After the surprise success of low-budget horror Saw, a sequel was inevitable. The cannily named Saw II found an even bigger audience with a "deliciously devious plot" that sees good-looking people dismember themselves to escape the booby-trapped shed of a psycho sadist (Tobin Bell). Naturally, Saw III is already in the pipeline and re-teams original scribes James Wan and Leigh Wannell.

Piecing The Jigsaw

Formerly no-name director Darren Lynn Bousman took the helm for this second instalment, which he briefly outlines in Jigsaw's Game. This featurette runs at just over two minutes so don't expect a thorough dissection. Instead it provides just a fleeting introduction to the characters with the deepest insight coming from the creepy Tobin Bell. "By being in a situation where they have to fight for survival," he growls, "they might come to appreciate their lives." Very Oprah...

The remaining featurettes are similarly brief and go behind-the-scenes to deconstruct the vicious traps masterminded by Jigsaw. For actor Noam Jenkins, wearing the Head Trap was a hair-raising experience as the effects bods reveal that precise head casts had to be taken otherwise, "It could shave off an ear." For the art department, the Needle Pit was a bigger problem because each one of 120,000 hypodermic needles had to be taken apart and put back together using a fibre optic tip. Now that is torture.

A lot of fake blood was involved in making The Hand Trap scene, which production designer David Hackl particularly enjoyed because he could whip out his red lighting gel. According to him, this creates "the perfect horror moment". The Furnace was a little more straightforward in conception and execution (if you'll pardon the pun), but that was small comfort to the stuntman who found himself up to the neck in flames.

Bits And Pieces

Actors Beverley Mitchell and Donnie Wahlberg join Bousman for a patchy audio commentary. Mitchell sounds like she's had too much coffee or maybe reliving the horror is just too much for her fragile nerves. She admits that she got "stuck in the props room with the puppet" one time and that it really "freaked" her out. Conversely it sounds like Wahlberg skipped his morning shot of caffeine as he mumbles in barely coherent fashion about matters of no consequence.

Lousman is hardly equipped to offer a master class in directing, but he does deliver one tasty bit of behind the scenes trivia regarding the film's only chase scene. Apparently he hired a SWAT truck at great expense, but it would only run at 15mph. Frustrated, he resorted to speeding up the film in post-production and it later turned out that someone had left the parking brake on. Genius!

Four scene-to-storyboard comparisons round off the extras menu. Fans of the first film will be disappointed by the lack of contribution from Leigh Whannell (who also co-wrote this film with Bousman) and what amounts to a very scattered look behind the scenes. For a film that's so gory, there's generally very little flesh on these bones.

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