This little story tells of a group of traditional Thai dancers and their luckless experience with a puppet dressed up in traditional Thai garb. It seems that the puppet has been cursed by an ancient force and whoever comes in contact with it will be rendered mad. Several members of the group believes the curse is just a trick to stop those from harbouring the puppet for themselves, as they see the puppet as a treasure.

But steadily, these members of the group gradually finds themselves entranced by the powers of the puppet and fall into madness accumulating in hallucinations and visionary distress.

The Wheel is a very strange tale and I rate it the weakest of the three stories. It is difficult to comprehend and at times seems daunting. The mystical mumbo-jumbo doesn't help either and it just seems to be a mish-mash of strange images and ideas. It is quite scary in some places, but the crappy plot serves it no points.

MEMORIES (Korea)

By far the scariest of the three story strands, and the most disturbing. A man finds his wife has gone missing and seems to have strange visions ever since. He believes that maybe something terrible has happened to his wife, but doesn't have a clue what.

A woman wakes up and finds herself alone on the street. She cannot remember who or where she is, but clues takes her back to her home. It is there that she finally realises what had actually happened.

This is a very chilling and eerie story, and the plot is very tight with each segment testing your limits. The score is spot-on and adds ample atmosphere to the tale, which is littered with very unsettling images. I'm not going to tell you what happens because the ending is very shocking and is something that you may not have guessed. A lot of the message is implied upon, but the graphic imagery will bound to make you squeam unnervingly in your sofa. A very well made short film.

GOING HOME (Hong Kong)

At last we see some familiar faces. Wai (Eric Tsang) moves into a very old apartment with his young son, who believes there are some ghostly influences around. Their next-door neighbour is Yu (Leon Lai), who lives with his paralysed wife and young daughter.

When Wai's son goes missing one day, he stumbles inside Yu's apartment and finds - shock horror - that Yu's wife is actually dead, and that Yu has been perserving her body by immersing her in some kind of liquid. Yu then takes Wai captive, and it turns out that Yu is mentally unstable, believing that his medicine would revive his dead wife. He even thinks that she talks to him on occasions.

Trapped in a house with a nutter and a dead woman, Wai must find every means to escape and find his lost son.

Going Home is very interesting, but not scary at all. There isn't much of a plot to speak of, and the story is really about Yu's belief that he could bring back his wife from the dead. Wai is just a spectator, caught in the middle, and nothing what he does or says could change Yu's single-mindedness to revive his wife.

The set-designs and music score are well made, as is the performances of Tsang and Lai, but the simple plot doesn't really stretch their acting skills at all. Yuen Lai Kei, who plays the dead wife, got a roasting from her mother Chang Pei Pei for appearing nude in some scenes. Apparently, Chang wasn't too pleased about it and said so in an interview.

Overall, Three is a mixed-bag of short stories. The reason this film was made was to promote itself to each respective country. For example, Korean films are very well received in Hong Kong, yet it is not the other way round. Judged by this effort, Hong Kong comes in a close second, beaten only by the well written Korean story. If Hong Kong films can keep a consistency in tighter plots and better scripts, then it may regain its position as the number one film industy in Asia.

Not a bad effort, but I would have preferred to have a story strand by Japan than by Thailand.