What follows is an attempt to put Saw 2 and “The Price is Right” into a cage, force them to mate, and then sell off the freakish little half-breed babies they produce with the hope that someone will pay out the ass to own one. The result of this twisted experiment in genetic cross-breeding and demonic marketing comes out incomplete and hosted by a guy who lacks the infectious charisma of Bob Barker or the gruff troll voice of Jigsaw. This “Shadow Man” wears a cheap suit, has one of the most wicked cases of “Fatal Comb-Over Disease” I’ve ever seen, his face looks like he went out and got a botched Botox job after leaving the burn ward, and his voice sounds like a smooth talking robot more than anything else. Whatever his reasoning, Mr. Man has made it a hobby to kidnap young people and put them through life-threatening “games” in his own twisted reality-TV take on “Fear Factor”… only I prefer his because it involves more idiot breeder types dying, less consumption of pureed centipedes and bovine sex organs, and no Joe “Somebody please smash my testicles with a hammer!” Rogan.

I’m confused by the status of Shadow’s little program though, as it’s referred to as a “hit reality show on TV” called “Are You Scared?” (where contestants face their worse fears for “fabulous” cash and prizes) several times and his victims are all taken from audition tapes sent in to said show, yet nobody on the “show” seems to realize their lives are actually in real danger, nor do we find out why, if the show is actually broadcast on television, nobody knows where the feed is coming from or why the television channels haven’t requested any information from said feed beyond “where do we send your check?”. You’d think it’d be a p.r. nightmare if it was revealed that CBS or NBC are airing glorified snuff films in prime time… not so much with Fox. Either way it turns out that nobody knows where the feed really is coming from, hence why we get a cop and his FBI agent partner looking for the killer’s hideout… again, if you’ve seen Saw 2, you know the premise here!

Since none of the victims here really matter (with the exception of one who’s needed for the all important “plot twist” near the latter pages of the script), I’ll skip the introductions and just tell you what brands of carnage you’ll be seeing should you decide to pick this flick up: decapitation via garrote wire; a head chopped in half horizontally with an axe; one person who’s blown up when he refuses to perform surgery on himself to remove the device; one guy who’s blasted by shotguns when he sets off a tripwire in a room where he must navigate between pitch darkness and blinding illumination to get to the exit door; one girl who’s forced to walk over a floor of broken glass before shoving her face into an aquarium filled with acid; a germ-phobe has her hands bound by her own intestines and must allow rats to chew through said guts so she can free hands and acquire a cell phone to call for help; and one person who gets a large drill bit bored through their skull rather than let a similar fate befall their twin sibling. It’s all eventually tied up (sorta) with a few plot twists, a half-baked attempt at a moral, a bout of arson, and one of those “shock twist endings” that promises as sequel if we’re not careful. Bad movies are like unprotected sex: if people put too much into them, something you’ll regret is bound to come out sooner or later. As such, do everybody a favor: always wear a condom and don’t pay money to watch bad movies.

Though the movie’s an obvious attempt to cash in on a previously established money making franchise, there are a couple of killers here that I thought were fairly well done for a knock-off flick. Additionally, I have to give a few extra kill style points to the writers for going with the “traps that exploit the victims’ fears” angle rather than simply doing the Saw thing and just trying to make the murders as grizzly as possible… not that there’s anything wrong with grizzly murders mind you, it’s just nice to see some kind of angle applied to try and spice up the original recipe a little. As for the rest of the movie, you can pretty much imagine what to expect as far as the acting, direction and music go, so I’ll let it go at that and pull the trigger on this one.