The Top Six Saw Traps [With Saw 3D Opening Today, We Take A Look At Six Of The Best Bits Of Engineering From The Popular Saw Films]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 29. October 2010 under: Audio,Visual

Today, folks, the Saw series supposedly reaches its grand climax. It’s been seven years in the making and it’s gone through a whole lot of twists and turns, some of which made sense, in retrospect. But for all the reasons to watch Saw–the storyline, the jockeying for position among Jigsaw’s many potential replacements, the blood-soaked gore feast–there’s only one reason for us to watch it: amateur mechanical engineering.

I’m talking here, of course, about the gadget-intensive portion of the Saw series, the thing that really made Saw what it is today–the traps. And today, in honor of the last Saw title, we take a look at the top six traps of the Saw series. Each movie brings out its best trap, and there’s only one caveat: nothing from Saw 3D made it onto this list, as we’re not going to spoiler anything for those of you who haven’t seen it yet. It’s one through six only, one trap from each movie.

6. The Flammable Jelly Trap

The first Saw gave us a look at a variety of different traps, but the first Saw’s best had to be the Flammable Jelly Trap. Also called “The Combination Safe”, it begins with a guy stripped naked and put in a room with a combination safe and a floor covered in broken glass. The room is pitch black and the man has a candle, and he’s got a slow-acting poison in his system. He can get out of the room by finding the combination to the safe, which is written on the walls around him. Only problem? He’s covered in a flammable jelly, and the walls are covered with numbers. Actually figuring out which set of numbers opened the safe would have been hard enough, but the time limit and the broken glass on the floor made this one downright impossible, or at least close to it.

5. The Magnum Eyehole

The Magnum Eyehole wasn’t so much a trap as it was a little surprise thrown in for extra fun, but considering that it was an automated killing machine made up of a revolver and bicycle parts makes it something different. Sure, the needle pit was a skin-crawling example of horror, and I think most anyone could appreciate the subtlety and easy-in-retrospect workings of the razor box, but the Magnum Eyehole took everyone by surprise. After all, who expects to get shot in the head after sticking a key in a lock? Sure, everyone involved was warned against using the key in the lock, and Jigsaw was never anything but scrupulously honest, but still, a definite surprise. It was indeed a golden example of amateur mechanical engineering at its finest, and the best trap of Saw II.

4. The Rack

Sure, there were a lot of traps in Saw III, from the various set that Jeff Reinhart witnessed to Amanda’s unwinnable traps, but clearly, the biggest trap of them all was Jigsaw’s last trap before his death, the Rack. Designed to twist limbs a quarter turn on a regular, timed basis until the limbs in question severed and the victim bled out, the Rack was both an amazing machine and the most imposing figure in the film. Plus, it’s also one of the only traps that Jigsaw personally identifies as a “particular favorite”, so it’s got to get the mention.

3. The Ice Block Trap

It was actually tougher to pick out the trap of choice for Saw IV, being as Jigsaw’s first trap, the Knife Chair, showed up in this one and thus should have received special mention in its own right (huh…guess it just did!) But the clear winner had to be the Ice Block Trap. As both timer and implement of death, the three ice blocks involved in the Ice Block Trap had the variety and the sheer impact (those last couple minutes when the ice blocks slammed together were downright eye-popping) to make this one the trap of choice for Saw IV. It also gets a lot of bonus credit for introducing Detective Hoffman as one of the new villains of the Saw franchise by showing us how he’d arranged the trap such that only Detective Matthews was only really in danger the entire time.

2. The Blade Table

The biggest surprise of Saw V easily came from The Blade Table, a trap that showed how the entire movie could have been different if the so-called “Fatal Five” had worked together instead of against each other. Not only was it the biggest surprise of Saw V, it might well have been one of the–if not absolutely the–biggest surprises in the in the entire series. The Blade Table is about what it sounds like–a table lined with a row of blades connected to a ten pint beaker, which had to be filled with “fluid” in a rapid fashion in order to disengage a door lock. The key here was, had the original five survived to the end, a feat which was actually possible given the way the traps leading up to it had been set up, they each would have had to give up just two pints of blood each, which would be about double the amount taken at a blood donation. But considering only two people survived to the end of the trap series, they had to each give five pints, which represents about half of their total blood supply at any given time.

1. The Carousel

Granted, there were a lot of big traps in Saw VI–for crying out loud, when Saw’s willing to mock the mortgage mess in the first trap of Saw VI and follow it up by going after the health insurance industry, you know it’s a target-rich environment. But the biggest one was a refination–and an amplification–on a previous trap, and one we’ve already listed. Saw VI’s greatest trap has to be the Carousel. Featuring six health insurance company employees all jostling for position–this time the position of “person who gets out alive”–there were only two openings, and all of them were attached to a carousel to which a pump-action shotgun had been pointed. As the carousel spun, the shotgun would fire at regular intervals, and the only way to prevent it from doing so was for the main character at the time to take a metal rod through the hand. It’s a refination of the Magnum Eyehole, except this time with a twelve-gauge shotgun operating by itself.

What traps will show up in the final Saw installment? Will they be bigger and better than the previous movies? Will they all make this list look sick? The only way to find out is to finish the game and go see the movie, which is now in theaters.

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