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
Decades before the flesh-eating virus jumped from science fiction to science fact, there was 
And how! Their horrors begins by finding a whole human skeleton on the beach, grasping that aforementioned bikini top. Then there’s the glowing fish bones. It’s all due to the “silver stuff” in the water that results in some nifty, surprisingly gory effects on the skin it touches. A beatnik (Ray Tudor) wearing rope sandals doesn’t heed their warnings at first: “Where’s the love, Max? Don’t tell me about that ugly jazz!”
After you’ve made the best and worst Bruce Lee movies — 
They include poncho-clad Billy Ortega (kickboxer Benny Urquidez); big, black cyclist Lockjaw (Sonny Barnes, 
The final film for 
It’s hard to hate a movie whose first scene depicts a tough guy trapping a Filipino midget in a phone booth and throwing it into the bay. As the box goes splash, the film freeze-frames to announce its awesome title: 
As spoiled by that title, Ortega isn’t about to take his handicap lightly. Trained by the Philippines’ equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones, he becomes a ruthless warrior, albeit one with a sleeve flopping around. Ortega then goes hunting for Edwards (“What balls!”), whose boat bears a swastika and who keeps a henchman on staff whose sole purpose is to act as a human thesaurus. (His lone African-American henchman is dubbed by a redneck.)