Three Extremes 2

Saam Gaang (2002)

Another three part horror anthology from Asia. The weird thing about this is that it was made before Three Extremes and only released as Three Extremes 2 in America after the success of the other one. I feel confused.

Memories
Written and Directed by: Ji-woon Kim
Starring: Hye-su Kim, Bo-seok Jeong, Jung-Hee Moon, Jung-Won Jang

This would be the South Korean contribution to the film. It's about a man whose wife has gone missing and he can't remember what happened to her. He's also having weird nightmares about her digging her finger into her head and picking out bits of her brain. Then there's the woman, his wife, who wakes up in an empty street without any memories of what happened to her and no idea of who she is. Some freaky stuff happens to her too. Eventually she makes it home and learns that her husband killed her and chopped her up into little pieces and stuffed her into a gym bag (spoilers). Not particularly original, but fairly well done.

It's all extremely strange, and pretty atmospheric (in other words, very little actually happens). Unfortunately, there's only so freaked out a person can get before they start laughing. I can't help myself.

Especially when the fingers start falling on people. That was funny, I'm sorry. Fingers are one of the funniest pieces of a person (hence my online name).

The movie just sort of drifts along in a very dreamy fashion (a lot of Asian films are very dreamlike) with beautiful images and very little sound. It was nice.

It also used that weird sort of stop motion thing (you know, they used it in The Ring) with the freaky people twitching along. And of course, dead women with long black hair.

This one was probably the more coherent of the three...

The Wheel
Directed by: Nonzee Nimibutr
Written by: Nitas Singhamat
Starring: Suwinit Panjamawat, Pongsanart Vinsiri, Tinnapob Seeweesriruth, Vinn Vasinanon, Komgrich Yuttiyong

Not that this one wasn't coherent. It was just a little... bizarre. They did there best to explain it to an ignorant American audience (by which I mean myself), but I was still a wee bit lost.

It didn't really matter though. I figured out what was going on. This guy has all these puppets, and then he dies, and then this other guy steals his puppet, but it's cursed so it kills everybody (some people for no apparent reason other than they looked at it cockeyed or something). I guess.

This is the Thai 'extreme', and it's got evil puppets, curses, ghosts, demons, all kinds of freaky shit. I didn't dig it all that much, though. It was just kind of... I don't know... dull or something. It had way too many effects. And I kept thinking about all those evil puppet movies I've seen before.

It looked nice, though. Nice costumes, nice scenery, well shot - they're all well shot... it just didn't do anything for me, that's all...

Going Home
Directed by: Peter Ho-Sun Chan
Written by: Matt Chow, Jojo Hui
Starring: Eric Tsang, Leon Lai, Eugenia Yuan, Ting-Fung Li

And this one is from Hong Kong. It's about a man who moves into a dirty old apartment building with his son. The little boy runs off with this weird little girl, and when the father goes looking for him, he sort of gets kidnapped by this other guy who has his dead wife in a wheel chair and is convinced that she's going to 'revive'. He ties the first guy up (why?) and says he'll let him go when his wife wakes up.

All of this has very little to do with the boy and the little girl in the red coat. I guess she's like their (the man and the dead woman) aborted fetus? I don't know. It doesn't mean anything.

Anyway, if you try hard not to think about that, it's all good. It's just really weird, especially when it gets to the end (the woman does wake up briefly). It makes no sense whatsoever, but that's okay.

I kind of liked it the best out of all three (even though it didn't make any kind of sense). And it looked good... (that statement's getting a little tiresome, no?). But hey, Christopher Doyle. There you go.

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