For the latter half of the Aughts, SAW was appointment cinema for gorehounds. Every Halloween from 2004 to 2010, the franchise had a new film release, raking in close to a billion dollars at the box office at that time. Add to this the effect that it had on ancillary markets, including the heyday of the unrated DVD in a pre-streaming service world, and from a purely commercial point of view, the series created by two film school friends from Australia may be the biggest triumph in 21st century horror.
That said, it’s a shame about SAW 3D, known as SAW: The Final Chapter on streaming and other ancillary markets. After its predecessor, the actually good SAW VI underperformed in theaters ($68 million USD against a budget of around $11 million USD), Lionsgate was ready to put the franchise out to pasture, as it appeared that the golden goose of its horror branch had finally taken ill. The seventh chapter in the twisted saga of John Kramer, the civil engineer turned amateur high-stakes escape room designer, would be the last (for about seven years, at least), and the film… well it was a film. A meaner tone, an overreliance on tying up loose ends halfway, and a cliffhanger ending on the franchise that is known for cliffhanger endings left fans with a bad taste in their mouths, at least one aside from all the gore.
So how the hell did Chester Bennington, co-frontman of Linkin Park, end up playing a neo-Nazi in admittedly one of the strongest group traps in the franchise's debatably worst film?
According to Billboard, it was the film’s producer Mark Burg moving next door to one of Chester’s bandmates. Bennington would have been all too willing, saying that “if they had asked me to just show up and watch them shoot I would have done it.” Previously, he had cameos in both of the Crank films starring Jason Statham, playing a meth addict in a pharmacy. Bennington went on to call the first Saw “one of the most brilliant movies of all time” in an interview with Noisecreep.
In his trap, Bennington plays Evan, a skinhead who is part of a group that has committed some act of gross bigotry. Specifically, the tape calls him and his friends racists, so while it isn’t explicitly stated that they committed a hate crime, we can safely assume that they did something remarkably vile to get the attention of the newest Jigsaw, Detective Mark Hoffman. In order to survive the trap and keep his friends alive, Evan must tear himself away from the seat of the car he’s stuck in and grab the parking brake just outside the windshield. When he fails to complete this task, the car falls and crushes his girlfriend’s head, darts forward to rip one skinhead’s jaw and arms clean off, plow through the second male friend, and send Evan out of the windshield and into another one in the junkyard, in a complicated mechanism that even Rube Goldberg would wince at.
Due to his touring schedule, the original plan for Bennington’s character to survive and return had to be scrapped, though he did contribute a song to the soundtrack of the film in the form of Dead by Sunrise's "Condemned." In the three minutes or so he was on screen, Chester made an indelible impression in one of the best scenes in an otherwise rough film. We know he was no slouch in conveying pain and anger in his music, but in his acting, he was something else.
