The first Saw film was okay. I'll admit that. It was a 50 minute TV piece dragged out to a 90 minute movie but it had an original premise, a distinctive visual style and one kicker of a twist ending. It just needed tightening. For example, you could've removed Danny Glover and his associated subplot from the film with no great loss. For another, ditch Cary Elwes. His hammy, melodramatic acting – as always – was enough to make even his mother question his chosen career path ("Now, Cary, dear, are you sure that you don't want to consider something more appropriate? Like joining a Male Shouting Choir? Or perhaps becoming a Gurning Champion? What about an emo singer?"). But these are nitpicks in what's, essentially, a strong first film. The writing showed some promise. I figured, "Next thing these guys make is gonna be a winner."

I could not have been more wrong. Leigh Whannell, come on down. It's time to stick your head in front of the Den Of Geek Dartboard.

I don't know what happened to Leigh Whannell. Perhaps he's one of those guys who has one half-decent fluke of a script in him and that's your lot? Perhaps he got abducted after the first Saw film and replaced by a pod Leigh? Perhaps he was killed and brought back to life with voodoo as a sort of substandard zombie Leigh? Perhaps he just has the brain worms? One too many blows to the head? A nasty flu that won't go away? God knows. I'm not even sure any of this could justify some of the abysmal, nonsensical mindlessness he's spewed up in the last few years. His slapdash prolificacy has produced three hootin' stinkeroos that make about as much sense as James Blunt's record sales.

Dart One: (60 points)
Saw 2 proved that any initial cleverness displayed in the original was unlikely to resurface within the franchise. Whannell retained a couple of basic motifs (a serial killer who likes to play games with his victims) but, otherwise, abandoned any similarities, opting for a generic slasher formula instead. Teens in a creepy house, picked off by a sadist ad nauseam. Its only distinction from clichéd stalk'n'snooze crap like April Fool's Day or One By One was the unsavoury extremity of the murders. Sadly, these grotesque set-pieces couldn't possibly compensate for the lack of characterisation, logic, flair or originality.

Dart Two: (120 points)
Still, at least it was better than Saw 3, although few things aren't. Obsessed with the imaginary cleverness of his own already-spiralling mythos, Whannell wove a convoluted web of nonsense, flashbacks and Jerry Springer style face-offs into an overblown, underwritten mess. It came as no surprise to read that he wrote the script within a week whilst at a film festival.

To make it worse, Whannell was so low on ideas that he even solicited a few death scenes from the users on the House Of Jigsaw fan forum! This means that, in between the attempts at stringing together extensive footage from the first two and some all-new gobbledegook, we get murders that range from the worryingly pathological (a naked woman pelted with ice) to the utterly absurd (a machine that pulverizes pigs and pukes porky porridge on any punters in its path). The fact that this film sold better than any other horror title of 2006 is depressing proof that Whannell doesn't even NEED to write properly any more on this franchise.

Dart Three: (180 points!)
Thankfully, they took him off script duties for Saw 4. The jury remains curious on how that'll turn out but, in the meantime, Whannell managed to completely fuck up a classic ghost story format for the truly pathetic Dead Silence. He made puppets – perhaps the creepiest things in the world – boring. I've never seen anything quite like this, in that he devised a perfectly simple, surprisingly effective, basic story and then destroyed it with more inconsistencies, logical fallacies and characters behaving stupidly than… well, anything. I'm serious. Think of the dumbest, most incoherent, senseless film you've ever seen. One that just makes you smack your head repeatedly into the screen, crying "WHY?!" – it's still not going to be a patch on Dead Silence. What's most frustrating is that the premise, like I say, is so simple. A 12 year old could've penned a better screenplay around it than Whannell did. He couldn't even come up with a decent nursery rhyme.

What all this proves is that his ego has become way too inflated, following the praise he won for Saw. He now seems to be labouring under the delusion that somehow everything he touches will turn to gold and, as we've seen time and time before with these types of overnight successes, they don't last long. Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that he'll find himself waking up in a grimy bathroom, handcuffed to the crapper, with a talking puppet challenging him to a fatal game of Ludo. I'm just saying that if the appalling box office figures for Dead Silence are anything to go by, he's going to have to shit or get off that now-all-too-familiar pot: he needs to start putting some effort into his screenplays and stop treating the audience like a pack of dribbling idiots. Otherwise, his head's going to be on the Den Of Geek dartboard for some time yet.

Is there anyone you'd like to put on the Den of Geek dartboard? The e-mail address, as always, is geekcontent@gmail.com...

Other Den of Geek dartboard victims: Len Wiseman, Kevin Smith, Takashi Shimizu, Naomi Watts, Paul W. S. Anderson, Zack Snyder.