Three brand-name directors from Asia each tell a story in Three… Extremes, an anthology as odd as its title’s punctuation. It begins with “Dumplings,” by Fruit Chan (Don’t Look Up), in which an aging actress (Miriam Yeung) eats dumplings prepared by Bai Ling (Crank: High Voltage) that reverse the ravages of time on one’s skin. The secret? High-gluten flour. Oh, and finely chopped aborted babies.

Next up, “Cut,” a movie-set piece about an actor (Won-hie Lim) taking revenge on his director (Byung-hun Lee, I Saw the Devil) by Park Chan-wook. Although it gets points for injections of black comedy that actually work, “Cut” isn’t as strong a tale as one would expect, coming from the man who made the bee’s knees of all vengeance pictures, Oldboy.

In fact, given the level of directorial talent involved, this entire project should be better than it is. Visually, it’s superb across the board, but when I see the word “extreme,” I don’t think “tone poems,” which is really what I’d peg the final story as. Directed by Takashi Miike (Audition), “The Box” illustrates why it’s not nice to lock a human being into one. The segment drags. Actually, they all do — at roughly 40 minutes, each is too long.

Not so strangely, a sequel exists, 3 Extremes II. Strangely, it actually predates this one by a couple of years. They do things differently on the other side of the world. Like boiling fetuses with cabbage, which Chan needlessly expanded into a full feature all its own, Dumplings, later that year. —Rod Lott

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For some R&R after wrapping a movie, mustachioed prick actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi) takes his girlfriend, Deborah (Silvia Dionisio), and select fellow cast and crew members to the spooky, middle-of-nowhere mansion where he grew up. His ailing mother (Anita Strindberg) still lives there, despite the home being the spot where Michael, as a child, fatally stabbed his maestro father for beating up Mom.

Mom’s happy to see Michael (take a drink every time you feel an incest vibe; you’ll die before the end) and wishes he’d visit more often, but he refuses: “I’m always on the move, you know. Like a gypsy.” That’s probably a good thing, because Michael’s friends start getting killed. Who’s the black-gloved killer? It may be tough to tell at first, because everyone but the dog wears black gloves.

The final film for The Horrible Dr. Hichcock director Riccardo Freda, the so-nasty-it’s-nice Murder Obsession colorfully plays with all the elements that make a giallo great, from a bloody beheading to showcasing the nude body of Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, no less than three times, including her first encounter with the unknown psychopath, who attempts to drown her in the bathtub.

The best scene, however, is an extended nightmare sequence, which we see as Deborah relates its surreal details to her uncaring boyfriend. Among other things, she runs into a giant spider web, complete with giant spider; gets her chest scratched by bushes she pushes her way through; finds snakes at her feet; becomes tied to a post by some white-robed crusty faces who vomit green froth; and then is felt up by that oversized arachnid — all while she’s wearing a tissue-thin nightie. That’s commitment, kids. —Rod Lott

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The Convent is made with such obvious affection, I’m able to forgive that it literally plunges a knife into the heart of its least hateful character 30 minutes into its running time, and then makes us wait another 20 before Adrienne Barbeau shows up to kick some serious demon nun ass. It begins memorably in 1960, with a hot, young brunette in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform walking into a church and batting away at the assembled sisters (and father) with a Louisville slugger before setting them ablaze and blasting them with a shotgun, all to the sweet sound of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”

Forty years later, the location of this massacre is the destination of choice for a trio of truly obnoxious fraternity assholes, their virgin pledge, two girlfriends and the super-cute, sarcastic Goth girl who’s just like the woman I imagined I’d end up marrying back when I was 14. (It didn’t happen.)

The trouble starts when super-cute Goth girl is sacrificed by a quartet of pathetic Satanists, which causes the demons that necessitated the previous massacre to rise up from wherever they went the last time this all went down. In the end, the only person who can stop the demons from raising the Antichrist is the hot, 50-something version of the hot schoolgirl who took care of the problem the first time.

Needless to say, Barbeau is truly awesome as the foul-mouthed, liquored-up, tight-jeans-wearing demon slayer and is — along with The Convent’s sly sense of humor — the main reason to ignore the its obvious deficits and give it a chance. Clearly inspired by Night of the Demons and Evil Dead 2, The Convent is better than the former and nowhere close to the latter, which is exactly how it should be in a fair and just world such as our own. —Allan Mott

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Stick a spider in a movie, and I’ll see it. While this movie’s title (Spiders, duh) promises more than one arachnid, it really only features one … but the damn thing grows to be about 30 feet tall, so who’s complaining?

Here, a shuttle mission goes awry when the spider on board for experimental purposes goes crazy and kills the crew. The shuttle crash-lands at an Area 51-sorta place, where some annoying college newspaper reporter and her two pals — a hacker geek and a photographer who uses a point-and-shoot number — are snooping around for a story. (For the three leads, Mosquito director Gary Jones cast three of L.A.’s most unappealing young actors, resembling the poor man’s Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser and Chris O’Donnell, respectively.)

They enter the shuttle wreckage and then the bowels of the secret base, only to find themselves trapped and menaced by this very angry, very aggressive, big-ass spider, who seems to be growing in size at an alarming rate. The U.S. Army’s also running around looking for the thing, so the movie quickly becomes a mix of Aliens and, um, itself. Created by KNB, the spider effects are mostly pretty cool, especially in the balls-out finale, where the eight-legged creature terrorizes a retirement home — excuse us, we mean college campus — in broad daylight.

What’s not so hot is the by-the-numbers screenplay, which seems to have been assembled using every stock line from the horror genre. To wit: “We’ve got to stop it!,” “You go that way,” “Let’s get out of here!,” “Save yourself!” and the ever-popular, spoken-too-soon “I think we made it!” Although it doesn’t quite know when to quit, you’ll be cheesily entertained for most of Spiders’ running time. While it’s not scary, a lot of the arachnid’s appearances gave me the shivers. (Aside: See if you can spot all the vaginal imagery in the spider’s mouth.) —Rod Lott

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True to its title, Cat in the Brain opens with close-up footage of a cat (puppet) wolfing down on (obviously fake) bloody brain matter. And we would expect nothing less from Italian gore king Lucio Fulci. When someone who hates horror movies asks, “What kind of sick mind would make such a thing?,” now you can answer, “Well, this guy.”

The film certainly pokes fun at his image, as Fulci more or less plays himself, a middle-aged bearded man who wears sweaters over shirt and tie, wears glasses and makes really sick flicks where the gallons of spilled blood look like someone bought red paint in bulk. In this meta work, where Fulci is “overcome with a sense of repulsion,” he visually links onscreen acts of horrific violence with eating raw meat — a chunk of flesh equals stark tartare.

Pretty quickly, Fulci goes mad as the felonious behavior of his films seeps into his daily life and he experiences disturbing visions, like the slaying of a whore in broad daylight (and a nipple-muncher under the cloak of darkness), and an orgy in which a billiards player redefines “corner pocket” with the nude woman draped across the pool table. Many, many clips from his previous films — from Sodoma’s Ghost to Touch of Death — are utilized.

It’s all very nasty stuff, that even heavy use of Edvard Grieg’s classical-music hit “In the Hall of the Mountain King” can’t serve as a reliable salve. It really is like a proto-Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but one that most video viewers won’t have the stomach to take. I can’t say I really blame them. —Rod Lott

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