There's something to be said about Asian horror movies: half the time you don't understand what's going on, but they will creep you out to no end. With those movies, there's rarely the American habit of pulling away at the last second so you get a PG-13 rating, there's no line that you can't cross, because inevitably, someone has already gone well past that line, and there's no shortage of new ideas or twists on what really is "horror".
Three...Extremes, a compilation of three short films each clocking in at around 40 minutes, has three very different directors give us their own version of horror. In Takashi Miike's Box, a woman is plagued by dreams (or memories) of her sister and the terrible accident that took place when both were performing in their father's entertainment troupe. Everything in Box can be interpreted as dream, fantasy, or memories of reality, but it doesn't all come together until the last scene. Throughout, the imagery in the film is haunting and beautiful, in a way that those familiar only with Miike's less stylized fare like Dead Alive, will be surprised to see. But as always with Miike's work, he takes a seemingly simple story and inserts enough twists and turns that you're trying to figure everything out and second-guessing yourself the whole way through. While visually arresting, there's no thematic quality to set it apart from any of his other work, so we're left with a surprise ending that came about too quickly with no real payoff.
The next installment is Fruit Chan's Dumplings, a tale of an aging television actress who is seeking a way to revive her career and marriage. She eventually meets Aunt Mei, a woman who makes and sells dumplings out of her home that will provide eternal youth to anyone who consumes them. But of course, there's a catch; Aunt Mei also runs a clinic out of her home as well. Three guesses as to what it is, and the first two don't count. Because of this, Dumplings is probably the most horrific in the set, based on its subject as well as the matter of fact way that the main character accepts what she is eating and continues to do so, because she is so addicted to their effects. The concept of what one will do for a better self image is an idea many Americans can take to heart, but may be too subtly done in this film to have a real impact.
The last film is from Park Chan-wook, called Cut, where a film director goes home at the end of the day to find his wife being held hostage in an elaborately set up system of wires and attached to a grand piano, by a seemingly insane man who was an extra in one of the director's films. To set his wife free, the director must prove to their kidnapper that he can be cruel, or the man will cut the wife's fingers off at five-minute intervals. While the situation is dire, the way it is filmed and the way the kidnapper acts throughout the whole piece lends an air of crazed amusement to the whole thing that works better than if it had been filmed in a somber, taking itself too seriously sort of way.
The production and acting in all three films is of great quality, and while the three films have no real connection between them barring the loose definition of horror, it's exciting to see a compilation from three Asian directors who all have a very broad idea of what does and doesn't work within the horror genre. While there's no shortage of horror films being made in Hollywood (and everywhere else), it seems that horror, by definition, has devolved into a genre where you have to have copious amounts of blood, gore, and gotcha! moments or no one will want to see it. Three...Extremes takes the genre back to where it truly should be: exploring the ideas of what is horrific and the faces and the motivations behind what people do.
"Three...Extremes" opens October 28, 2005 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Chan Wook Park, Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike. Written by Haruko Fukushima (Box), Lilian Lee (Dumplings), Park Chan-wook (Cut). Starring Atsuro Watabe, Byung Hun Lee, Kyoko Hasegawa, Ling Bai, Mai Suzuki, Meme Tian, Pauline Lau, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Won Hie Lim.
