Disturbing Foreign Movie of the week:
THREE EXTREMES
I know my readers, and I’m telling you now, many (if not most) of you will not make it through this movie.
The movie is made up of three short stories (each about 40 min. long), each with a different writer, director and production crew. In fact, they come from three different countries (Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan), and therefore – three different languages.
There is a movement, in asian cinema, to redefine the horror movie genre. The idea being that, in order to scare you, they have to exploit the things that really creep you out – that you’ll be thinking of long after the movie is over. They know that teenagers being hacked up by mutants or zombies, or even ghosts – is NOT scary. It’s disgusting, but not scary. I mean, c’mon! People just laugh at that stuff. I bet that nobody really laughed at AUDITION , the benchmark of this new wave of horror flicks.
There aren’t any zombies here, just ordinary people. Stephen King, at his best, knows what scares people. Ordinary people, maybe even ourselves, are capable of much greater horror than any pissed off ghost. That’s why “Misery” was much creepier than, say, “It” (Good grief! A giant spider? Step on the damn thing and move on!).
The three stories in THREE EXTREMES are examples of this new movement. The first one is the one that I think most people will walk out of. It breaks a lot of taboos that I think most people aren’t ready to see broken. The second places a good man in a dire situation where he must choose between two evils. The third is f***’ing messed up (damn those Japanese).
The usual warnings apply here:
- This is NOT a date flick!
- Don’t watch it if you are easily offended
- Don’t watch it if you get scared easily
- Don’t watch it if you’ve just eaten chinese dumplings
- Keep in mind that I listed this under “disturbing” movies, so don’t blame me if you can’t sleep for the next couple weeks.
- This is NOT a date flick!
Enjoy —- if you dare…..
