film | Gore for precedent

Attention, you nutty gore-lovers who thought the previous entries of the Saw and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises somehow left a few gaping eviscerations unstaged: Between the sticky death games of SAW III and the tool-shed amputations of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, you'll see the human body mauled, maimed and mutilated beyond your grodiest dreams. We movie-reviewin' snobs, we'll bitch and moan like we always do about the wooden gratuitousness of these scare tactics, but the Fangoria faithful seem to dig them because they deliver exactly that — just enough gallons o' gristle and inventive kills to out-ick whatever last month's blood-spattered horror bonanza was — and little else. That said, with its drowning-by-liquified-pig-guts and a machine that makes its occupant do the twist in a way Chubby Checker probably never imagined, Saw III wins in the depraved-showmanship department, cuz ... well, there's only so much you can do with a chainsaw.

Anyway, let's start with The Beginning, an unnecessary prequel to 2003's better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Texas Chainsaw redux, sorta superfluous itself, I guess, but also a truly unnerving carnival sideshow. The Beginning initially appears to be a glib analytical breakdown of Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) — the series' mute, stab-happy, other-folks'-epidermis-wearin' boogeyman — and his sick afflictions, but pop-psychology is more or less shrugged off after the opening credits, which means that we're spared a campy moment in which a cute li'l Leatherface brings meat tenderizer and a mallet to his kindergarten show-and-tell. But hey, that would've been preferable to the mostly scene-for-scene restaging of TCM '03, this time with a quartet of 1970s youths (Jordana Brewster, Matthew Bomer, Diora Baird and Taylor Handley) running afoul of Leatherface's cannibalistic clan while road-tripping through the Lone Star state before the boys enlist for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Leatherface's maniacal adoptive pa (R. Lee Ermey, always a batshit-crazy drill sergeant, never a bride) tries to slice and dice the kids into a four-course meal, and, uh, since none of these characters stick around to warn Jessica Biel and co. in TCM '03, it's obvious from the get-go that this bloodbath ends with a full freezer.

While the inevitable cast casualties of The Beginning render it a pointless wallow in cinematic violence, they're precisely the reason the Saw flicks are so damn popular: It's less about who dies than how they die, and the rusty booby traps and torture devices fashioned by Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the anti-hero monster of Saw, to reform society's miscreants and sinners — y'know, they'll repent if they survive — are equal parts Rube Goldberg and the Marquis de Sade in their devious brilliance. Jigsaw and his Saw II lackey (Shawnee Smith) are still prone to windbag pontifications ("Death is a surprise party ... unless you're already dead on the inside"; insert evil laughter here) as they target two new marks: a grieving dad (Braveheart's Angus Macfayden), given the opportunity to avenge his son's death, and a sullen ER physician (Bahar Soomekh), locked in a bomb collar while she operates on Jigsaw's terminal brain tumor. Believe it or not, this stuff is a cut above Saw and Saw II in terms of performance and writing, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement considering how barrel-bottom both films were. Hell, maybe I'm only giving Saw III a little extra credit because, amidst the non-stop unpleasantness of its entrail-soaked money shots, it addresses the shoddiness of its predecessors by working back through the entire narrative to tie up their loose ends and fill in their plot holes. Flesh wounds aren't the only gaping things in the Saw movies.

As Saw III reaches its ballsy (for this kind of film), definitively final finale, you've gotta wonder what big twist the writers could possibly cook up for Saw IV — which is, of course, scheduled for release later this year. Please, franchise gods, deliver us from yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but if the Saws keep improving at this rate, holy cow, Saw VIII might actually be good. Saw III: C The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: D+