I had a most interesting Friday evening. I witnessed a cat tortured and poisoned in a rat trap until dying. I watched a captive man roasted alive, his flesh boiling and blistering under dozens of heat lamps as he cried. I saw another man, gagged and bound, immersed in battery acid, his flesh slowly and literally eaten from his bones as he died in utter agony.

It was all graphically filmed for my pleasure.

And so, I find myself rather unexpectedly contributing once more to the ongoing discussion about what constitutes “obscenity” within our community.

I originally was considering how to gently rebut Valerie Smith's disturbing tirade against pornography. However, I took my girlfriend out to the movies to see “Untraceable,” a movie about which we had only heard a basic plot synopsis, and which we both agreed sounded like a terse thriller. We were, however, completely unprepared for the gratuitous amount of unnecessarily sadistic, graphic and disturbingly cruel depictions of torture and death which I have just described. I very nearly walked out, disgusted, but stayed out of perhaps a sense of mission? That mission being the better to be able to comment on, and perhaps warn parents of what I sincerely saw as “obscene” and “sick.”

I was profoundly disturbed at the violence in this movie. In a previous letter, I had alluded to the level of excessive graphic violence in films like “Saw” and “Hostel,” but I wonder if parents have any idea of what their kids might really be watching while some of us are worried about adults watching other adults making whoopee?

I would seriously consider supporting a movement to eliminate “soft-core snuff films” such as the type I just inadvertently witnessed, and I challenge any rational adult to make the comparison.

Karl Logan

Auburn