Saw III - 
Unrated Edition
(Lionsgate Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2006)
review by Died with Boots On

‘Saw III’ is the talk of the town, and let me say that ‘Saw’ fans will not be disappointed.  It’s not more of the same disconnected deathtraps like the first ‘Saw,’ and it’s not one big deathtrap like ‘Saw II.’  This film is a journey of dovetailing deathtraps with a series of twists and turns that hit me upside the head so hard that I swallowed a few teeth and had to have my jaw wired shut.  I contend that Leigh Whannell and James Wan are the only consistently good storytellers and screenplay writers in all of Hollywood.  Sequels are a backbreaking affair, and a sequel that is as good as its predecessor is hard-won.  Of the three, I could never choose one as my favorite, or even my least favorite.  Each is so impossibly different from the others that they are all awfully good for their own reasons.  ‘Saw III’ has several eccentric scenes that caricature a sick melodrama, curtailed with hard-to-watch sequences that will wrench your gut.

While it’s not exactly on the same footing as ‘Hostel,’ it is without a doubt the most disturbing and gory of the ‘Saws.’  I would even argue envelope pushing.  There is full frontal nudity where the camera truly lingers on every inch of a girl chained into a death machine called the ‘Ice Shower.’  I think that says it all.  As far as gore goes, the audience is waylaid with nothing short of brain surgery.  I treated my mom to this movie for her birthday since opening night coincided, and she loved it just as much as me, though I think she had her hands cupped over her eyes for most of it.  She leapt straight out of her seat more than once, showering me and the rest of the theater with everything from Raisinettes to popcorn to Milk Duds.  My whole life I have made it part of my mom’s job description to become desensitized to viscera, but she still couldn’t stomach this.  To be shamefully honest, I was moaning and drawing parted fingers to my eyes when bones splintered through skin and heads were split wide open, and big barbed hooks hasped through skin, nipples, Achilles’ tendons, and the crotch were torn free.

I was delighted to see Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith return to the screen once more.  Jigsaw (Bell) is somehow even more ominous and frightening now that he is on his deathbed, surrounded by rudimentary hospital furnishings and cupping an oxygen mask over his mouth.  With him incapacitated, Amanda (Smith) is at the reins.  Her methods are more criminal than those of Jigsaw.  Rather than giving her unenlightened victims a fighting chance, she is putting them in situations where they die no matter what.  The victim that was held in place by barbs hooked under his skin had sixty seconds to free himself and get out of the room before a bomb went off, but the police assault team had to cut through a welded door just to get into the room.  Realizing he is knocking on death’s door, Jigsaw has Amanda kidnap one of Dr. Lawrence Gordon’s co-workers to keep him alive until a game he is playing with the broken father of a dead son is over.  This doctor, Lynn (Soomekh), is guilty of estranging her husband by working every hour of the day at the hospital.  As incentive to keep Jigsaw alive, Amanda wants to play a game with her.  She strangles Lynn’s neck in a collar strapped with shotgun shells.  The shells are rigged to go off if Jigsaw’s heart-rate monitor flat lines, or if she tries to take it off.

Meanwhile, in some unknown location, Jeff (Macfadyen), the father of a boy who was killed in a drunk-driving accident who lost the volition to live, listens to his tape-recording.  Jigsaw tells Jeff that he is consumed with hatred for those involved in his son’s death, and that in order to move on with his life and pass this test, he must suffer and forgive.  The reward for passing the test is being able to confront the man responsible for the loss of his child.  After two hours, he will be entombed within the maze of rooms forever.  Several questions that arose in ‘Saw II,’ and even the first ‘Saw,’ are answered in vignettes that cut in and out of the backbone of the storyline.  What I was especially impressed with were the scenes in this movie that had to look like they were taken from the other movies because of overlapping sequences.  For example, we see what happened to Adam in the first ‘Saw’ after he was shut up in that nauseating bathroom.  There was another scene were we see Jigsaw setting up the ‘head-cage’ contraption on Amanda.  These shots were very convincingly done and looked like they could have been deleted scenes from the other films, though I don’t think anyone was thinking two sequels ahead.

In typical ‘Saw’ fashion, the last ten minutes of the film are devoted to the unraveling of all the double entendres the audience hears and tries to make sense of all throughout the movie.  The ambiguous subjects and plays on words are what separate these flicks from being the bloodletting ‘splatterfests’ they are at heart.   This ‘Saw’ is far more bloody and gruesome than the others.  If you winced when Shawnee Smith was hurled into the pit of syringes, you will pinch your eyes shut and shove popcorn in your ears and rock back in forth in your chair reminding yourself that ‘it is only a movie, it is only a movie, it is only a movie’ during just about every minute of this horror masterpiece.  What I find interesting about this movie is that while it wants desperately to have another sequel, it is happy to be the last in its line.  Unlike the others, there is closure, perhaps a few strands left frayed and untied, but closure nonetheless.  I hope there is a ‘Saw IV,’ this is one franchise I have ridden out from the beginning, and its one that never pales in comparison to the first ‘Saw.’ 

The Unrated DVD from Lionsgate features three featurettes; THE TRAPS OF SAW III, which showcase the Rube Goldbergian torture devices of Jigsaw, as well as THE DETAILS OF DEATH, which focuses on the props of the film. There's also DARREN'S DIARY, which offers a look at director Darren Lynn Bousmen, a trio of feature-length commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and more.