‘Three tales of death and beyond…’
The anthology is woven so deep into the fabric of the horror genre that I could have done this whole stupid exercise just about horror anthologies. As it is, Three… Extremes will probably be the only one, and that’s a shame, because on the whole… it isn’t a success.
Combining the efforts of Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Jee Woon-Kim and Nonzee Nimibutr, Three… Extremes presents a trio of unrelated horror stories that are certainly closer to the horror movie freak zone than the standard Hollywood fare. The problem is that the extremes mentioned in the title are more a scale of quality than anything else. At one extreme we have the first two stories Memories and The Wheel, both of which are bizarrely esoteric in a way that is both distracting and unsatisfying. The former sees a married couple attempting to piece together the horror of their final moments, while the latter leans heavily into eastern mysticism with disappointing results. I was pretty much ready to abandon the whole project, especially when I realised that I wasn’t even watching the film I thought I was.
So. Three… Extremes is a critically acclaimed horror anthology combining three giants of Japanese and South Korean cinema (Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook and Takashi Mike), and has been on my watchlist forever. Until researching this review, I thought that was the film I had watched. Due to a quirk of marketing for an American audience, what I had actually watched was Three, the first film in the series for which Three… Extremes is a sequel. Normally, this kind of thing happens because of my tiny monkey brain, but on this occasion, there are mitigating circumstances. Three was eventually marketed in America as Three… Extremes II in order to capitalise on the success of the better known sequel. If anyone does manage to see Three… Extremes – the movie I had been trying to watch – please let me know. Anyway, let’s move on from the tangled web that this paragraph has regrettably become.
Now that mess is out of the way, we can return to Three and the final story in the anthology – Coming Home. Peter Chan’s jet black commentary on the inevitability of death is entertaining and wonderfully demented, featuring a deserted tower block, a creepy ghost child and a man attempting to revive the corpse of his dead wife. It’s all good stuff, and while it doesn’t justify sitting through the first two stories, it’s still pretty damn good.
All in all, this whole exercise has been frustratingly pointless, and I still haven’t seen Three… Extremes. Goddamnit.