Credit: Amazon.com
Directed by
Fruit Chan
Chan-wook Park
Takashi Miike
Cast:
Ling Bai …. Mei (segment “Dumplings”)
Pauline Lau …. Li’s Maid (segment “Dumplings”)
Tony Leung Ka Fai …. Lee (segment “Dumplings”)
Meme …. Connie (segment “Dumplings”)
Miriam Yeung Chin Wah …. Ching (segment “Dumplings”)
Miki Yeung …. Kate (segment “Dumplings”)
So-Fun Wong …. Kate’s Mother (segment “Dumplings”)
Byung-hun Lee …. Director (segment “Cut”)
Won-hie Lim …. Stranger (segment “Cut”) (as Won-Hee Lim)
Hye-jeong Kang …. Director’s Wife (segment “Cut”)
Dae-yeon Lee …. Actor in School Girl Uniform (segment “Cut”)
Gene Woo Park …. Assistant Director (segment “Cut”)
Mi Mi Lee …. Kyung-Ah (segment “Cut”)
Jung-ah Yum …. Vampire Actress (segment “Cut”)
Kyoko Hasegawa …. Kyoko (segment “Box”)
Atsuro Watabe …. Yoshii/Higata (segment “Box”)
Mai Suzuki …. Kyoko (Age 10) (segment “Box”)
Yuu Suzuki …. Shoko (Age 10) (segment “Box”)
Mitsuru Akaboshi …. Circus Member (segment “Box”)
The Movie:
2005 was not a great year for horror films. Marked by bad sequels ( Saw II and The Ring 2), terrible remakes (Dark Water or Bad Plumbing: The Movie) and just plain awful films (White Noise), 2005 was a wasteland for fans of the genre. Now that it’s on DVD, the best and sickest Horror film released in the US in 2005, 3 Extremes, can finally be seen by a wide audience. Three different stories by three of Asia’s best directors are presented here, Fruit Chan from Hong Kong, Chan-wook Park from South Korea, and Takashi Miike from Japan. Apart, the directors have created some of the creepiest films of the last ten years, together the effect of watching their work is almost overwhelming.
Dumplings
The hardest to take of the three is Fruit Chan’s Dumplings, the first story presented. Bai Ling plays Aunt Mei, a woman offering the fountain of youth to her clients with her special recipe for dumplings. Taking up her offer is Miriam Yeung Chin Wah as Mrs. Ching Li. She’s a former TV star that is looking to spark her career and her marriage back into shape by looking and feeling young again. Simple inference will give you the special ingredient to Mei’s dumplings and once you do the story’s all encompassing sense of dread builds and builds, climaxing with a psychologically excruciating sequence. I sincerely hope the science used here is not accurate in the least. Knowing the love of vanity in today’s society, the effect it could have would be catastrophic if people actually started trying these techniques.
Cut
Chan-Wook Park’s Cut is very much in the same vein as his masterpiece, Oldboy. Sucking you in with flashy camerawork, an engrossing story, and entertaining characters, the director’s signature gut punch in the last five minutes of the piece stays in tact. Everyone here is fantastic as Byung-hun Lee plays a director who is kidnapped by Won-hie Lim, a nameless obsessed fan out to prove that the director is not as good a person as he seems to be. Won-hie Lim is sadistic but still morbidly funny throughout this story that it’s hard to hate him. Park’s heroine from Oldboy, Hye-jeong Kang plays the poor director’s wife who tied to a piano and held up by hundreds of wires. The image is both fascinating and horrific, just like this entire experience.
Box
Surprisingly enough, the film’s least horrific and most effecting story of the three comes from the man that brought us Audition and Ichi: The Killer>. Takashi Miike’s Box is a beautifully disturbing, yet elegant story of a woman wrestling with the inner demons of her youth. Told mostly in flashback, the short film is about Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) a successful writer who is channeling the turmoil from her childhood into her writings. The film depicts the relationship of Kyoko and her sister Shoko (Yuu Suzuki), who were are contortionists working in their father’s circus. This is a haunting story of jealously and despair that is beautifully highlighted by Miike’s use of silence and imagery.
No other horror film of 2005 even comes close to the effectiveness of 3 Extremes. What is truly amazing in each of these stories is just how beautiful they are shot. Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer on the Martial Arts epic, Hero shoots Dumplings with a suaveness that is surprising for the segment with the most gross out moments, Cut’s camera work is as slick as anything by David Fincher, and Box is driven mostly by its gorgeous, yet horrific images. Each is so gorgeous, yet so distinct that it seems as if only these particular directors could have conceived them.
There are moments when the films may seem to go too far, but what do you expect from a film named 3 Extremes? For those that have tired from the mediocre quality of Hollywood’s Horror helpings, 3 Extremes provides a hardy meal. You may just want to find out what’s in it before digging in.
Score: 9.0 /10
The DVD:
The Video
Have I mentioned how gorgeous this film is? Well the print doesn’t seem to let anyone that worked on the film down and the pictures are crisp and colors are bright and disgusting at times. The movie is presented in Widescreen with an aspect ratio of 1.85 : 1.
The Audio
The audio is also quite good here. The music is so important in a film like this for setting mood and the audio here is up to the task. The soundtrack is presented in Dolby Digital 5.1.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Commentary, Dumplings The Feature Length Version, Featurette.
Audio Commentary by Director Takashi Miike on Box – This commentary is in Japanese with English subtitles. Miike is a very astute director that obviously loves his work here, but doesn’t seem egotistic in the least. The man is an artist and shows what he knows here.
Dumplings the Feature Length Version – On disc 2 of this set you get an entire movie with Fruit Chan’s 95 minute version of Dumplings. The film is just as effective in this version as it obviously has more time for character development, especially Miriam Yeung Chin Wah’s Mrs. Li. You really get a feel for her despair in this version that is only touched on in the shorter version. Chan also has more time to build this film’s prevailing sense of doom that grabs hold of you early on and doesn’t let go until the film’s last gross out frames.
The Making of Dumplings – This is in Cantonese with subtitles and is a decent look at Dumplings’ production. I love getting to look at these directors because it finally allows me to put a face to all this sadism.
Score: 8.5 /10
