Director: Fruit Chan, Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike
Year: 2004
Country: Hong Kong/South Korea/Japan
Alternate Titles: Sam gang 2
Genre: Anthology
Plot:
Three stories are told by emerging Asian directors.
Review:
Dumplings-Finally fearing the advances of age, a middle-aged housewife seeks the advice of a local chef renowned for her curative and seemingly magical dumplings. When the strange dish starts to work, the two begin spending more time together, finally letting her in on the gruesome secret to its spicy flavor. Overall, this was easily the best of the three. The main part of this one is based on the concept of her appearance against the stereotype, which manages to get some great work out of the burgeoning mystery of what she uses to prepare the dish. Once this is finally unveiled and there's the whole truth revealed, it manages to utilize this quite well with the actual revelation sequence coming off as a wholly intense and disturbing sequence that really feels like it gets away with a lot as it's quite a dark and chilling explanation. While the rest of this could be better, especially all the adultery angles throughout here which aren't all that interesting by taking up a large portion of time to get to a mild-mannered resolution, this is the only underwhelming part about this whole effort.
Cut-Returning home from a movie shoot, a big-time director finds himself and his wife kidnapped and held hostage on the movie set by a deranged extra. Forcing him into a series of extremely brutal games, he gradually begins to uncover the real reason behind the encounter. This one was just lame and completely unworthwhile as the biggest factor against this is the main plot for it. It's simply not scary as the rationale is so inherently stupid it's a wonder it made it through to the final approval, the purpose of performing the capture and torture just doesn't make sense and the whole thing could've ended on numerous occasions without any harm done had there been more interest in removing himself from the situation without regard for his captors' well-being. Still more flawed is the fact that this one then spends an indefinite amount of time recounting a series of grievances against each other and doesn't tend to make this move along at the briskest of paces. Likewise, the fact that this is billed as having him torture them for their behavior and position in society then skimps out on the torture leaving only the impact of their final retribution against him as the only gory bit in the whole story just seems completely infallible. All in all, this was a truly terrible segment.
Box-Tormented by strange dreams, a woman begins to feel her twin sister has come back from the dead to haunt her. Trying to find the confidence to shake off the experience, she finds her closer than she initially expected. Once again, this is another just truly outright terrible segment as the main focus here is again completely removed from horror. The only real interesting part of this is the backstory explanation for their situation as the two sisters performing a ballerina routine succumbing to jealousy from the misappropriated preference towards their father and the resulting encounter one day unleashing an accident that consumes one in a hellish blaze, but beyond that, this is just so slow that it's agonizing to get through yet is the quickest one running time. The psychosexual implications at play offer a chance to mix up the long sections of wordless moments that pass by but instead are just dull and lifeless, and there's even less to like about once this tries to become interesting as what happens isn't really horror anyway. This is a curious and questionable inclusion that really lowers this overall.
Overview: ***.5/5
A fun anthology that might have some issues at points, but there's still quite a lot to enjoy here that there's enough to cover the lackluster work present. Those who enjoy this kind of genre fare, are huge anthology completists, or fans of the creative crew will be the main audience here while most others out there might want to heed caution here.
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