Saw 3 (2006)

OUR REVIEW
by Dave White

Who's in It: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Angus Macfadyen, Bahar Soomekh, Dina Meyer
The Basics: Abandoning for good the idea of making the series frightening, the makers have decided that torture alone will make audiences happy. And they're right. The brutal machine-assisted murders are equal to — and sometimes even nastier than — the killings that occur in the first two movies. So enjoy yourselves, gore-o-philes.

What's the Deal? This time around, the rules of the first two films get tossed out the window. That's not a spoiler. They demonstrate the subversion of Jigsaw's "integrity" right off the bat. And, just like in the first two films, there's a nasty kick of an ending begging for a fourth installment. My only question is how Jigsaw's assistant, Amanda (Smith), got her engineering degree fast enough that she could design all these complicated murder devices.

Scariness Scale: Zero out of 10. In the first film, there was an uncertainty, a sense of mystery about who was doing the killings and why. They can never recapture that, and eventually they'll hit the wall of hard, blood-and-guts–soaked, R-rated mayhem and be forced to call it quits, or else descend into A Nightmare on Elm Street comedy.

Grossest Moment: It involves liquefied pig remains. That's as much of a spoiler as you're going to get out of me.