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Three... Extremes AKA Three, Monster AKA Box / Dumplings / Cut
R2 - United Kingdom - Tartan Video Review written by and copyright: Ben Austin & Noor Razzak (29th December 2006). |
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The Film
 The film "Three...Extremes" is a collection of three horror short films from three filmmakers from Asia. The series of films are cut one after the next. "Dumplings" id the first short featured, it's directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Fruit Chan. A former actress, now middle age society wife visits a woman who may be able to restore her looks through her amazing dumplings. Now at this point I began to wonder if this was a "God of Cookery" (1996) style comedy farce, which is by no means a bad thing. The surreal image of the wife, Mrs Li (Miriam Yeung Chin Wah), eating these mysterious, red meat filled dumplings, while being sung to be the cook Aunt Mai (Bai Ling) is reason enough to watch the film. Mrs Li quickly becomes reliant on Aunt Mai's dumplings, and learns the secret ingredient, and after a short period of disgust, wants more, and faster results. Happily, or perhaps more correctly disgustingly Aunt Mai also turns out to be a back street abortionist who can procure the ingredients through her second, illegal, job. No matter what ones views are on abortion, it is quite something else to watch one occur on screen. There were a few parts of the film which really bugged me, principal being the sound effects added in for emphasis. They were overly loud, which I can't but assume was deliberate. However I found this rather laboured, we are already clearly meant to know something is up with the dumplings, but why this needs someone crunching into a microphone for emphasis I am not really sure. It just detracts totally from the experience, akin to having a drum roll machine for jokes. Overall I quite enjoyed this short, it combines an interesting plot with generally visually grabbing scenes, which is exactly what a horror film should seek to accomplish. The last scene is a fantastic way to end a film, there is no resolution, only disgust. "Cut" is the second film from South Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park. "The psycho as amateur psychologist", as St. Peter evaluating the life of a. A successful director (Byung-hun Lee) returns home after a busy day on the set where he is surprised by an intruder (Won-hie Lim) who takes him and his wife (Hye-jeong Kang) hostage as part of a macabre psychological test. The intruder hates the director for having a great life - he is successful, educated, well liked and with a beautiful talented wife. Surely there must be a dark side, that makes the director more like the normal people, and the intruder is determined to find out. He presents the director with a choice - he can either confess his dark secrets and be judged by the intruder, or he can perform an act of murder on another hostage, or his wife will slowly be tortured to death. All three options are visited as the story progresses, as it increasingly becomes apparent the intruder is a murderous psychotic who will not rest till everyone is at his own level. Through his acts of violence the director is slowly driven mad, and ends up killing the hostage, and his wife. It is an interesting premise, and one that is entertaining to watch, as despite the subject matter it has some great comedy moment. The intruder is a long serving extra on the films of the director, and through this experience acts out a variety of roles, one of which, the dance number had me rolling about with laughter. The surreal picture within picture imagery of these comedic moments is fantastic, and adds much to the film. Is there a moral? Possibly. The third and final film in this series is "Box" by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. A woman (Kyoko Hasegawa) is troubled by her past, by her sister's horrible death. Her dreams are filled with recreations of the events that led to the death, events that started in her jealously over her sister's success. Or is it? No, in fact it is really a series of delightfully messed up dreams that reflect something of the character, or fantasies of the dreaming sister. In itself, the fantasy makes for an interesting horror - death of one sister, sexual relations with their guardian, despite them being only 10 - buried alive in a box as penance for the death of her sister by the man who abused them. Rather sick, but well done, if that is a good thing. Then for what must be the world's stupidest twist ever, it turns out it was all a fantasy dream by one of two sisters who share the same body, being Siamese twins. I'll give the director marks for creating a messed up fantasy secret, but for including a dream sequence surprise plot twist of this degree of ineptness he loses it all and more. The only way this could be redeemed would be by retitling the film as Siamese Twins LOL
Video
Presented in 1.78:1, this anamorphic transfer tends to vary depending on the film and ranges from fairly good to not so great. The main problem is compression noise is evident throughout the print, although the general image is sharp and colors are nicely balanced it was a bit of a let down that the film did feature some artefacts. I also spotted some minor edge-enhancement which added further insult to injury, overall Tartan could have done a much better job with this title but instead it's teetering on the line between average and below average.
Audio
As usual Tartan have included three audio tracks for this film, considering there are three spoken languages the tracks are presented in Cantonese/Korean/Japanese DTS 5.1 as well as in Dolby Digital 5.1 and finally a 2.0 Stereo track. For the purposes of this review I chose to view the film with its DTS track and for the most part found it adequate but certainly not nearly as good as the DTS name should deliver. While it delivers on the depth and ambient sounds, I felt that the mix was too front heavy at times and weakened the impact the sound should have had. While other elements such as dialogue and minor directional effects were all finely mixed and posed no problems. Optional subtitles are included in English only and appear to have no spelling or grammatical errors.
Extras
Tartan has included a documentary, the film's theatrical trailer, a collection of bonus trailers plus a booklet for this release. Below is a closer look at these supplements. First up we have "The Making of Three...Extremes" a documentary which runs for 53 minutes 19 seconds. This feature is separated into three major sections that deal with each of the three films, in the first section the cast and director of "Dumplings" talk about the film, their characters and the overall themes of the film in some detail. In the second section we are taken behind-the-scenes of the filming of key scenes from "Box", these are fly-on-the-wall style footage and also feature some interviews. Finally the segment on "Cut" includes interviews with the director as he talks about making horror films and the story of this film among other things, the cast are also interviewed and it's rounded off with more fly-on-the-wall footage of the filming of the film. Overall there's a fairly decent amount of footage and information in this documentary and the behind-the-scenes footage is fascinating but could have used some narration. Next up is the film's original theatrical trailer which runs for 1 minute 34 seconds. Following that are a series of bonus trailers that include: - "Infection" which runs for 1 minute 26 seconds. - "Premonition" which runs for 1 minute 28 seconds. - "Dumplings" which runs for 1 minute 39 seconds. - "A Bittersweet Life" which runs for 2 minutes 4 seconds. - "Lady Vengeance" which runs for 1 minute 46 seconds. Rounding out the extras is a 2-panel booklet with an essay by author Calum Waddell.
Overall
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