Starring Tobin Bell, Sean Patrick Flanery, and Cary Elwes. Rated 18A. Now playing

Saw 3D is the seventh Saw I’ve seen, and maybe the sickest—which is exactly what I said about Saw VI. They’ve also been calling Saw 3D “the final Saw” in the trailers, but I’m sure that’ll depend on box-office profits. Jason Voorhees’s fourth outing was titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, but that didn’t stop him from slaughtering folks on a spaceship six flicks later.

If Saw 3D is the last entry in the franchise, its makers are going out with a bang—as in an explosion of human suffering and flying body parts. The movie opens with a flashback to the original Saw as Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes) drags himself along a grimy floor after removing his own foot with a hacksaw. Returning Saw VI director Kevin Greutert quickly demonstrates where he’s headed artistically by having the poor sap cauterize his fresh stump against a grungy, boiling-hot pipe.

The indecipherable “plot” revolves around celebrity author Bobby (Sean Patrick Flanery), who’s doing the talk-show circuit, claiming to be one of the few survivors of the twisted traps set by mad genius Jigsaw (Tobin Bell). But because that fiendish moralizer hates liars, Bobby is captured and forced to run an obstacle course to try and save the four people closest to him from being diabolically offed.

As always with Saw films, the real stars are not the actors themselves but Jigsaw’s intricate, over-the-top devices of pain and death. That said, a high-tech contraption that drives steel spikes into a bound victim’s neck at a speed determined by the decibel readings of her screams proves no more menacing than the common pair of pliers another victim uses to remove his own molars. Hopefully, that type of realization will bring an end to this series’ mechanized torture porn and save us all from the potential anguish of next Halloween’s Saw: A New Beginning—Jigsaw’s Gettin’ Jiggy Again.

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