by SARAH ROWLAND

Directed by some of the biggest names in Asian cinema, Three Extremes is a triple shot of horrifying shorts. It’s also the exception to the rule that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The weakling in this case is Takashi Miike; the Japanese director makes the mistake of veering too far away from what people have come to expect from him: blood, blood and more blood. Conversely, South Korea’s Park Chan-wook succeeds by sticking to what he knows best: highly creative sadism.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan ups the macabre ante with his stomach-churning installment. But despite these varying degrees of success, the three twisted tales meld together smoothly, forming one perfectly disturbing anthology.

Kicking things off is Miike’s disappointing Box, a stylishly blue-tinged nightmare about a successful writer who is haunted by the death of her twin sister. Through flashbacks and hallucinations, we learn the two young siblings were contortionists who performed in a travelling sideshow along with their magician father. The doomed sister is considerably more talented than her womb mate, which of course leads to paternal favouritism. Seething with jealousy and yearning for the father’s affection, the rejected sister tries to teach her rival a lesson. But her prank turns deadly.

Box never really wakens from the dream-state visuals long enough for us to care about what is happening in reality. It’s as though Miike spent too much time trying to prove he can do art-house horror just as well as gratuitous bloodletting. It turns out he can’t.

Dumpling depravity

Next up is Chan’s Dumplings. Even though the basic plot feels like a moral commentary on vanity (in much the same way every Twilight Zone episode seems to end with a lesson on one of the seven deadly sins), Chan sets a tone that is far too macabre for unsuspecting TV viewers.

An ageing actress desperate to keep her husband from straying makes a visit to eccentric Aunt Mei, a witchy woman who would be attractive if it weren’t for the fact that she’s always picking her nose and filing her corns in public. Mei makes a pretty decent living selling her homemade, age-defying dumplings to upper-class women disillusioned with legally approved gimmicks such as Botox. Without giving too much away, Mei’s secret ingredient is, as you can imagine, at the heart of what makes this short so hard to stomach.

Chan brilliantly magnifies the gorge-rising factor by turning the sound up on every crunch of every bite. Visually, he’s just as relentless, never letting the squeamish viewer off the hook. The abortion scene, for instance, is not only enough to make Gloria Steinem reconsider her position, but it could very well trigger the gag-reflexes of even the most hardened horror fans.

Revenge revisited

Anchoring the trilogy of terror is Chan-wook’s Cut. Here the Oldboy director offers yet another elaborate revenge plot, in which he works his way backwards to explain the source of contempt. In what is perhaps tapping into his own worst fear, Chan-wook’s latest slice of vengeance is about a movie extra gone mad.

The terrorist in question is a psycho who has appeared in crowd scenes in all five of his favourite director’s films. But he’s really sick and tired of how perfect his idol is—after all, the filmmaker is young, successful, chiselled and doesn’t even have enough common decency to be an asshole, which only fuels our madman’s disdain for him. The logic here is that if rich, good-looking men start cornering the market on being “nice,” then the poor ugly schmoes of the world will be left with nothing.

It’s a stretch, but it’s still fun to watch all the various torture devices that Chan-wook dreams up for our villain. The auteur of ultra-violence is clearly in his element here, weaving in as much sadistic behaviour into his 45-minute segment as possible. And unlike his aforementioned peers, Chan-wook still leaves enough room for some dark humour. Watch for the bad guy’s song-and-dance number and you’ll see what I mean.

Three Extremes opens at the Cinéma du Parc Friday, Dec. 9

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