It's Only a Podcast - A Horror Movie Review Show · Christian Estabrook and Ian Nichols

Overkill: Jigsaw (2017)

·2 hr 19 min·5 clips

Christian Estabrook opens Overkill with a weird question. He and Elle Willers immediately make it worse in the best possible way, comparing ways of being addressed until the tone settles somewhere between mean joke and shared laugh. Ryan shows up early. The hosts keep coming back to the way he talks to the women in the game, stacking sweetheart, babe, and lollipop until the pet names become their own tiny punch line. From there, the conversation shifts into the trap itself. A purse snatcher has stolen $3.53 and an asthma inhaler, and the pair work through the setup with equal parts disbelief and amusement. The chain-and-needle logic matters here. Christian and Elle explain the puzzle step by step, then immediately start tearing into the decision-making that should have saved everyone. The moment the purse snatcher figures out the right number, the whole thing becomes a fresh fight. Both hosts seem stunned that anyone could still pick the wrong syringe after the answer has basically been shouted out. Jigsaw gets a small but real compliment. The hosts especially like the line delivery, with the phrase purse snatcher landing with the kind of ugly specificity horror fans tend to remember. That praise sits right next to a much harsher judgment. They call the scene the dumbest anyone has ever been in a Saw trap, and they do not sound like they are kidding. The annoyance is part of the fun. Christian keeps pressing on the consequences of choosing the wrong needle, while Elle keeps pointing back to the obvious solution sitting in plain sight. The show never gets too formal about the movie’s mechanics. Instead it uses the trap as a launch point for jokes, frustration, and a running case for why the whole setup feels absurdly avoidable. Then the episode starts to wobble. A botched intro take shows up later, and the whole thing turns into a second bit about cursed memory, missed lines, and Christian getting thrown off by his own recording. He blames psychic interference. Elle refuses to help him out. The repeated opening becomes its own little horror scene, except the monster is a bad take. Through all of it, the episode stays loose and talkative rather than polished. It runs on quick pivots, self-correction, and the kind of conversational mess that makes a horror podcast feel lived-in instead of packaged. The result is an Overkill that treats Jigsaw as both a movie to dissect and a machine for generating arguments, callbacks, and exasperated laughter. That mix is exactly what the episode wants. It is a horror hangout that keeps threatening to go off the rails and somehow gets funnier because of it.

As heard by us

A filthy, funny Jigsaw takedown anchored by sharp trap logic and bad decisions.

Overkill: Jigsaw is a loose, filthy takedown of Jigsaw, carried by Christian Estabrook and Elle Willers. They keep the movie's trap logic, line readings, and terrible decisions in the crosshairs, and the joke lands hardest when they are drilling into how the traps work and how…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a Jigsaw roast with zero patience for bad trap logic, press play now.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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