This is a review of the International version of Three... Extremes. The segments are reviewed in the order of appearance for that version. The US version is ordered differently, with Miike's "Box" being shown last instead of first. - ed.

After the failure of Three (2002), the loose sequel Three... Extremes stands out as a marked improvement. The three mavericks here are Takashi Miike, Fruit Chan and Park Chan-wook representing Japan, Hong Kong and Korea respectively. Yet, audiences remain likely to walk away bemused because, despite its title, the audience-restraining rating and the track record of two of the three directors (Miike and Park), this is more about extreme ideas than about graphic imagery. Ichi the Killer this is not. And while Three embraced the supernatural, Three... Extremes explores the realms of madness, obsession and violence. Unrelated, perhaps save for a shared fascination with female ghoulishness, the three segments form something of a rough introduction to modern Asian horror, with Chan delivering a dose of macabre black wit, Chan-wook providing his usual brand of self-conscious bloody moralizing, and Miike contributing otherworldly, irrational J-horror spookiness.

"Box," the opening episode by Miike, is quite likely to alienate the gore crowd. Its somber, surreal dream logic and difficult conclusion refuses to court an audience. Kyoko (Hasegawa), a young writer, finds professional success a hollow comfort for a guilty secret she carries. As a child contortionist, she performed a double act with her sister under the unsettling eye of their stepfather (Watabe). Envious of the stepfather’s (pedophilic and incestuous) love for her sister, Kyoko stages a prank that goes fatally awry. Now, years later, Kyoko receives a letter summoning her to the circus marquee once more for a reunion.

Miike is in Audition mood here. Low key and haunting with abstract imagery reflecting a mind distorted by guilt and obsession, Box is one of the directors most confident films. Impeccably mounted and controlled, the story builds from fragments of memory accompanied by stretches of uncomfortable silence or regular Miike composer Koji Endo’s haunting musical box melody, and the icy blues of Kyoko’s adult life are placed in stark contrast to the feverish ochre of her childhood. Matching the disturbing visual color scheme is the suggested relationship the girls have with their stepfather, whose obsession definitely strays into the arena of the unwell.

Another theme of "Box" is women’s preordained roles in society. The child sisters repeatedly squeeze into tiny wooden compartments at the behest of their cracked master. This theme of female subservience carries over into the next movie, Fruit Chan’s delirious, erotic and offensive "Dumplings." Where Miike played it cerebral, Chan opts for viscera to depict the extreme measures women choose in order to obtain eternal youth. Miriam Yeung is superb as a middle aged TV-personality, desperate to reclaim her youth and keep her wayward husband (Leung Kar Fei). Her mania takes her to the squalid apartment of Mei (Bai Ling), and the rejuvenating dumplings for which she is famous.

Revealing the special ingredient that makes Mei’s culinary treats so physically and emotionally rejuvenating would be in bad taste, but suffice to say that Chan, with the help of Wong Kar-Wai regular Christopher Doyle’s disquietingly ethereal cinematography, deliciously lays bare modern society’s unhealthy preoccupation with physical female beauty via one crunchy bite and a terrifying, serpentine lick of the lips. With flashes of horror and a very effective and eerie soundtrack, "Dumplings" is a triumph of distressing body horror. Women’s bodies and biology are put through the grinder, with an abortion scene one of the squirmiest moments of unpleasantness in recent memory, while the pay-off to Mrs. Lees unholy quest for youth is a perfectly executed piece of social horror. Add a climactic moment of vaginal trauma akin to Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle and you have the ultimate anti-date movie.

"Dumplings" is fiery horror with real guts to go with its gore. Chan and writer Lillian Lee comment on the huge class divide in contemporary Hong Kong, with the working class Mei committing vile atrocities to satiate the whim of the bourgeois Mrs. Lee, but claiming some class revenge with Lee’s final social humiliation. Mei’s claims to be far older than her looks and her renditions of Maoist songs while preparing the titular treats add another layer to her relationship with Mrs. Lee. Bai’s performance reeks of evil and compromised values, but the revelation here is Yeung. Hitherto a pop queen and mostly starring in inoffensive Hong Kong fluff, this is a brave change of pace for her. That she convinces as a maddened woman twenty years her senior is a testament to a talent that has yet to be fully explored.

"Dumplings’" themes of class war are focused on in Three... Extremes closing episode, "Cut." Park’s film is the most mainstream of the three, but is still unlikely to play the multiplexes anytime soon. It tackles the horror staple of home invasion for a pitch black comic tale of social envy, class status and the debilitating influence of violence. Park is responsible for the recently lauded Oldboy and that movie’s skewed humor pulsates here, as does the class hatred savagely depicted in his previous Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. A handsome movie director (Byung-hun Lee) is taken hostage along with his beautiful pianist wife (Hye-jeong Kang) by a crazed movie extra (Won-hie Lim). The extra resents the director’s handsome looks, perfect life, talent and status. To bring harsh reality into this charmed life, the extra plays a series of sadistically inventive games to ruin the purity of a man he both hates and idolizes.

Played out on a movie set designed after the director’s home, "Cut" is an intense three-hander (or four, counting a near mute child hostage), with the director kept at bay by a length of bungee rope and his wife memorably made into a piano puppet, bound by wires and with her fingers glued to the keys. Located almost entirely on a single set, this movie avoids stagy dullness thanks to Park’s keen directorial eye. Kinetic camera movements gleefully disorientate the viewer, dancing alongside Lim’s virtuoso performance, complete with strange speech style, seemingly based on a local Korean dialect, while compositions alternate between wide-angle shots and uncomfortable close-ups. As with other home invasion films such as Straw Dogs, Panic Room and Funny Games, "Cut" is about how middle-class pacifism will collapse when people are pushed too far, and how the violent impulses, once unleashed, are hard to control.

Three... Extremes is an eclectic and compelling piece of screen darkness. While it certainly won’t hit the popcorn chords for the masses, it serves very well as an introduction for those who are tempted to venture their first steps into the wonders of Asian horror avant-garde.