19: Three.... Extremes

This film is weird. It's an asian anthology film taking one of the most popular horror directors from South Korea (Park Chan-wook, the director of Oldboy), one of the most well-known directors from Hong Kong (Fruit Chan, director of Made in Hong Kong), and the legendary Japanese horror maestro Takashi Miike and having them all film a 40 minute short horror film. They are all very disturbing and very extreme, but other than that they couldn't be more different; Both from themselves and from any other movie I've ever seen.

In Fruit Chan's Dumplings, a retired actress named Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung) wants to look as young as she ever was. She is having problems with her husband, and she wants to rekindle their relationship. So she goes to Aunt Mei, who is rumored to have a secret dumpling recipe that restores youth. Unfortunately, the dumplings aren't exactly made out of wholesome ingredients. Mrs. Li is so vain that she chokes them down time and time again for months. But she is convinced that the dumplings aren't working fast enough. Her uncaring husband is still uncaring. She still looks just as good as she ever did, but she wanted to look better than that. She keeps having Aunt Mei give her more Dumplings, and stronger. Both characters are deeply disturbing, not just in their actions, but in their casual indifference to the obvious wrongness of what they are doing.

The thing that really creeps me out about this film is it's plausibility. There really are people who will do horrible things to stay young. There really are ignorant and disgusting local customs that people believe in. Things like this could happen; they have happened. This all combines with a truly nihilistic ending to give the short film a lot of power. (No, I'm not going to tell you what the dumplings are made of. Watch the movie, but not if you're squeamish)

The last thing I expected after Dumplings was a horror film with comedic elements, but that is what I was given with Park Chan-wook's Cut. A well liked director and his pianist wife are taken hostage by a deranged extra. The extra had always been poor, but he consoled himself with the thought that at least all rich men were heartless bastards. But then he started working on the director's films, and the director was kind and decent to him. Now he has to prove that the good director isn't so good, and he does this by making the director a deal: He wouldn't cut off his wife's fingers if the director would strangle a child. It's your standard Faustian Bargain: do you sell your principles for your life? I know this doesn't sound like a premise for a comedy, but bear with me for a moment.

The Extra acts completely bizarre. He perfectly memorized all the roles he's ever been them, and seems to take great pleasure in doing them at seemingly random times. The man is obviously deranged, which works for the film in two different ways. A lot of the film's humor comes from this man's non sequitor's, but at the same time the idea of having to please this clearly unstable maniac also generates horror in the long run. It's like having your cake and eating it too. The result is the funniest movie to ever have one of the character's finger get puree'd in a blender. Except for Peter Jackson's Dead Alive.( I think I watch too many movies.)

The final film is Takashi Miiki's Box, and I'm still not entirely sure what the hell happened. It is definitely about a person's recurring nightmare of being buried alive. Other than that, I could be completely wrong about what it is about. There are quite a few other aspects that are also probably a part of the nightmare, and it gets to the point where the entire film could just have been a dream. In order to avoid having to write “What most likely happened is” before every sentence, just be aware that the whole film is vague.

We follow Kyoko, a young woman trying to move on from her childhood as a circus circus. Her and her sister were an act together, contortionists who would fit themselves into tiny boxes. But she was always jealous of her sister, who got all the attention from the ringmaster. The Ringmaster, incidentally, is a pedophile. In a fit of rage, Kyoko locks her sister in her box and attacks the ringmaster. The recurring nightmare is of the ringmaster tracking her down and locking her in a box with her sister forever. There is also a repeated image of the two of them contorted impossibly closely forever.

The film has one of my favorite twist endings of all time. It does what twist endings are meant to do. It allows you to see the film in a new way, you interpret the dream completely differently after the ending than you do before. That's why it is so hard to know what is going on. It seems like a mixture of memory and nightmare, dealing with Kyoko's guilt. But after the ending we don't really know what we know. All we are presented with is a character''s psyche, damaged and strange. It is up to the viewer to put a story to it, and the story will almost always tell you just as much about yourself as the character. That's why I love this movie.

This film has one of the most bizarrely specific niches of any film: Fans of Extreme East Asian horror films who also like anthologies, horror comedies and contemplative dream sequences. If even half of that sounds compelling, you should really check this out. But you'll never be able to eat dumplings again