20 Horror Movies That Revealed TOO MUCH
18. Saw IV
Saw III felt like the end of a perfectly contained trilogy of movies, especially considering that it concludes with the deaths of both John Kramer (Tobin Bell) and his apprentice Amanda (Shawnee Smith).
Saw IV innately feels like an "unnecessary" sequel, then, and one which sought to extend the series' life by introducing another secret apprentice in Detective Hoffman (Costas Mandylor).
That's all well and good, but Saw IV also marked the point at which the franchise attempted to compensate for Kramer's absence by shoehorning him into the story wherever possible through a series of wildly soap opera-esque flashback subplots.
Saw IV reveals that Kramer's ex-wife Jill (Betsy Russell) was pregnant with their son, Gideon, when drug addict Cecil (Billy Otis) accidentally slammed a door into her stomach, causing her to miscarry. Kramer already had a brilliantly fascinating motive for "testing" people, to challenge their will to survive while his own life was being sapped by cancer, but to layer a contrived personal tragedy on top of it just felt excessively melodramatic.
It's easy to consider the prospect that John Kramer may not have become Jigsaw if his son were still alive, which is a messy, unnecessary addendum to Kramer's tidier original backstory.