Taglines: You won’t believe how it ends.
Saw 5 movie storyline. In the fifth installment of the SAW franchise, Hoffman is seemingly the last person alive to carry on the Jigsaw legacy. But when his secret is threatened, Hoffman must go on the hunt to eliminate all loose ends.
Detective Mark Hoffman is deemed hero after he saves a young girl and “escapes” one of Jigsaw’s games, or so it seems. Special Agent Peter Strahm is suspicious of him after his assistant Agent Lindsay Perez says Hoffman’s name. While Agent Strahm looks into Detective Hoffman’s past, a group of five people who helped burn a building which was supposedly abandoned, face a series of tests set up by the Jigsaw killer.
Saw V is a 2008 American-Canadian horror film directed by David Hackl and written by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan and stars Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Scott Patterson, Betsy Russell, Mark Rolston, Julie Benz, Carlo Rota, and Meagan Good. It is the fifth installment in the Saw franchise, and was released on October 24, 2008 in North America.
David Hackl, who served as the production designer of Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV, and second-unit director for Saw III and Saw IV made his directorial debut with Saw V.[4] Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, the writers of the previous film, returned to write the film. Charlie Clouser, who provided the score for all previous Saw films, also returned to compose the score for the film. Saw creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell served as executive producers.
In its opening weekend, Saw V grossed $30,053,954 in 3,060 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking number two at the box office[13] behind High School Musical 3: Senior Year. It grossed $56,746,769 in the United States and Canada, and an additional $57,117,290 in other markets, for a worldwide total of $113,864,059. This was the second film in the series to not be number one at the box office, the first was the first film. It is Lionsgate’s tenth-highest-grossing film in the United States and Canada.
“What the fuck is going on? Where am I?”
Those words, uttered two minutes into 2004’s SAW, express the primal emotions – the hopeless confusion, the awful sense of powerlessness and sheer, panic-stricken terror – that lie at the heart of Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures’ SAW franchise; emotions that are a key to its phenomenal success. The SAW films follow the machinations of Jigsaw, a terminally ill cancer patient with an exacting moral agenda and a genius for gruesome games of survival, “played” with those he believes have ceased to value and appreciate the gift of life.
Ratcheting up tension and invention with each successive film, the SAW franchise has touched a chord while jangling millions of nerves worldwide. It has picked up the baton from classic horror series such as HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET to become a cultural touchstone, as well as the most profitable horror franchise, both theatrically and on DVD, in movie history. To date, the four SAW titles have taken in over $550 million in worldwide theatrical box office and their combined net DVD sales exceed 24 million units. The franchise has helped make Lionsgate the leading studio for horror today, with #1 rankings in box office and DVD consumer spending.
SAW made its world premiere at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Festival’s popular “Park City at Midnight” program. Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore, who programs the annual event, recalls that he was impressed by the first-time filmmakers’ command of both form and theme. “SAW grabbed the viewer from the first frame; it was bold, cleverly constructed and flat-out terrifying,” he comments. “But what really set SAW apart was its moral seriousness. This movie didn’t just want to scare you, it wanted to make you think about what you would do to stay alive. In today’s world, that is not a trivial thing to contemplate — either as an individual or as a member of society.”
As the SAW series has continued, the films have tunneled further into Jigsaw’s beliefs and worldview. Says Leigh Whannell, who created the original story with director James Wan and wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for SAW, SAW II and SAW III, “Jigsaw’s cancer has led him to think very hard about what it means to be alive and how close we are to death at any given time. But he’s not someone who stops with a simple `carpe diem’ and a trip to placeEurope. The concept of life’s value becomes a springboard to look at other personal moral choices, like forgiveness versus retribution. Jigsaw keeps digging into these issues, which become grist for his games. And as twisted as the games are, his intention is to help people. Between his philosophical bent and his sick take on altruism, I like to think Jigsaw is somewhat unique in the horror universe.”
The SAW franchise has been part of a wave of horror films that have drawn favorable comparisons to the independent horror cinema of the 1970s, a connection highlighted in a Summer 2007 series at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, entitled “It’s Only a Movie: Horror Films from the 1970s and Today.” The six-weekend retrospective drew a thru-line between films like Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), which shocked audiences of their day with envelope-pushing gore and disturbing explorations of human behavior; and the films of the SAW age, including Darren Lynn Bousman’s SAW II, which contain images and stories that have left today’s viewers just as stunned and terrified — and eager for more — as the moviegoers of the 1970s. “It’s Only a Movie” presented double features that paired films from each era, with SAW II sharing a bill with Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
Announcing the series in June 2007, the Museum’s Chief Curator, David Schwartz said, “These movies are of considerable aesthetic and cultural interest, clearly reflecting the fears of contemporary lives…. Of course we are aware that these films contain disturbing, often shocking images, but they are powerful precisely because they tap into our deepest anxieties.”
Assistant Curator Livia Bloom also weighed in. “The filmmakers in this series use the horror genre as a commercial framework to make smart, often subversive films. Their work examines deep psychological concerns, and comments on social and political issues of the day.” Bloom noted that in SAW’s “startling scenes of torture,” she found “reflections of a life during a time of war and turmoil.”
The thematic and stylistic consistency of the SAW series owes much to the stewardship and participation of a core team, including SAW originators James Wan and Leigh Whannell; writer / director Darren Lynn Bousman, who joined the team with SAW II; producers Oren Koules, Mark Burg and the late Gregg Hoffman; and executive producers Stacey Testro, Peter Block and Jason Constantine. The key creative team has been with the series from the start, and includes director of photography David A. Armstrong; production designer, and current director David Hackl; editor Kevin Greutert; and composer Charlie Clouser, a onetime member of the band Nine Inch Nails.
Another critical member of the SAW team is actor Tobin Bell, who has portrayed Jigsaw throughout the franchise. In his September 7, 2007 essay on contemporary horror movies in the L.A. Weekly, critic Luke Thomson wrote, “Tobin Bell’s performance as Jigsaw is a wonder; he’s the best `real-world’ horror antihero since Anthony Hopkins first played Hannibal Lecter.”
Giving Til It Hurts: The Animal Saw Blood Drive
The SAW franchise is not only about big-screen blood; it also about the blood that saves lives. With the release of the first SAW in 2004, Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures embarked on a cutting-edge promotion tailored specifically to the franchise’s profile: a nationwide SAW blood drive that exhorts fans to “Give Til It Hurts” to benefit the Red Cross. The SAW “Give Til It Hurts” Blood Drive has become a key element of the SAW franchise, as much a part of its annual rituals as the Halloween premiere date.
Each year brings a new ad campaign photographed by Tim Palen, Lionsgate Co-President of Theatrical Marketing and fine art photographer, and featuring the SAW nurses, seductive angels of questionable mercy and considerable visual impact. In the first four years of the blood drive, SAW filmgoers donated nearly 80,000 pints of blood to help save as many as 238,000 lives.
For the 2007 drive, the SAW “Give Til It Hurts” Blood Drive acquired two important new partners, the American Red Cross and Yahoo!, to help make the campaign bigger, better and more bloodily ambitious than ever. Lionsgate and the American Red Cross entered into their first formal partnership to administer the SAW IV Blood Drive on a nationwide basis. The national organization teamed with local Red Cross chapters to set up donation centers, a commitment that more than quadrupled the number of centers, from 250 to 1200. SAW star Tobin Bell was featured in several PSA’s advertising the event.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! provided massive online support for the SAW IV Blood Drive as Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures’ key online partner. In addition to providing hundreds of millions of impressions across Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo Movies, Yahoo! also hosted the Blood Drive website. By searching for “Saw Blood Drive” on Yahoo!, users were able to access the SAW IV Blood Drive website, which featured a branded, interactive Yahoo! Map that allowed users to find the closest Blood Drive to their geographic location. In addition to the interactive map, users could watch the Blood Drive PSA with Tobin Bell, grab branded downloads, and tell a friend about the Blood Drive. Both the Red Cross and Yahoo! reteam with Lionsgate for the 2008 blood drive effort.
The SAW V Blood Drives are taking place at college campuses and other locations across the country. Field drives began the week of September 26, 2008 and Red Cross blood drives began the week of September 23rd. The SAW V Blood Drive will continue through the first week of the film’s release.
The SAW IV blood drive gathered 41,784 pints, over 3000 pints more than the previous three years combined and saving approximately 125,350 lives. Collection totals from the SAW blood drives have doubled year after year: during the 2004 inaugural drive, 4,200 pints were collected, in 2005, 10,000 pints were collected, and in 2006, 23,493 pints were collected, resulting in tens of thousands of lifesaving blood transfusions.
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Saw 5 (2005)
Directed by: David Hackl
Starring: Tobin Bell, Costas Mandylor, Betsy Russell, Mark Rolston, Julie Benz, Greg Bryk, Meagan Good, Scott Patterson, Mark Rolston, Laura Gordon, Samantha Lemole, Sheila Shah, Athena Karkanis
Screenplay by: Marcus Dunstan
Production Design by: Anthony A. Ianni
Cinematography by: David A. Armstrong
Film Editing by: Kevin Greutert
Costume Design by: Alex Kavanagh
Set Decoration by: Liesl Deslauriers
Art Direction by: Graham Caswell, Elis Lam
Music by: Charlie Clouser
MPAA Rating: R for for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, language and brief nudity.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: October 24, 2008
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