Saam Gaang Yi

Saw Saam Gaang Yi which is, recall, the sequel to the film known in the US as Three Extremes 2. This is confusing. I know. As before, the film is composed of three short horror films so, without further ado, on to the shorts:

Dumplings:
I liked this one. As in the previous Three Extremes, it's not horrifying in a conventional manner, but it is revolting and very evocative which winds up being pretty horrifying anyway. The plot is this: an aging actress, obsessed with regaining her youth, contacts a cook whose dumplings can make you young again. The secret ingredient is revealed fairly early, but I still don't want to spoil the surprise. If you're curious, the secret ingredient is human fetuses(!) This leads immediately to all kinds of obvious social commentary (although, of course, it doesn't add meaningfully to the social issue, just uses it for disgust points.) The cook is clearly some kind of witch. She's very young but has scraggly hair, a slightly husky voice, and dresses in loud, skin-tight prints. She is always smiling and merry. She is the demon of female sexual vitality and youth. She is last seen in the film waltzing merrily away from any kind of danger, singing an old-fashioned song. I enjoyed it greatly, although it is also repulsive.

Cut:
A bit weaker, this one. It opens on a rich vampire-woman sucking the blood of an old man. She plays piano and calls her friends and (psyche!) it turns out it's just a movie. The film director goes home to his wife. They are both captured by a deranged extra and forced to play some cat-n-mouse game where if the director doesn't play along, his wife loses fingers. The short is very theatrical and goofy. It uses the trappings of comedy (unhappy marriages, men in dresses, outrageous costumes and funny faces) to tell a horror story. The result is very strange and not always in a nice, uncomfortable way. Sometimes it's like a cowboy on the moon: incongruous, but not scary. Also, the main antagonist has some nice little De Sade-esque ravings about money, power, and morality. It's interesting but what most interested me was this stylistic schizophrenia between comedy and horror. Very goofy, but interesting.

Box:
Directed by Takashi Miike, I was expecting a lot more ugliness. It has a sexualized creepiness to it that I've come to associate (however incorrectly) with Miike. The plot follows an ex-circus-contortionist girl who used to preform with her sister until her sister died in a tragic accident. The short circuitously exposes this story, sliding between dreams, memories, visions, and the circus act. It's very confusing and deeply icky at parts. Its most effective horror is its most prosaic: the repeated symbolic allusions to rape. A miniature Bunraku doll is repeatedly contorted and stuffed into boxes. The image is creepy, but the work of making the connections to the plot is left to you. Not an accessible film.

This trilogy was better than the first. It was also much more artistic and much more stylized. Mostly this worked, with only some parts of Cut not quite hitting the high-water mark. Again, nothing particularly scary, but plenty of creepiness and ominous slowness. Once again, not a bad collection.