The Scope

Zoo and Three Extremes (and Three Extremes II) are unrelated. However, Three Extremes is actually the sequel to Three Extremes II (which was originally titled Three), but they were released in reverse order in the West.

Also, between the release of both Extremes in North America, an expanded version of Fruit Chan’s Three Extremes entry, “Dumplings”, was released as a stand-alone 90 minute movie.

Confused yet? You won’t be, after this next installment of Blogowe’en.

Three Extremes: Directed by Fruit Chan, Park Chan-Wook and Takashi Miike

What kind of horror movies are they? Asian horror; anthologies of the macabre.

Last week, the unthinkable happened: Blogowe’en was offline for all of Thursday, October 8th, 2009. Millions panicked, lives were lost and the very fabric of polite society seemed poised to explode without even saying goodbye or offering to split a cab.

How sad we all were.

To compensate, this entry will cover two birds with one stone. If you look carefully, that stone has a tag on it that reads MADE IN JAPAN.

With the release of high-profile remakes of Ringu and Ju-On, those films’ producers had done what most producers set out to do: successfully popularize (and get rich off of!) a not very new phenomenon. The Ring and The Grudge ushered in a mainstream interest in Asian horror and, before long, it seemed that every American horror movie made in the 2000s had genteel protagonists pursued by dark-haired, drippy, dead kids. Whether they lived in TV sets, wells, houses or computers, they were all pale, they were all wet, they were all unpleasant and they were all going to kill you in a grotesque fashion.

It was lazy and formulaic. But anything’s better than torture porn.

Most of the American-influenced horror films are pretty disposable. They’re little more than the latest from an endless string of sausages from the Hollywood abattoir. Mere products made by filmmakers who didn’t know or care much about the themes or social commentary that made the most popular Asian horror films work in the first place.

Take last year’s Blogowe’en entry, Suicide Circle, for instance. It worked not only because it told an engaging, creepy story, but because it had so much personality. For one, it was a moody, off-beat film, unafraid to stray from the mood of gradually building dread to play a scene for laughs, or to get the audience to empathize with its characters.

This style of storytelling is in sharp contrast to American horror cinema’s mono-thematic, mono-stylistic efforts, which try to engender such a sense of gloom and foreboding — from their first frame onward — that they do little to excite or engage the viewer, and they resort to endless jump-scares that seem to be more in tune with prank flash animations than true horror. The worst offenders in recent memory are The Unborn, Hostel and its sequel and, of course, the unbelievably lame Saw series.

Most importantly, Suicide Circle is undeniably the work of filmmakers with a vision. It speaks of loneliness and an increasingly impersonal world with an eerie prescience. To say, as the film does, that we know more about manufactured pop groups, ringtones and Internet memes than we do about our neighbours is an accurate condemnation of life in these times. These horror films are rich in directorial vision and theme, attracting modern horror fans to the likes of filmmakers like Japan’s Takashi Miike, in place of John Carpenter, George A. Romero or David Cronenberg in their respective genre heydays. Miike is the latest notable in a genre that makes stars out of its directors.

Three Extremes, like the Romero/Dario Argento double-feature Two Evil Eyes or the recent Grindhouse, is an anthology film that is very much a star director attraction. Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan had risen to prominence following his impressive, low-budget debut Made In Hong Kong, while Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy earned him international acclaim. Miike, representing Japan in this trilogy, is one of the most prolific and misunderstood directors of the bunch. Many fanboys seem to follow him for being oh-so-gory and extreme in films like Ichi The Killer without understanding the depth of his work. Takashi Miike, like Chan-Wook, is not just in it for brainless stimulus like perpetually-annoying hack Eli Roth. Miike is insanely prolific and is just at home directing goofball, delirious comedies like Zebraman or the David Lynch-like Visitor Q and Gozu.

The segments in Extremes all have simple, juicy set-ups.

Chan’s “Dumplings” depicts an aging actress who dines on fetii to retain her youth. Chan-Wook’s “Cut” turns torture porn on its head, as an embittered film extra (Won Hie-Lim) holds a beloved film director (Byung-hun Lee) hostage on a horror movie set. Finally, Miike’s “Box” is an eerie revenge story, as a former circus darling is haunted by dreams of a death she may have caused.

Miike’s story has the most straightforward plot line. The young Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa) has endless troubling dreams about the death of her young sister, whom she was always jealous of. Yet, there’s a lot of scripted and directorial flourishes that muddy the waters more than your average E.C. comic, as we learn more about the girls relationship with each other and the incestuous overtones regarding their father. Like the restrained, sombre horror of Miike’s 2002 film Audition, “Box” is the least bloody of the three stories, with much of the horror coming from its crisp winter atmosphere and its muted soundtrack. Rather than driving up the soundtrack to imbue menace, Miike the short film plays out as a near-silent, with only the occasional chiming bell to remind us that our TV set isn’t on the fritz.

I would welcome more of this kind of restraint in horror films. The segment near the end of “Box” — when Kyoko is confronted by her father and the titular box finally opens by a crack — is more unsettling than anything coughed up by Miike’s American counterparts.

Since “Box” is so restrained, it’s up to “Dumplings” and “Cut” to live up to the film’s promise of extreme horror.

For the former, its outlandish premise references issues like abortion and stem cell use without ever equating them with the evil of, well, eating fetuses. Fruit Chan’s film only depicts the pathetic actress Lei’s rabid consumption of dumplings as an indictment of vanity. She doesn’t care who she hurts in order to acquire fresh specimens, even when the process used results in the death of a young girl.

“Cut”, like “Dumplings”, pushes the boundaries of good taste to tell a story.

Whereas Fruit Chan’s segment relies mostly on the quiet horror of the central plot’s depravity, “Cut” is over the top, gory, dark and very, very funny. Like the other directors, Park Chan-Wook upstages his contemporaries at their own game.

Filmed in 2004, Korea had doubtlessly been exposed to the mentally bankrupt Saw series, which purported to have a grand, moral modus operandi, but was mostly about watching vacuous non-entities die at the hands of another (villainous) non-entity in the most tedious ways possible. By contrast, “Cut” transforms the black-and-white moralizing of Saw into something a little more cerebral…

“Cut” outdoes its ilk with style, humour, and a less dubious sense of ethics. The director’s abductee/torturer speaks at length about the nature of good and evil, but is blind to his lengthy list of shortcomings, not the least of which being a deranged stalker. Chan-Wook’s film doesn’t fetishize or worship murderer-torturers like the Saw and Hostel films do, but rightly reduces them to what they are: snivelling failures who are deserving of nothing but our contempt.

The directing in Three Extremes is incredible across the board, with not one weak moment in any segment. Chan, Chan-Wook and Miike are all top-notch filmmakers and are beautifully aided by strong scripting and casts. Of the latter, special mention should be made of Miriam Leung, who plays the petty Mrs Lei in “Dumplings”, and the equally brave work done by Won Hie-Lim in “Cut”.

Still, despite the names involved, Three Extremes seems to have vanished by the wayside, eclipsed even within the cult followings of its individual directors.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the DVD release of the 2005 horror anthology Zoo, made by comparative unknowns, is even more of a non-entity among horror fans.

Just as Three Extremes was so full of directorial vision and engaging, horrific parallels to our modern lives, Zoo is a less-polished, but thoroughly engaging meditation on life and death. Naturally, given the genre we’re in, we have a lot of death on our hands, but there’s a lot of wonder and warmth to be found in this hidden gem.

The strongest of these segments are its first (about a ragamuffin of a girl named Yoko) second (in which a chainsaw killer traps a brother and sister in an underground jail) and the fourth, an animated story about a robot with a built-in death date. The former may actually be the best of the bunch, though it is the lightest on overt horror, as an awkward teen deals with her abusive mother and peers, and excruciating in its exaggerated take on teenage awkwardness and sibling rivalry.

Throughout four of the five segments, Zoo’s focus is exclusively on family dynamics through the lens of fantasy and horror.

Indeed, only the titular last segment disappoints, not only because it abandons this theme, but the story grinds to a halt with a clumsy non-ending before it can really go anywhere. It’s not the only gaffe the film makes, as the third segment (in which a boy’s parents exist in separate realities, each one ignorant of the other), starts off as an effective metaphor for divorce before switching gears in its denouement.

Still, those missteps only reinforces the strength of the surrounding stories, as the protagonists of each mature and find strength by using or escaping their relatives. Zoo is ultimately a film about optimism, love and hope, which, despite its faults, makes it all the more unique and interesting among the screams and grue of your average horror pic.

Availability: Zoo and Three Extremes are both available on DVD.

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