While not one of the three films in the collection of shorts put under the name "Three Extremes" will ever shock to the point of no return, they represent some of the sharpest wit, guts (literally and figuratively), and psychological insight into what really creeps out, entertains and sticks with us as viewers. The first is Fruit Chan's Dumplings. This one had me intrigued on the outset because I had never seen a work of Chan's before- he's won many awards but is not as well-known a cult director as the his other contemporaries here- and by film's end he had me for quite a loop. It's surely the most depraved and intentionally "oh-my-God" type of short horror films one's likely to see in the years to come, mainly because it takes on a very basic and over-done topic, vanity, and is cooked up (no pun intended) with human beings' attachment to new life. Mainly because, as Bai Ling's character demonstrates, it's so useful a old-age-prevention to eat aborted fetuses in dumpling form, as the main character, a former TV star who's worried about being appealing to her husband. This probably has the least depth, emotionally and psychologically, of the three films, mainly because Chan is far more interested in getting the audience repulsed by what's going on. It will certainly set the alarms going off for pro-lifers, but just about anyone will wonder how it can end like it does, with a twist that is just meant to add one more devilishly wretched twist on top of the baby-plate.<br /><br />Next up is Cut, a film by South Korea's newest sensation Park Chanwook. While overall his film is the most wholly satisfying and entertaining, it's not without a heap of 'hip' shots, like the one that pulls back (via computers of course, though very cleverly) across the set of a movie being shot, or in some of those angles that one saw as being one-of-a-kind in Park's Oldboy. This time a similar thread emerges: a true-blue psychopath, an extra with a grudge, makes psychological mind-games with a director with maybe too much humility to him, as his wife is tied up intricately with her fingers getting chopped off one by one. There's a lot of real guilty-pleasure type laughs to be had here, with the black comedy reaching higher points than one would've expected even from Oldboy territory, where conscience gets thrown out the window and all that's left are raw human emotions and the dark side of circumstance. It helps that the extra, played by Won Hie Lim, is great at the part because there's no real sense of humor to him, but he still ends up being funny, like when he dances to that song from one of the Director's films. The final five minutes of the short ratchets up the terror that's been building up, and those looking for the same knock-out violent climax won't be disappointed. But it's the little moments too that Park gets right, as character, primarily the Director's, is never a very certain thing.<br /><br />Takashi Miike's Box is definitely, for my money, the best directed of the lot, or at least with the most measured for the characters in the story. This time the outrageousness of the previous shorts is replaced by a grim horror of complexes going back to childhood, of entrapment in the mind to memories that are too horrible to contemplate. An author seems to be revisiting things that happened as a child- the death of her sister by her own very strange accidental hands- and how a box figures its way into it all, on top of a very sick man- the girls' father- with a half-white face. Atmosphere this time trumps perversity, though it still applies that Miike's film is a work that will be probably more haunting because of the complexities to how Kyoko faces what's happened to her sister Soko. I won't reveal what the final twist is, which is pure classic Miike, but the rest of the Box, which has very little dialog and many shots that linger longer than one might expect, is haunting and deliberately gut-wrenching. A circus atmosphere, of the sort here anyway, is no more or less realistic than the other scenarios portrayed in Three Extremes, but Box also has the upper-hand of reality blending with nightmares, and what nightmarish qualities always come up from them. What does the box mean? It's not necessarily a MacGuffin, put it that way.<br /><br />So, if you make sure not to eat anything during the proceedings, and maybe have someone's arm to clutch during some of the bloodier and gleefully sick moments, Three Extremes should make for a cool night of viewing. The directors on hand are in their A-game forms, and it has an appeal that might reach the more hard-bitten veterans of Asian cult films due to the ingenuity of key moments as well as newcomers to Asian horror that might draw them in ever more than before.