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Behind the incessant gore and outrageous shock value of Saw, there lies a great idea for a movie. The conception of Saw, a grisly and jolting horror film of superior intelligence and primal energy, is evidence of the filmmakers' startling understanding of fear. First time director James Wan and star/writer Leigh Whannell are master thrill makers because, like the calculating killer of their movie, they consider every step that Saw may take and tunes it to scare its audience as quickly and as powerfully as possible. Unfortunately, Wan and Whannell overlooked a few inherent problems when actually creating Saw , which leaves the overall execution of their film as a mere shadow of its concept's potential.

After a few minutes of watching Saw, the David Fincher thriller, Seven, will instantly leap to mind. Like Seven, Saw is not a conventional horror film, but a murder mystery twisted into dementia. Both films exist on the very edge of sanity; no happy people are ever around, every character is marred by a dirty, rotten past, and it seems as if a few more inches of darkness would send the whole thing crashing into hell. And within Seven and Saw, and their worlds of rotting reality, there are monstrous killers, who stage elaborate, gruesome murders. To these elusive creatures, homicide is like a chess game. Seven's killer was a man obsessed with the Seven deadly sins; Saw's killer only wants people to think long and hard about the quality of their lives.

Without warning, Saw opens with Adam (Whannell) lurching out of a bathtub in a small, decaying room. As Adam calms down and slowly wracks his brain to remember what happened, he notices a few things: the room is completely enclosed, his leg is chained to solid pipe, and he is not alone in the room. Two men are with him-across the room, Dr. Gordon (Cary Elwes), sits also chained to a pipe, and between them lies a dead man clutching a gun and a tape recorder. Neither man knows who put them there or why. However, in each man's pocket there is a small tape which, when played on the dead man's recorder, introduces the situation. The killer's voice is clear: Dr. Gordon must kill Adam within a certain time limit using the tools within the room (some of which are apparent, others not), or his family will be killed. Dr. Gordon immediately recognizes this setup-it must be the work of the infamous Jigsaw killer, who places his victims within disgusting timed puzzles with death as the consequence of failure.

Saw's killer is interesting. We never really see him until the end; up until then, he is embodied by a deep, electronically altered voice and a frightening looking mannequin puppet when his physical presence is required. Other than that, he's just a ghost, but we feel his presence in every frame, and within every step of the puzzle. When Dr. Gordon and Adam discover another clue in their surroundings, we kind of marvel at the killer's genius as we cower in fear of what may happen when the puzzle is entirely unlocked. The thought of this man lurking just around the corner is frightening, which of course, makes Saw a spectacular piece of suspense and terror. The killer himself, and all that he repsresents, is Wan and Whannell's greatest achievement in the creation of Saw.

But even though the killer's presence may hold us in a vice grip, it becomes impossible to look past Saw's many flaws. For starters, the acting is absolutely terrible. Most of the movie takes place within the "puzzle room," meaning that much of the movie rests on Dr. Gordon and Adam. However, both Whannell and Cary Ewles miss the mark entirely. Both actors feel fake and amateurish when it comes to portraying people fixed on survival and maintaining sanity. In the climactic scenes, when Dr. Gordon and Adam are minutes from the killer's deadline, Whannell and Elwes are so over the top that the rising tension is completely destroyed, ruining Saw's big finale. Danny Glover adds star power as a cop hell bent on catching Jigsaw, but he's in too little of the movie to make a lasting impact.

The other problem with Saw is that it gets way too silly. At first, the excessive brutality (manifested in flashbacks to Jigsaw's previous victims) helps set the movie's tone, but eventually Saw's bloodlust becomes too much to be taken seriously. In fact, some of the more graphic scenes are so ridiculously violent that they almost feel comical; the gore ultimately becomes the biggest cause of Saw's severe lack of credibility. To be fair, there have been more explicitly violent movies this year (The Passion of the Christ is still, per gallon, 2004's bloodiest movie), but Saw is far more violent than its story needs it to be.

If you want to spend Halloween at the multiplex with something scary, your only options are The Grudge and Saw (that is, unless you're lucky enough to have Shaun of the Dead playing near you), which pretty much forces you to determine the lesser of two evils. My recommendation is Saw, simply because of its wonderfully ingenious concept and dark style. It's not the perfect Halloween flick, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't get the blood pumping on more than one occasion.

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