The film shorts trilogy Three Extremes had work from China's Fruit Chan ("Dumplings"), Japan's Takashi Miike ("Box"), and most memorably Korea's Park Chan-wook ("Cut"). Three Extremes II has three mini-movies from Thailand's Nonzee Nimibutr ("The Wheel"), Hong Kong's Peter Ho-Sun Chan ("Going Home"), and Korea's Kim Ji-woon ("Memories"). Sadly, each of the new featurettes tries way too hard—albeit in a different way. Nimibutr's contribution has a gnarly narrative as if six different screenwriters had pitched an idea about a demonic puppet and the director had opted to do all of them instead of picking the best one. Chan's "Going Home" strains credulity as it constantly out-weirds itself with an out-there account of a naturopathic doctor who puts his wife in a coma to cure her cancer and administers acupuncture to a kidnapped cop while his aborted daughter's ghost roams the halls with the cop's missing son. Kim's featurette is the most disappointing—a pretentious, shapeless dreamscape in which a guy flashes back-and-forth between an amnesic state and a lived-out fantasy of murdering his wife. The highest praise any of these deserve is "laughable." Let the tittering begin.
Independent cinema. Attach those two words to a low-budget movie and you're making a promise of a fresh perspective, some groundbreaking material or one original thinker behind the whole thing. But Kim Jin-won's indie horror flick The Butcher delivers on none of these promises. The script is insipid, a tediously pointless bit of torture porn filmed sea-sickeningly by a camera attached to the primary victim's head. The dialogue is fifty percent inarticulate expressions of pain (screaming), fear (panting), and defeat (whimpering from behind a ball gag). The other fifty percent is self-conscious lowbrow structuralism, some of which is spoken, appropriately enough, off-the-cuff while smoking a cigarette. Like many a hack before him, Kim is subconsciously aware he's making a piece of crap. He may try to dress up his pseudo-snuff with shockery like urinating, vomiting, the gouging of an eye, and the sodomizing of his hero by a man wearing a pig's head, but he eventually let's his self-important mask slip when he has his stand-in -- the director of the video within the film -- proclaim, "I know we can sell this to the U.S. They're always looking for more bloody things. But this ain't art at all." Truer words were never spoken. At least not in The Butcher.