Here’s a case where a title truly fails to express the content of the film it represents. Aside from a rare use of ellipses, Three . . . Extremes is a pretty mild advertisement for the demented fantasies of three of Asia’s most skilled purveyors of mayhem. When one hears the word “extreme,” in the States at least, one immediate calls to mind images of bleach blonde mimbos shredding half-pipes to the bland pop-punk sounds of Bad Religion on ESPN2. Personally, I prefer the South Korean title, Three, Monster, which somewhat more directly hints at the monstrousness contained therein. And monstrous this collection is—when the tamest entry of the three happens to be directed by Japanese schlock and awe genius Takashi Miike, you know you’re in for something special on the gonzo front.

Fruit Chan begins proceedings with a perfect little film called “Dumplings.” I don’t mean to be sensationalist, but the only other film I’ve actually felt physically sick while watching was Salo. Christopher Doyle, one of the great cinematographers of our time, shot “Dumplings”: the film is thus a unique combination of the lush and the stomach-churning. Chan and Doyle concentrate the camera on tactile images of boiling water and swaying fabrics in a story about a middle age former TV star, Ching (Miriam Yeung), who seeks to restore her once youthful appearance and regain the attention of her philandering husband by eating the curative dumplings of a famous, or maybe infamous, chef, Mei (Bai Ling). The irony revolves around what’s used to make the dumplings (spoilers ahead)—aborted fetuses. The quality of the “stuff” depends on the lateness of the pregnancy stage during which the fetus was aborted. Chan and Doyle’s tactile cinema works especially well here—as Ching seeks a more powerful Fountain of Youth, the images become more graphic and gruesome. But most of “Dumplings” works via suggestion, and Chan never succumbs to overkill. The especially brutal moments come during the eating of the dumplings, when the slow, exaggerated crunching sounds of Ching’s chewing drive home the grotesquerie of the unscrupulous drive to remain beautiful. Also memorable is a scene in which the unintended effects of the dumplings manifest themselves for Ching in the middle of her dinner party. Taste, smell, and touch seem to exude from basic yet well applied principles of image and sound. Apparently there’s a feature film version of “Dumplings,” which I still haven’t seen. It’s difficult, however, to imagine a lengthier screen time improving on this nugget of acidic satire. Even the incomplete, fragmentary ending makes sense in this context—a vaguely nihilistic conclusion befits a vaguely nihilistic film.

I earlier alluded to the monstrousness of all three of Extremes entries, but try as I might, I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the insufferable embarrassment that is Park Chan-wook’s “Cut.” Could this possibly be the same director of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy? Judging also from the nearly concurrently released Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, apparently so. Park has stated that his “Vengeance Trilogy” was undertaken in an attempt to prove to critics that he could film an infinite number of variations on a similar theme, but this short seems to betray the fact that Park has a more than arbitrary interest in the workings of revenge. And yet, “Cut” fails to cover new ground. Its story of a disgruntled extra (Won-hie Lim) who threatens the health and home of a successful director (Byung-hun Lee) contains the same dynamics of class envy that fueled Mr. Vengeance without any of the same visual brilliance, narrative irony, or attention to detail. That Park this time chooses to focus on a film director of popular and critical acclaim could possibly suggests a personal statement latent in “Cut,” but Park has also stated that nothing of his personal life appears in his films. So there’s not much to grab hold of in this meager effort. “Cut” opens with a scene of intense, baroque violence that is then revealed as a staged film event inside a studio, a de Palma move that teases us into believing more meta-treats await. The director’s home exactly mimics the film set, setting up a possible meditation on the conflation of reality and fiction. But once the extra enters the narrative, costumes and sharp instruments in tow, all is lost to flat taunts, boring mind games, and lame attempts at humor. The director is forced into impossible deeds—including the admittance of infidelities that destroys the façade of his perfection—in order to save the fingers of his pianist wife, but it’s really the viewer who’s held hostage. Another nihilistic tale in which a traumatic event turns up each character’ core rottenness, “Cut” adds little to the Park Chan-wook oeuvre and, if anything, proves alongside Lady Vengeance that this real life director’s penchant for masking sadism with layers of moral instruction is wearing thinner and thinner.

Takashi Miike has taken the opposite approach throughout his career: instead of apologizing for graphic depictions of violence, he willfully indulges the absurdity of such an enterprise. This can render Miike’s films as gleefully juvenile as they are brilliantly executed, but “Box,” Miike’s Three . . . Extremes entry, is a complete departure, at least from the films I’ve seen by this Japanese renegade director (to note once again: Miike makes at least 4000 films per year, only a small sample of which I’ve had the time to actually view). Until the very last image Miike, working from newcomer Haruko Fukushima’s script, lays off the immediately horrific and concentrates on dark ambiance. Haunted by memories of her former life in the circus and the rivalry with her sister for the love of the magician they assistant, a young woman, Kyoko (Kyoko Hasegawa), returns to the big top scene of a particular chilling fratricide. The story couldn’t have been better served than by Miike’s techniques—gothic textures, dreamlike pacing, affective alternations between sound and silence. The result is a nightmarish fairy tale that Cocteau could have dreamt up. The absence of the usual Miike flourishes, Dadaist slapstick and over-the-top violence in particular (although I’m generally not against these), is welcome. Even though the finale’s freak show twist reverts to the standard Miike formula, it doesn’t function as well after the serious course the viewer has just received on building dread and psychosexual surrealism. But that’s forgivable—Miike has crafted something extraordinary here. The question remains as to whether “Box” portends a new phase in the prolific director’s work, or if it’s just another aesthetic exercise from the man who never met a genre or style he couldn’t tackle.