I saw Saw III and survived

HERMIONE EYRE

For me, the horror begins not in the cinema but on the automated Odeon booking line. "Please say the name of the film you're calling for," says the woman's recorded voice.

"Saw III," I say.

"Was that The Ant Bully?"

"No. Saw III!" I bellow. We continue in this vein for some time. When we eventually agree on Saw III she asks: "Would you like to hear a brief summary of the film?"

"Yes" I say, cautiously.

"Say 'stop' when you have heard enough," she advises. "Jigsaw captures a doctor, keeping him alive while his apprentice devises a brutal plan to torture and maim..."

"STOP!"

I wonder how I'm going to get through this film. I figure a packet of Revels and my boyfriend will help.

The fact that the cinema is almost full also helps (though the piercings bristling from the face and neck of the man next to me don't).

The film begins as it means to go on, with man bludgeoning his own foot off with a stone. The Revels stick in my maw, and I bury my face into my boyfriend's shoulder. He helpfully whispers a running commentary: "There's quite a lot of blood."

I can hear a mashing noise, and gurgles. I burrow deeper.

"He's got the foot off now."

Some people behind us walk out. Perhaps they wanted The Ant Bully.

The rest of the cinema is loving it. They are devotees of the Saw franchise, I feel. They groan at the nasty things, like the acid melting the woman's hand off, but at the really gruesome bits, like the man on the twisting crucifix, they laugh. The atmosphere is giddy and hysterical, as if we're on a fairground ghost train.

By the time we get to the bit where the brain operation is performed with a carpentry kit I'm laughing along with the rest of them, revolted and elated.

This is vaudeville horror, too silly to be frightening. Saw III is bad, but not nearly as bad as the automated Odeon booking line.

JOHANN HARI

Go and see a film where people have to saw off their own feet, watch as their rib-cages are ripped from their bodies, and be drowned in a vat of liquefied pig guts, the editor said. See if you can endure it without puking or fainting. So, naturally, I fetched my 86-year-old granny and wheeled her to the nearest cinema.

My nan is the sweetest, gentlest old woman in the world, but for some reason she's always had an appetite for psychotically sadistic horror films. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are sitting up late at night with her, watching I Spit on Your Grave, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain and a hundred other video nasties.

We were already aficionados of the Saw films. For those of you who haven't seen them (where have you been?) they feature a serial murderer called Jigsaw placing an innocent civilian in a dilemma. You wake up wired to a hideous machine - its exact nature varies - and a white-faced puppet mask, which looks uncannily like the Tory MP John Redwood, appears before you to explain you can either elaborately mutilate your body to get away, or stay and die in agony. Imagine an edition of the Krypton Factor presented by Fred West, and you've got the idea.

From the first mutilation in Saw III, my nan was clapping her hands in glee. "Look, son - he's got to burn his face off on the pipe to get the key!" she exclaimed as I was gagging and retching into my popcorn. The camera never averts its gaze: you see every smashed bone and maggoty wound. "Whoever directed this should be sectioned," I groaned as yet another actor was turned into an interchangeable pile of body parts. "And given an Oscar!" she cried.

As a victim was having his arms and legs twisted from his body, I asked Nan how she could stand it. "Oh, once you've lost control of your bowels, nothing looks very gross any more, darlin'," she said. "Now shut up, look - his leg's come right off!" The only way to survive Saw III is with your nan there to hold your hand. Just make sure she doesn't saw it off when you're not looking.

DEBORAH ORR

First, I should confess that I'm probably one of the worst people in the world to be called upon to offer an opinion about violent films. My track record is bad, so bad that years ago I filed a piece for The Guardian from the Cannes Film Festival declaring that all the hype about disturbing content in Reservoir Dogs was a storm in a teacup. Months later, when the film had been banned from video distribution in Britain because of its brutal scenes of cruel inhumanity, I finally realised why I'd got it so wrong.

At the age of four, when watching Doctor Who, I adopted the technique whereby one averts ones eyes from the action at the first sign of anything nasty, and when that wasn't quite insulating enough, I put my fingers in my ears as well. I've stuck with this policy ever since.

About four seconds into Saw III, my eyes were covered. (Hey, I've invented radio!) About six seconds in, my ears were plugged as well. (Hey, I've invented sensory deprivation!) Given these, admittedly major, limitations I'm forced to report that the most shocking thing about this film is that it's actually quite intelligent.

It's repugnant, of course, that graphic torture of the most extreme kind is served up as glossy entertainment. To sit there looking at it until the point of nausea suggests a level of dissociation from human suffering, and indeed from one's own corporal being, that is disturbing in itself.

However, the philosophical content of the film is concerned with this very dissociation. The premise of this film, and apparently its two precursors (I haven't "seen" them), is that in an individualistic society, people drift into becoming "dead inside", so concerned with their own needs that they are without empathy for the suffering of others.

The popularity of the Saw films in itself is evidence that there is truth in the thesis. As is the fact that insightful people are happy to service this lucrative, desolate market. If you enjoy extreme horror films, ask yourself why. If you like sitting in the dark with your hands over your face, musing on the real horrors of moral relativism, go and see Saw III.

KIM SENGUPTA

The 9.15pm showing of Saw III at the Odeon Marble Arch was sold out. The cinemagoers were an eclectic bunch - a few tourists, a surprising number of couples, - and four hoodies who would have been hugged by David Cameron had he been there, and who had a scuffle in the street at the end of the film.

Cliff, sitting beside me, had smuggled in vodka in a bottle of coke and was an enthusiast of cinematic gore. But he was not so keen on real-life violence and said he wanted to move as soon as possible from Kingsland Road in Hackney, where he was living, because the people were "so aggressive".

But is extreme celluloid violence more palatable than in real life? I have seen a certain amount of the latter while covering various conflicts and have discussed with colleagues the effect prolonged exposure to that kind of experience may have had on us.

When the Hamra Hotel - where the dwindling band of foreign journalists live outside the Green Zone in Baghdad - got blown up, we found a penis from one of the suicide bombers on the pavement and bits of the scalp of a second bomber in the pool. This was deemed to be funny, although the laughter was much to do with the relief that we had escaped with just a few cuts and bruises.

The last time I experienced any violence was near Kandahar in Afghanistan, when a Canadian army convoy got hit on the road near us. The reaction then was to drive off as fast as possible from the gunfire which followed. That I think is the difference. When reporting violence, one tries not to be infected by it and also to get away from the death and destruction.

With Saw III, however, there was no getting away. A man started hacking off his feet in the first few minutes and the cutting of flesh and crunching of bones continued thereafter. What I felt was not so much fright as a sense of revulsion and, after a while, boredom. And also a certain amount of alarm at the way my fellow cinemagoers seemed to lap it all up.

JOHN WALSH

Nobody fainted or ran screaming from the stalls of the Odeon at Tottenham Court Road when I saw Saw III. The three young women beside me munched popcorn and drank Coke with their feet up, unbothered by the exploding ribcage scene, the acid hand bath scene, the ripping-chains-from-your-skin scene. I think I know which bit caused the people of Stevenage to swoon - the lovingly-detailed, close-up brain surgery with the power drill and circular saw - but the girls and I could see it was just a plastic prosthesis slicked with watery blood.

I quite enjoy being jolted by horror: I thought Se7en and Silence of the Lambs and Alien were first-class films, with first-class shock tactics. One's main response to Saw III is amazement at its ineptness. How could so much effort be spent devising ingenious torture methods to so little effect? Here's a woman being sprayed with cold water (oh no!) Here's a chap having his arms and legs twisted like a gigantic Chinese burn (oh my God!). I thought we'd learnt from The Blair Witch Project that watching people suffering or being scared isn't itself very frightening. The special effects are hopeless. In one scene, a series of maggoty pig carcasses are fed into whirling bacon-slicers, spraying a hapless prisoner with what appears to be Brown Windsor soup. The soundtrack is full of shrieks and yells as if to compensate for the visual inadequacies. The acting is rubbish: Tobin Bell as the mad sadist Jigsaw is about as scarily villainous as a retired interior decorator, while his evil assistant Amanda (Shawnee Smith) keeps interrupting her cold-hearted plotting to weep into her hanky.

The most irritating thing about Saw III, however, is its attempt to moralise. Jigsaw drones on about how people must suffer in order to let go of the past and learn to forgive, and you know some birdbrains in the audience will find him perversely admirable. The smug moral hypocrisy is the only thing that's truly horrible about this dim and squalid mess.

Screen shockers

The Exorcist (1973)

Doubting priest deals with projectile vomit and bad language as 12-year-old Linda Blair has a demonic visitation. Some cinemas provided 'Exorcist Barf Bags'.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Prototype slasher film banned for years due to its graphic portrayal of the cannibalistic slaughter of students at the hands of Leatherface and his redneck family.

Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver battles acid-blooded creature on board spacecraft. The alien's introduction (via John Hurt's stomach) is one of cinema's most shocking moments.

Se7en (1995)

Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman investigate murders themed around the seven deadly sins. Highlights are 'pride' (a model who has her nose cut off) and 'lust' (mutilation with a sword-dildo).

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Wobbly documentary-style filming and terrified actors bring a new level of horror as amateur film-makers get lost in the woods.

By Matt Cartmell