Jigsaw/Totem

Jigsaw/Totem (DVD)

Jigsaw (2002)
Directed by Don Adams, Harry James Picardi
Starring Barret Walz, Aimee Bravo, Mia Zifkin

Colin (Barret Walz- a dead ringer for in Craig Kilborn in both looks and arrogance) is the perverse junior college art teacher for a group of cinematically diverse misfits. He comes up with an intriguing, if not slightly deranged, final project for his grab-bag of unlikely students- the creation, and ritual destruction, of a jigsaw man. Each student is given a piece of a mannequin, and instructed to embellish and personalize it in whatever fashion they chose. Then, they will reconstruct him, and after discussing the merits of their make-shift Frankenstein, they will burn him as an effigy. Everyone gets their piece of the puzzle, and agrees to meet a week later at a local bar, Sneaky Pete's, to show off their work.

Because he has no business teaching anybody, Colin ups the freakish ante when they all finally assemble by adding on a drinking game aspect to their show and tell. Before each person adds their part to the jigsaw man, they order a round of whatever drink they choose, and everyone washes it down together, ensuring a night of drunken debauchery to go along with the art-brut project. As each tortured soul adds more life to the manikin, and tongues get loosened form everything from "Irish Car-Bombs" to shots of cough syrup, they each explain their motivations for their creations, revealing the jigsaw man to be an anamorphic temple of pain. Tawny (Aimee Bravo), the drop-dead sexy cowgirl stripper, offers up an arm with a shotgun strapped to it. She tells a tawdry tale of her father's sexual abuse, the cause of her little sister's bullet eating suicide, and the arm's inspiration. Louise (Mara Lindon), the frazzled, aging metal chick, is married to an abusive, alcoholic trucker. She viciously fought with him before working on the mannequin leg, and ended up smashing half the dishes in the house in the process. Her contribution to the project is a leg covered in chunks of broken dinnerware. Eddie (Arthur Simone) is a tightly wound psycho jock, so of course he adds a circular saw blade to the jigsaw man's crotch. Val (Zifkin), the mousy suburban girl, found no personal connection with the piece, so she merely wrapped her contribution, another arm, in newspaper clippings. Finally, there's Todd (James Palmer), the wise-cracking class clown. Since he feels the need to be one step ahead of everyone else, he attaches a camera to the mannequin head's eye, and because he's a wise-ass, gave the rest of the head a zombie punk make-over.

The final result is a monstrosity, a ragged, ghoulish thing. After more drinks and assorted college-kid hijinks, including Tawny's eye-popping jigsaw man lap dance and Colin's fumbled efforts to seduce Val, the class drags it out into the woods, crucify the sum of all their fears, and set the jigsaw man ablaze. Oh sure, he burns. But from the fire, an evil is born.

Their is no rational explanation for why the art-student's ugly class project eventually walks away from his funeral pyre and starts hunting down his creators, so none is even attempted. All you or I or the panicked college kids need to know is that he's for real, and he's using their own particular fears to kill them, one by one.

Jigsaw is a sharp, flashy little splatter film. The first half, where the compelling premise (and the jigsaw man) takes shape, is crackling good filmmaking. Shot in garish, cartoon colors inside an invitingly hip cowboy bar on the edge of town, it brings to mind a kind of psycho-analytical "Dusk 'til Dawn". The actors all gleefully dig into their characters, exaggerating just enough to ensure an over-amped horror movie atmosphere, without falling into self-parody. The second half of the film, unfortunately, quickly devolves into standard slasher flick cliches as the jigsaw man lumbers around the bar's parking lot, looking a little too much like Robo-man to instill much fear, mindlessly tearing through the students. Still, the first hour or so is a corker, and overall, this is an inventive, fast-paced shocker. Recommended.

Jigsaw also benefits from a rocking soundtrack, with plenty of cowpunk and shitkicker country tracks from Angry Johnny and the Killbillies, Boot Hill, and the Lonesome Kings, among others. I could do without the tepid nu-metal tracks that grind away during the murder scenes, but Tawny's impressive bump n' grind to a fittingly raunchy devil-billy number more than makes up for it.

Totem (1999)
Directed by Martin Tate
Starring Jason Faunt, Marissa Tait, Eric W. Edwards

Also included on the DVD is recently produced Full Moon feature, Totem. It's based on a story written by Full Moon head honcho Charles Band, so you know what to expect- tiny monsters. Half a dozen good looking teenagers find themselves inexplicable stranded in a cabin that none of them remember actually coming to. There's an invisible wall around the area that won't let them stray any farther than an old graveyard just beyond their log cabin prison. The graveyard contains a giant stone totem pole with three menacing gargoyle statues embedded in it, as well as make-shift grave stones with all of the group's names and dates of death (the very same day that the film occurs in) on them. As they frantically try to unravel the mystery of the cursed cabin and their supernaturally imposed exile, the stone gargoyles come to life and begin stalking them.

Totem looks great, and is nicely atmospheric, but it's fear factor hinges entirely on how scary you find malevolent lawn ornaments to be. If you liked any of the other Full Moon movies featuring similarly diminutive demons, like the Puppet Master and Demonic Toys series, than you'll like Totem, too. - Sleazegrinder