Three...Extremes - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Three...Extremes': Three times the terror

By CHRIS GARCIA
Austin American-Statesman

How you digest a line about aborted fetuses being "so cute and nutritious" (nutritious!) is a reliable gauge of how well you'll cozy up to "Three ... Extremes," a trio of short films by three of Asia's best and most prolific filmmakers. The movies share a delight in wanton depravity, and together compose a bloody plunge into human degradation and perversity, including, but not confined to, cannibalism, torture, murder and dismemberment.

Lions Gate Entertainment

'Three...Extremes'

3 out of 5 stars

Directors: Fruit Chan, Takashi Miike, Park Chan-wook
Starring: Hye-jeong Kang, Kyoko Hasegawa, Atsuro Watabe, Jung-ah Yum, Bai Ling
Run time: 125 minutes
Release date: Oct. 28, 2005
Rating: R for strong disturbing violent content, some involving abortion and torture, and for sexuality and language.

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Official movie site

The cumulative effect of this two-hour immersion in ick isn't the bludgeon-to-the-head you might expect. The threesome is an almost delicate fresco of physical and psychological unpleasantness executed with an artful elegance that's both incongruous and palliative. Still, the extremes of the title are more than truth in advertising; they're fair warning.

Hong Kong director Fruit Chan's unsettling cautionary tale "Dumplings" begins the show. Satirizing our collective beauty obsession and the Botoxy lengths to which we will go, Fruit presents a beautiful actress who has found a fountain of youth in Chinese dumplings filled with — get ready — human fetus meat. The story is told, though the filmmaker exults the sensual, with caressing close-ups of the pearly dumplings and the gelatinous pulp they contain. The sounds of eating are amplified for maximum squirm.

"Dumplings" is an absurdist tragedy played disturbingly straight. It's up to us to extract the arch humor beneath its becalmed surface. If you can't find it, the film will smother you in bleakness.

South Korean director Park Chan-wook is best known for this year's spectacular revenge noir "Old Boy" and "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance." Violent retribution also propels the episode "Cut," a stylish if slight moral thriller about toxic degrees of class envy. A film director and his wife are held captive by a disgruntled movie extra. Elaborate torture is his tool to bridge the gap between haves and have-nots.

Taking place on a palatial movie set, "Cut" generates a frantic, coiled energy using panic-eyed closeups and canted angles. Casual brutality mingles with serrated humor. Like the gory thriller "Saw," "Cut" explores the torment of making irrevocable choices under life-threatening duress. Park's visual snap helps distract you from the set-up's overfamiliarity.

Curiously, the least gruesome chapter in "Three ... Extremes" is "Box" by Japanese cult director Takashi Miike, who has made a name with taste-pushing crime and horror movies ("Ichi the Killer," "Audition"). Guilt and the cruel power of memory haunt a young woman who lost her twin sister in a tragic accident years before. Takashi shoots with a cold Lynchian remove for a quasi-ghost story that has the opacity of someone else's dreams. He creates pretty imagery using snow and fire, but the impact of the woman's suffering is lost in the nonlinear shuffle.

Excellent acting and exquisite craft mark all three films. Like much recent Asian horror, "Three ... Extremes" traffics in lyrical debasement and sophisticated scares. The bite-size movies are exercises not so much in repulsion as eerie dislocation.