When three famous Asian directors work together to make a three part horror film you know you're in for a good ride. Written by Fruit Chan, Chan Wook Park and Takashi Miike they each have their own 45 minute slot to make you cringe with fear yet cannot turn away, three films entitled 'Dumplings', 'Cut' and 'Box'. The first film of the three is 'Dumplings', staring one of People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World 1998", Bai Ling and Miriam Chin-Wah Yeung. We follow the story of Qing a retired actress trying desperately to win her husbands love back with various anti ageing solutions. When she hears about Aunt Mei's Dumplings are the best things to regain your youthful looks, she knocks on the flat door of the unusually young looking Aunt. After consuming a number of Aunt Mei's dumplings for a couple of weeks she starts to develop some unusual side affects. Because of the great success of this film, the director went on to make a feature length version of 'Dumplings' with a run time of 91 minutes. The next instalment of the three is 'Cut' directed by Chan-Wook Park (famous for his Vengeance Trilogy) and stars Byung-hun Lee and Won-hie Lim. One way to describe this section of the film is the Asian version of 'Saw'. It tells the story of a director on the set of his latest film, but he's not to do work. he has been kidnapped by a jealous extra in his films and put into a life threatening situation, hands bound and a rope around his waist he is set a task, on one side of the room is an abducted girl and on the other his pianist wife, both of them securely tide up. The director must decide to either strangle the little girl, or his wife gets a finger chopped off every five minutes. I had a lot of problems with this story, first of all there were a collection of open flamed candles behind the director, I'm sure he could have used those to burn through the ribbon joining his hands together, and also there was a number of times were the extra came so close to the director that he could have easily swung for him, instead he just listened to him talk. After I put both of those things aside I really enjoyed this short film, it had some very tense parts as well as some strong horror, 15 minutes through you get sucked in and wish it also had a separate feature length. The third and final part is by Takashi Miike (most famous for Audition and Ichi the Killer) his film is called 'Box' this story contains a woman's worst nightmares as they become reality. Staring Kyoko Hasegawa as struggling writer Kyoko, the story mostly focuses on the flashbacks of her childhood when she ran a sideshow act with her sister and father. The shows success is great until the attention comes away from 10 year old Kyoko and onto her sister Shoko; her jealousy causes her to play a nasty trick on her sister that goes horribly wrong. I looked forward to this the most of the three and was the most disappointed, there was hardly any dialogue so most of the film was purely based on assumptions, and it also got quite boring watching the same flashbacks over and over again. On the other hand people that I watched this with found it to be their favourite; I guess it's a love-hate kind of thing.
Over all I give this film 7 out of 10, manly because of the first two films, they each got you involved with the characters and had a great ending, the third made me drop the score by a couple of marks, if they had 'Dumplings' as there final piece I would have enjoyed this film a lot more, a good thing about the films is the length of them, as some of the times you may not have the time to watch a two hour feature you can choose to just watch one of the stories and turn it off afterwards. I do recommend this film to fans of horror or Asian cinema, if not then try something new, this films a good catch and worth watching.
Over all I give this film 7 out of 10, manly because of the first two films, they each got you involved with the characters and had a great ending, the third made me drop the score by a couple of marks, if they had 'Dumplings' as there final piece I would have enjoyed this film a lot more, a good thing about the films is the length of them, as some of the times you may not have the time to watch a two hour feature you can choose to just watch one of the stories and turn it off afterwards. I do recommend this film to fans of horror or Asian cinema, if not then try something new, this films a good catch and worth watching.