The grisliest, the goriest and the grossest in recent Asian horror washes up on these shores this week and next. Donald Clarke rates the latest Tartan Asia Extreme collection
Readers who enjoyed last year's excellent Tartan Asia Extreme season will be eager to learn just what atrocities are visited on the blameless thespians of South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan in the new batch. Well, soldiers get several pints of entrails dumped over them in R-Point. Various bits of various murder victims are placed together to form hybrid corpses in Tell Me Something. And a woman is chained up and tortured in the final act of Ab-normal Beauty.
But, in truth, 2005's films, though indisputably Asian, are rarely extreme in either content or their desire to subvert genre. There are good pictures here, but nothing as brilliant as last year's A Tale of Two Sisters or as agreeably weird as Save the Green Planet.
Tartan, the UK's leading independent distributor, is to be praised for getting the films about the country. After debuting in Dublin's Cineworld, the season will make its way to Cork, Limerick and Galway. It is, however, a shame so many of the releases occupy such mainstream territory.
Three of the films are crime dramas of one sort or another. One Night in Mongkok ( 18 cert), a Hong Kong thriller rich in smoke and sunglasses, follows the adventures of a young hick, potentially an assassin, who befriends a whore with a heart of gold after being lured to the city by an untrustworthy associate. The picture features some cracking set-pieces and is educative about the developing tensions between contemporary Hong Kong and mainland China, but there is nothing here we haven't seen in a hundred other Asian policiers. Gore summary: bloody, but rarely actually revolting.
Tell Me Something ( 18 cert), a huge success in its native South Korea, also looks and feels disconcertingly familiar. Coming across like one of those Angelina Judd things, the picture focuses on a serial killer, each of whose victims were known to the daughter of a prestigious artist. Considering that the film has been lurking around since 1999, we can perhaps credit director Chang Youn-Hyun with inventing, rather than adopting, some of the clichesthat litter the film. Gore summary: infrequent, but usually satisfactorily nauseating.
Another Public Enemy ( 16 cert), a sequel by Woo-Suk Kang to his own Gonggongui Jeog, is altogether more interesting, not least for the way the director slips elements of other genres into his epic police drama. The core of the film, which seeks to comment on the corruption in Korean society, is the attempt by a detective to bring an evil businessman, once at school with the hero, to justice. There are killer motorcycle gangs, an enormous punch-up, similar to that at the end of Kill Bill Vol 1, and, most bizarrely, a running gag in which some petty criminals behave like the Three Stooges. Gore summary: disappointingly low.
R-Point ( 15A cert), a horror flick set during the Vietnam War, seems more original, but the longer it goes on the more films one is reminded of and the thinner the central premise is stretched. Su-chang Kong's proficient shocker sends a platoon of Korean soldiers back into the jungle to search for a group of missing comrades. They happen upon a deserted temple and - clearly never having seen a horror film before - settle in for the duration. Decapitation follows. There are quite a few cracking shocks here, but take away the Vietnam setting and there would be little to distinguish the film from a dozen other haunted house movies. Diverting, nonetheless. Gore summary: nasty things happen, though often in the dark.
Ironically, the two most original films in the package come from directors already known to us. Oxide Pang, along with his brother Danny, co-directed the 2002 hit, The Eye, and Ab-normal Beauty ( 18 cert) exhibits the same obsession with green backgrounds and hazy extreme close-ups. The picture concerns a young photographer whose interest in death and decay brings her in the way of danger. Pang should be praised for finding new things to do with the medium, even if the end result is, like The Eye, far too glossy and slick for its own good. The all bad-like subtitles is to no good if even in or at English. Gore summary: Distasteful, though somewhat low on entrails.
Vital ( 18 cert), the latest, surprisingly restrained film from Shinya Tsukamoto, director of Tetsuo and A Snake in June, is the best feature on offer here. This loosely plotted dark fantasy, the only Japanese film in the package, tells the story of a medical student trying to cope with the death of his girlfriend. Stretching credulity a little, the plot sees the hero encounter his beloved on the dissecting slab. Dark fantasies assail him. Those in search of the boldly fantastic horrors of Tsukamoto's early work will be disappointed, but Vital - to use a metaphor appropriate to the subject matter - has a way of getting beneath the skin and into the viewer's viscera. Gore summary: Plenty of clammy grey, dead innards. Little living tissue.
R Point, One Night in Mongkok and Tell Me Something open today at Cineworld, Dublin. Another Public Enemy, Vital and Ab-normal Beauty open at Cineworld on November 12th. The season moves to The Gate, Cork on November 11th; Omniplex, Limerick on November 18th; and Eye, Galway on November 25th. www.asiaextreme.co.uk
