Three and Three...Extremes (2002 & 2004)

Arrow are releasing a double disc Blu-ray set of producer Peter Ho-Sun Chan's two Asian horror anthology pictures, both of which contain work by some of the most famous directors working in that part of the world. But before we get started, let's clear up what might be a little confusion. THREE EXTREMES was released first by Tartan DVD in the UK, with its predecessor THREE then being released as THREE EXTREMES 2, so if you're wondering where the 'sequel' to THREE EXTREMES is in this set it's here under the correct title. OK - now let's take a look at what we get:

Disc One: Three (2002)

THREE, as the title suggests, offers us three short (ish) stories over a two hours running time. These consist of Memories directed by Kim Jee-woon (A TALE OF TWO SISTERS) in which a woman wakes up in the road with no memory of how she got there. Meanwhile a man consults a psychiatrist because his wife has seemingly left him but he has no memory of it. It's not difficult to guess how these tie together but the appeal of Memories is in an execution which offers us some atmospheric compositions and an excellent music score by Byung-woo Lee. 

        Second is The Wheel, a slightly confusing tale from Thai director Nonzee Nimibutr. Puppeteer Master Tao is dying and asks that his beloved puppets be destroyed,. They aren't of course, and this leads to all manner of mayhem and murder. A jealousy subplot is shoehorned in and by the end it's still not terribly clear why or how the puppets have caused the mayhem that has ensued. 

        Last is Peter Ho-Sun Chan's Going Home, which is essentially a love story told within the exceedingly grim environs of a tower block due to be demolished.

New extras include new interviews with Peter Ho-Sun Chan (20 minutes), Kim Jee-woon (15 minutes) and Memories DP Hong Kyoung-pyo (6 minutes). Archival material includes two more interviews with Chan (55 minutes in all), Kim Jee-woon (16 minutes) and Going Home star Eugenia Yuan (12 minutes). There's also a 16 minute making of.

Disc Two: Three...Extremes (2004)

THREE was so successful that Peter Ho-Sun Chan was able to attract even bigger Asian talent for this sequel. Fruit Chan's Dumplings offers a unique and delightfully disgusting take on youth treatments, Park Chan-Wook (OLDBOY, THE HANDMAIDEN) gives us Cut, in which a film director is terrorised by an insane actor who has wired his wife up to a piano with every intention of cutting off her fingers, and Takashi Miike concludes the film with Box, a tale about a stage show featuring two young sister contortionists and a jealousy that leads to something horrible. 

Extras include new interviews with Peter Ho-Sun Chan (16 minutes), Fruit Chan (a whopping career-spanning 43 minutes) and Takashi Miike (18 minutes) as well as archival interviews with Fruit Chan (15 minutes), Dumplings star Bai Ling (19 minutes) and three makings of for Dumplings (15 minutes), Cut (21 minutes) and Box (18 minutes). Those who still have their old Tartan DVDs may want to hang onto them as the feature length version of Dumplings isn't included here. There's also the usual booklet, double-sided poster and sleeve.

THREE and THREE...EXTREMES are out in a double disc Blu-ray set from Arrow Films on Monday 20th October 2025

Cloud (2024)

 

The new film from director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who gave us CURE (1997), PULSE (2001), and CREEPY (2016) amongst others is getting a UK cinema release through Blue Finch.

Yoshii (Masaki Suda) works in a factory but makes most of his money by being a scalper, buying up quantities of limited editions and fake products and then selling them at vastly inflated prices online. When his boss offers him a promotion Yoshii's response is to resign, move to an isolated house, and do his scalping full time.

However, unknown to Yoshii, there is a growing online community devoted to finding his true identity and his address with the intention of exacting a terrible punishment for how he has ripped them off. Eventually, a gang descends on his house, drugs him, and takes him to an abandoned factory to mete out revenge. 

Interviewed about CLOUD, director Kurosawa said he deliberately made the character of Yoshii complex and ambiguous, such that while the men who come to torture him could be said to have good reasons, the second half of the film becomes an exercise in the viewer trying to decide who to root for, if any. Apparently the story itself was inspired by newspaper reports of violent attacks in Japan which, when investigated, were found to be the result of petty internet grievances that had been blown out of proportion.

The overall result is a film of two halves - the first demonstrating a fine sense of building dread as the character of Yoshii is developed to the extent that, while we understand what he does, it's difficult to feel any sympathy for him, and yet once he's tied to a chair and being threatened with a blow torch we do, or at least we probably should do.  The main body of the second half then moves to being a lot like an action-packed Western-style shootout. You may not know how to feel during CLOUD, but chances are you'll have a lot to talk about afterwards. Here's a trailer:

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's CLOUD is in UK cinemas from Friday 25th April through Blue Finch Releasing

Rampo Noir (2005)

"Great Author. Great Shame About the Film"

Arrow Films are releasing 2005's RAMPO NOIR on Blu-ray. It's an anthology film by four different Japanese directors that purports to ‘adapt’ (and I use that term loosely but not as loosely as the people who made the film) four stories by the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo (a play on 'Edgar Allan Poe' - his real name was Taro Hirai). Rampo became famous in his homeland for his detective novels, but many of his short stories contained controversial elements of what were termed 'ero guro nansesu' or eroticism, grotesquerie and the nonsensical. His tales of cruelty and psychological horror haven’t been translated into English much, although there is a nice little paperback from Tuttle publishing that includes the classic tales ‘The Hell of Mirrors’ and ‘The Caterpillar’, both of which have both been filmed here.

We start with the very brief 'Mars' Canal', which is essentially plotless and features a naked man wrestling with a naked woman who might be his reflection that he saw in a lake. There's some fascination with lighting and skin texture here but in terms of narrative there's very little of substance.

An emphasis on imagery (plentiful) over storytelling (mediocre at best) and pacing (terrible) is present in the second story which adapts the mirror tale, and adds to its bare bones source a plot about women being discovered with their faces burned off. It turns out they all have hand mirrors made by one particular man, who ends up inside the mirrored sphere of the original piece. Despite attempts to make a police procedural out of it, this is far too slow and far too in love with its own visual style to hold the attention.

After that we get ‘The Caterpillar’ one of the most outrageous of Rampo's stories as well as being one of the cruellest and most despairing. The story of a war hero who comes home without his arms and legs only to be tortured by his wife was banned by the Japanese government out of concerns it would affect their war effort, and it could have formed the basis for a painful, tragic meditation on loss and desire. Instead once again we get something that is far more concerned with imagery than narrative which, especially coming after the similarly dirge-like previous segment makes for testing viewing indeed. Finally comes 'Crawling Bugs', a story whose execution is confusing rather than ambiguous and the denouement silly rather than horrific.

I'm being more vitriolic than usual here because I'm a big fan of Rampo's stories and it would be awful if RAMPO NOIR was to put off new prospective readers. Here his stories have been hijacked by filmmakers who have seemed determined to turn some excellent pieces of short fiction into relentlessly dull and self-indulgent cinema, and that's a great shame.

Extras include a new commentary track from Jasper Sharp and Alexander Zahlten, a 76 minute making of from 2006, 15 minutes of footage from the Japanese premiere with the directors on stage, an image gallery, and a stack of new interviews.

The new interviews include Mars Canal director Suguru Takeuchi (14 minutes), Caterpillar director Hisayasu Soto (25 minutes), Crawling Bugs director Atsushi Kaneku (14 minutes), Caterpillar cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa (16 minutes), and Mirror Hell cinematography advisor Masao Nakabori (25 minutes) and actress Yumi Yoshiyaki (14 minutes). There are also image galleries for each story. The disc also comes with a reversible sleeve and an illustrated booklet with new writing on the film.

RAMPO NOIR is out on Blu-ray from Arrow Films on Monday 6th January 2025

Dark Water (2002)

 

Hideo Nakata's film of Koji Suzuki's novella gets a UHD upgrade from Arrow.

Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is getting divorced, and the big question is who is going to get custody of her six year old daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno). For now it's Yoshimi, and the two of them move into an apartment in a refurbished but still rundown tower block.

Despite the flat having been redecorated, a bothersome damp patch persists on the bedroom ceiling, a patch which gets steadily larger and more drippy the longer they stay there. Then there's that blurred figure in a yellow raincoat, and the fact that apparently a little girl who lived in the block went missing a couple of years ago. And she lived in the flat above Yoshimi and Ikuko.

DARK WATER isn't as good as the team's previous RINGU (1999) and could probably have done with about 15 minutes trimming off its 101 minute runtime. It's still nicely atmospheric, though, and delivers at least one good ghostly scare.

Arrow's UHD transfer looks fantastic. DARK WATER has always looked rather muddy on disc but the image here is crystal clear. Extras include interviews from 2016 with Nakata (26 minutes), Suzuki (20 minutes) and DP Junichiro Hayashi (20 minutes). There's also an archival 2002 making of and interviews with actors Kuroki and Asami Mizukawa (who plays the grown up Ikuko) and Shikao Suga who wrote the song at the end.

You also get trailers, TV spots and a booklet with writing on the film from Michael Gingold and David Kalat. 

Hideo Nakata's DARK WATER is out on 4K UHD from Arrow on Monday 18th March 2024

Ju-On: The Grudge Collection

Arrow Films are releasing, in a five disc box set, the six films that constitute the original Japanese cycle of JU-ON movies. The JU-ON franchise is one of the more confusing out there, not least because in the UK the third and fourth movies were released first but with the titles swapped around. There are also US versions, as well as both Japanese and US reboots and remakes. Mind you, it's still nowhere near as confusing as the HALLOWEEN franchise, which you'll see at the end of this review where I'll be going through how they all fit together. But for now let's crack open this six film set and take a look at what Arrow has for us:

Disc One: 

Ju-On: The Curse (2000)

This is where it all started. A brief, 70 minute made for video feature that consists of several short vignettes, each concentrating on a different character. The overall story, though, is a familiar one, that of the brutal murder of Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji), her son Toshio (Ryota Koyama) and the family cat by Kayako's husband Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) in a fit of jealousy. The scare tactics that would be employed throughout the series are present and correct here also - the pale wailing child, that rasping sound effect, and Kayako's tendency to appear in confined spaces and come down stairs in the scariest way possible. 

Because it was made for video the film is in 4:3 and the quality isn't great, but it is worth watching, if only to see how such a simple concept can be rendered terrifying even on an almost non-existent budget. Extras here are a trailer and two short and charming introductions, one from Takako Fuji and the other from writer-director Takashi Shimizu.

Ju-On: The Curse 2 (2000)

As writer-director Takashi Shimizu states in his brief introduction to the second film, the two CURSE films were made at the same time and over a period of just a few days. It's not surprising, then, the running time of THE CURSE 2 is also brief at 75 minutes, or that 30 minutes of it is spent on a recap of the first movie. Theres enough new stuff to make it worth watching, though, but any details here would swiftly end up in spoiler territory. Suffice to say the events of the first film are resolved and then a new family moves into the Saeki house, with the movie ending on a teaser for the next film which became the series' first theatrical release and the one that the title JU-ON: THE GRUDGE is best known for. Extras for this one are the introduction and a trailer.

Disc Two (4K UHD) and Disc Three (Blu-ray):

Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

If THE CURSE started it all, JU-ON:THE GRUDGE is the reason we're all here. Arrow's presentation of Takashi Shimizu's classic is a new 4K restoration with the UHD disc in HDR10 compatible Dolby Vision and it looks and (especially) sounds great. It's actually beneficial to watch the CURSE movies first as JU-ON THE GRUDGE really strips the narrative down to the 'violent act leads to haunted house that affects anyone who goes within spitting distance of it' concept. Once again the plot focus hops from character to character and, like many great horror films, it's all really just an excuse for Shimizu to scare us with a variety of creepy scenes, which he achieves very memorably indeed. There's more than enough here to ensure that audience word of mouth would have made it the big success it became.

Arrow have essentially, and quite reasonably, built their boxset release around JU-ON: THE GRUDGE and its immediate sequel and there are plenty of extras for both. Extras for JU-ON: THE GRUDGE include two commentary tracks - a new one by historian David Kalat who talks about the long and quite complicated genesis of the movie, as well as the archival commentary from Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel. There's also an English dub track for those who fancy it.

Arrow's disc has two new interviews, one with director Shimizu (who also introduces the film) and one with star Takako Fuji. Evolution of JU-ON is 27 minutes in the company of J-Horror movie scholars Tom Mes and Zach Davisson who discuss all the influences on the film from Kaidan stories to Nakata's RINGU and beyond.

Archival material is extensive - interviews with Shimizu (31 minutes), Megumi Okina who plays Rika (17 minutes) and Kayoko Shibata who plays Mariko (10 minutes). There's also a stack of brief on-set interviews with the cast, four behind the scenes featurettes, five deleted scenes (with commentary) and an alternate ending. As well as a trailer and a image gallery you also get a ten minute reading by Hiroyoshi Kihara of the two 'true' stories that inspired the movie.

Disc Four: 

Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)

Released just six months after JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (at least according to the commentary we have on this disc from Japanese cinema expert (and producer of this box set) Jasper Sharp  and cultural historian Raechel Dumas, this sequel maintains the same fragmented narrative format, this time all centred around a documentary piece that has been filmed in the haunted Saeki house.

There are some good creepy bits in this one, including a very creative hanging sequence but it does go seriously over the top towards the end, so be prepared from some childbirth ludicrousness and quite a bit of gore.

We get an introduction from the director, the aforementioned commentary, an English dub, and a stack of archival material including an interview with the director (28 minutes), six on-set interviews with the cast (2-4 minutes each), four deleted scenes, lots of behind the scenes footage (including the filming of the movie's two highlights mentioned above) and preview and premiere footage from Japan, Korea and Taiwan as well as a trailer and image gallery.

Disc Five: 

Ju-On: White Ghost (2009)

Ju-On: Black Ghost (2009)

The final disc in Arrow's set is a double bill of films, each with a 60 minute runtime and made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the JU-ON franchise. While keeping the same narrative format, neither has much to do with Kayako or the Saeki house. BLACK GHOST is about a schoolgirl possessed by the physical remnant of her unborn twin, and is the better, if rather crazier of the two pictures, with the climactic conjoined foetus exorcism scene a daft but entertaining standout. 

WHITE GHOST has a family moving into a new house and, in a plot device straight out of some of those terrible AMITYVILLE sequels, a spirit in an old mirror possesses the father, who then kills the entire family and commits suicide. He records his final words on a cassette tape which, this being JU-ON world, becomes cursed. Toshio Saeki does have a tiny cameo int his one but it's actually rather silly and probably should have been left out. The main ghost, an old lady holding a basketball, is also more likely to inspire laughs than chills.

Extras on this disc are a 12 minute interview with Maru Asato who directed BLACK GHOST and she also introduces the film. You also get trailers and an image gallery. 

Arrow's box set also comes with a 60 page book featuring writing on the films as well as reversible sleeves featuring new and classic artwork. You also get 24 double-sided postcards and a reversible poster.

Finally, let's have a summary of the entire JU-ON: THE GRUDGE franchise. Titles included in Arrow's set are in blue. Other titles reviewed on this site are in brown. First of all there are four Japanese films:

JU-ON: THE CURSE (2000)

JU-ON: THE CURSE 2 (2000)

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2002)

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE 2 (2003)

Then come the American ones:

THE GRUDGE (2004)

THE GRUDGE 2 (2006)

THE GRUDGE 3 (2009)

After that some more from Japan. Firstly the end of the 'original cycle':

JU-ON: BLACK GHOST (2009)

JU-ON: WHITE GHOST (2009)

Followed by the Japanese reboot cycle:

JU-ON: THE BEGINNING OF THE END (2014)

JU-ON: THE FINAL CURSE (2014)

SADAKO VS KAYAKO (2016)

Not forgetting the Japanese Netflix TV series:

JU-ON: ORIGINS (2020)

And finally the latest US remake / reboot with the modern trend of having a supremely unhelpful title:

THE GRUDGE (2020)

So, if you didn't know all that before, now you do. 

Arrow Films are releasing JU-ON:THE GRUDGE COLLECTION in a six disc UHD and Blu-ray box set on Monday 19th December 2022, all ready for Xmas.