrifying when you think about it.
Other
- Valentina's near-rape by a prostitution client. Although it never goes further than an attempt, it's legitmately distressing to watch... Amanda shows up and takes out the guy before he can do anything to Valentina, but given what happens next, Valentina probably wished she didn't.
