Suicide Club (Suicide Circle) - Dark Publications

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Product Description
A wave of unexplainable suicides sweeps across Tokyo after 54 smiling high school girls join hands and throw themselves from a subway platform into an oncoming train. Detective Kuroda (Audition's Ryo Ishibashi) and the rest of the police force are baffled as the bloodbath triggers a wave of suicides across the city. When a cryptic phone call tips off police to a strange website that appears to be tracking the suicides before they happen the question becomes are they really suicides at all? This outrageously bizarre wicked social critique in the form of a creepy and enigmatic detective mystery examines the despair of the disaffected Japanese youth and the influence of pop culture on their lives. From international film festival favorite to cult sensation Suicide Club is a study of contemporary morality that is gruesome darkly comic and vividly original.System Requirements: Running Time 94 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: MYSTERY/SUSPENSE Rating: NR UPC: 807839000580 Manufacturer No: TLA049

Customer Reviews: Read 108 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Bizarre December 31, 2004
86 out of 90 found this review helpful

What do bags containing wheels of human skin, a computer hacker referred to as "The Bat," a serial killer named Genesis with a penchant for breaking into song, a girl band named Dessert, a hit song called "Mail Me," baby chicks, and a kid who clears his throat constantly during cryptic phone calls all have in common? Why, they all appear in Shion Sono's incredibly disturbing and impenetrable film "Suicide Club." I'm not the only person who adores these offbeat Japanese horror films: Hollywood loves them so much that studios are scrambling over themselves in a mad dash to buy up remake rights. I'm not so sure, however, that anyone in Tinseltown will knock themselves out trying to bring a new version of Sono's film to American screens. A scary ghost story about a haunted videotape has an appeal to audiences on these shores; a tale about kids taking their own lives in heinous ways as a result of the evils of mass consumerism doesn't. Can you imagine a corporation trying to figure out a way to place their products in a film showing children jumping off the roof of their school? I sure can't. I think it is safe to say that "Suicide Club" will remain a singular effort for some time.

Sono's film begins with what is probably one of the most memorable opening sequences in a modern horror film. A group of fifty-four Japanese schoolgirls--wearing those instantly recognizable uniforms--queue up at the edge of a subway track, join hands, and dive in front of a moving train. Oh man, what a mess that makes! The cops, led by Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi) launch an immediate investigation. Their query takes on decidedly ominous overtones when a white bag left at the scene is found to contain a wheel of stitched together human flesh. Good grief, Charlie Brown! Even my hardened soul recoiled at the sight of so much atrocity so early in a film. My finger strayed to the stop button until I decided to tough it out. Fortunately, the movie can't sustain its memorable opening scenes, and things start calming down significantly. That doesn't mean, however, that "Suicide Club" turns into a Disney film. The subway incident soon inspires other youths around the country to come up with grisly ways to take their lives, the worst of which is a scenario involving a bunch of kids jumping off the roof of their very tall school building. Suicide soon becomes the new "in" thing, something everyone wants to do. Kuroda and his men can't figure out this nightmare.

Then a mysterious website that appears to keep track of the deaths, and even predicts them beforehand with startling accuracy, comes to the attention of the cops. A hacker named "The Bat" soon contacts the police promising to track down the identity of those behind the site, and for the first time it looks like answers explaining the grisly suicides will come to light. Unfortunately, a wacko named Genesis kidnaps The Bat and her friends before she cracks the mystery. This guy and his cohorts live in an abandoned bowling alley where they keep their victims tied up in sheets. Genesis, after singing a song, admits to killing a large number of people. Is he the one behind the suicides and the website? Maybe, but kids keep dying after the authorities apprehend Genesis and his gang. Even Kuroda's family isn't immune to the tragedies sweeping the country. By the time he receives phone calls from a throat clearing kid who asks him cryptic questions about his "connections" to his family and others, the whole case seems impossible to solve. The focus of the film then switches to a young lady who finds secret messages hidden in products sold by the girl band Dessert, messages that lead her to a place filled with kids asking the same sort of questions Kuroda failed to answer. It's also filled with dyed baby chicks (?).

No one knows better than I do that "Suicide Club" is one strange film. Just when you think you've got a handle on the weirdness, Sono throws in another element that doesn't make sense. By the time the end of the movie rolls around, all sense of logic seems to break down. What exactly is Dessert's role in the unfolding madness? What does the song "Mail Me" mean, if anything? What is up with the wheels of skin, the kid clearing his throat, and the baby chicks? I think I can follow a few of these things, mainly that all of the questions about "connections" hint at the alienating aspects of pop culture and materialism. There is a sort of "monkey see, monkey do" facet of mass consumerism that is potentially life threatening, seen here in the way kids so readily take to the idea of killing themselves because others are doing the same thing. Life and death become mere commodities. I have no idea how that theme ties in with a bunch of kids sitting around applauding the answers to their questions at the end of the film, or the whole baby chick thing. Especially the baby chick thing, which is probably some symbol a Japanese audience would pick up on in a minute. For me, it's mystifying in the extreme.

As arcane as it is, "Suicide Club" still entertains. The gore scenes go appropriately over the top, but largely fall away as the movie expresses its social messages. I'm not ashamed at all to say I got a big kick out of Genesis's performance in the bowling alley; his song isn't half bad! Extras on the disc consist of trailers for "Suicide Club," "Between Your Legs," "Children of Hannibal," and "The Bathers." Sono's film isn't for everyone, and it holds on tightly to its secrets, but I guarantee you will find something in this picture that will grab your eye. Give it a shot.

5 out of 5 stars

To repair the connection to oneself...or to sever it? October 9, 2005
42 out of 44 found this review helpful

In the brash and ghastly opening scene of Jisatsu Curabu (Suicide Club), fifty-four students from eighteen different high schools join hands, step up to the edge of the platform at Shinjuku Station, and jump in front of an oncoming train. The splatter of blood against the train windows and spray of blood on screaming and horrified onlookers, and blood pouring onto the platform, as well as the chaos at the station sets the stage for this drama on how living in an industrial metropolis like Tokyo robs people of their connection to themselves.

Officer Kuroda, a fifty-ish family man with two children, Sakura and Toru, is in charge of the case. At first, the majority of his fellow officers, like the bald Murata think it's too much TV. A cult perhaps? However, a call from a woman calling herself Koumori (the Bat) reveals something odd and sinister. Koumori refers Shibu to a website that shows a row of red dots (representing women) and white dots (men), and that 54 red dots appeared on the site, and also before the suicides were reported! To add to the sordidness, a roll of ten centimeter strips of skin stitched together is found in a white sports bag at the train platform. Some belong to the dead students, many whose remains body parts are a horrid bloody collage of legs, and uniforms on the autopsy table. Things are complicated further when another caller says assuredly, that there is no suicide club!

Murata's point that it's too much TV points to how impressionable teens are and how fads come and go quickly. Two days after the suicides, a group of high schoolers join hands and jump off the roof. Once someone says "Let's all kill ourselves," and everyone goes "Yeah!" it's sad how jaded they seem to be, little realizing that they'll never see each other again.

It's not just teens, but ordinary adults committing suicide, as seen in a series of skits. Before hanging themselves, four women loudly declaim that "life is a sin. You just cause trouble for others. Kill yourself before you murder someone." And a mother in the kitchen slicing some daikon (long turnip) keeps on smiling as she continues slicing her fingers AND the daikon, oblivious to the spray of blood. All her daughter says is "Dad, Mom's being funny."

And just what is the connection with Dessert, a quintet of cute girls (average age 12.5) who sing infectious pop-techno songs like the seemingly harmless "Mail Me"? However, it's a crucial line that may send out the wrong message. They also sing how the world's like a jigsaw puzzle and how somewhere's there's a fit for everyone. "Don't fit, you say? Then make it so. ...There's nowhere for my piece to go. Find a place that lasts forever. Perhaps I'd better say goodbye."

But throughout the carnage, emerges the theme of the disconnect Tokyoites have between their fellow comrades. A look at the faces on the subway cars yielded tiredness, emptiness, and unhappiness in their eyes. Indeed, the recurring melancholy instrumental theme reflects weariness at a life without meaning in the industrial waste of Tokyo.

On the phone, Kuroda is asked by a child who has a penchant for clearing his throat: "What's your connection to yourself?... If you die, will you lose the connection to yourself? Even if you die, your connection to your wife will remain." It also comes down to the loss of empathy between people: "Why couldn't you feel the pain of others as you would your own? Why couldn't you bear the pain of others as you would your own? YOU are the criminal." Indeed, Kuroda's own two kids, Sakura and Toru, are more addicted to the Net and to TV rather than their own family.

Maybe it's best to be like Mitsuko, the girl on the DVD. She is shocked, sad, angry, and betrayed when her boyfriend dives off a roof and lands on her, yet musters the courage to say, "I have to keep living." She is sullen, a bit harsh, despises stupid questions, but quite the realist, connected to herself.

Apart from the carnage, there are some disturbing scenes, such as forms writhing in sheets in an abandoned bowling alley, and apart from the message of connection, the point of enjoying life is ultimately revealed, per Dessart:

Scary it's true, but it's loads of fun too
To open up and feel the brand of life
For each and everyone.

Light yourself with life
Light yourself with love
Light yourself with memories

All it takes is just a little heart and courage on your part

As we go, we'll forget the pain
We'll feel life again.

2 out of 5 stars

The Only Thing Committing Suicide is the Plot October 25, 2004
24 out of 38 found this review helpful

_Suicide Club_ certainly held my attention. I found myself both shocked and horrified by the casual manner in which suicide is depicted in this film. Seemingly endless streams of people launch themselves into the unknown; in fact, the opening scene in the underground train station (an actual site of many Japanese suicides) sprays blood all over the scene. What particularly makes this film casual is the always horrible sub-title job. For some reason, while this film seems to have some complexity to it, the dialogue is extremely watered down in the text and I just have to think that the actual script is much more complex and interesting.

_Suicide Club_ is a film that seems to explore the darker side of life, Japanese culture, and death without coming to any sense of a resolution. Many of the characters and sub-plots never tie together and the audience is left with a bunch of dangling fragments, trying to pick up the pieces of this storyline that never seems to go anywhere. As has been my experience with most Japanese films, one just cannot take their eyes off this material because it is fresh and edgy. However, as an American film goer, I just can't appreciate the film's depth and complexity without some semblance of continuity and the ability to understand the language first-hand. Imagine "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolfe" in translation? It would be awful. Naturally, this is not really a strike against _Suicide Club_ as it is a foreign film, but I think that English speakers will be hard-pressed to extract the full meaning of this film without the complexity and subtlety that the script may have possessed.

5 out of 5 stars

First Rule of Suicide Club: don't talk about Suicide Club! April 21, 2005
15 out of 18 found this review helpful

Shion Sono's "Suicide Club" ("Jisatsu Circle")is Japan's answer to the American subversive smash-hit "Fight Club", only this time it's disaffected Tokyo white-collar workers hooking up in basements and industrial sites across Hokkaido, ritually mutilating each other, then committing traditional Japanese hara-kiri (suicide). Too late does our hero realize that, unlike his trans-Pacific colleagues, "Suicide Club" isn't going to be a growth industry.

OK, OK, I'm just kidding---that's not what "Suicide Club" is about. I just couldn't help myself.

Buy this movie, then go through the house and turn all the lights off. Order some sushi and boil up some hot sake, and ponder this lethal dose of cinematic curare served up in the form of "Suicide Club", Shion Sono's night-gaunt cave spelunk into madness, teen-culture, conformity, identity, consumerism, and the unanticipated deadliness of girl-groups.

There's no point in doing a plot crunch of erstwhile Japanese pornographer Shion Sono's mind-warping "Suicide Club"; like his fellow countryman Takeshi Miike's equally ghoulish and puzzling "Audition", the less you know in coming to "Suicide Club", the more fun you'll have.

If you want a few bone fragments of what little linear plot the movie offers, though, I'll humor you---and if you're this far, chances are you already know about Suicide Circle's big bloody fishook of an opener: 54 giggling, smiling Tokyo schoolgirls link hands, count to three, and in front of hundreds of shocked and stunned subway commuters, hurl themselves into the path of an oncoming train. One! Two! Three! Wheeeeeeee!

The only things left in the wake of this horror (apart from a flood-tide of blood) are body-parts and a designer shoe-bag, so the police forensic team needs a strainer and plastic baggies to haul the evidence back to the Station.

Now that's what some might call a promising start---I certainly do!---but trust me, it's *nothing* compared to the unbridled tsunami of ghoulish creepiness and pure unadulterated ick that flows once this baby gets rolling.

The party is just getting started: as news of the atrocity on the subway platform filters out through TV and radio, the nation is gripped by a wave of copycat suicides among a wide range of people with no obvious connections. And what is the connection between the spate of suicides and the mind-rippingly awful girl-group "Desert" (or Dessert/Desart---the group name inexplicably changes)? Or the link to a website that is evidently tracking the suicides---*before* they occur?

When I first watched the film, I had unwittingly rented the R-rated Blockbuster DVD, which trims the opening bloodbath down to about 10 seconds of ruddy splashing. I soon realized my mistake, but it wasn't the opener that sent me running out of the house to buy my own copy: it's the breathtaking second sequence.

All I'll tell you is that most of the action in this sequence is filmed in almost unbearably long tracking shots of nurses navigating their way through the dark corridors of a nearly empty hospital. The sequence works---it's very subtle and you are convinced there are things happening just out of range of the camera that Sono is teasing you with---the director doesn't want you to see everything, not yet. That sequence alone was so cripplingly spooky that I rushed out and bought myself an unrated copy.

To be honest, when the credits rolled I contemplated returning the thing, perhaps saying it was defective. Having watched the movie in its entirety, I was baffled, confused, frustrated and annoyed. I was quite taken by the visual bravado with which Sono and his trusty DP Kazuto Sato shot the film: it goes in a heartbeat from creepy crawly ick to techno garish and back again. So what was wrong?

Certainly not the acting, which is all competent, surprising given the number of younger actors, and even though we obviously lose something in translation. The great Ryo Ishibashi squints and grumbles his way through another cop role (he also starred as the Police Inspector in the American remake of "The Grudge" and played against type as a film producer in Miike's "Audition").

Best of all, Sono ratchets up the level of grue and inexplicable vileness: the autopsy sequence calls to mind "The Thing", and rest assured you'll never look at a tuna roll in the same way again.

I think my problem with "Suicide Circle" is the film's abrupt shift, possibly psychotic shift in tone about 40 minutes in. Initially, I hated this mystifying claptraption; I felt cheated for having bought it---when on Earth, and why, would I ever watch the wretched thing again? If you feel that way after your first viewing, relax---that's normal.

But I've changed my mind. I still hate "Suicide Circle", but I'm now convinced that it's a work of diabolical brilliance, and I suspect that Shion Sono has created a kind of cursed masterpiece, a work of viral cinema that infects the mind of the viewer and insidiously replicates long after the credits roll. I say this because, quite frankly, I can't get the infernal thing out of my head, and the more I think about it, the more mesmerized I am by this gory-beautiful little puzzle-box of horrors.

"Suicide Club" is compulsively unforgettable and intellectually voracious: this is a film that positively squirms, teems, and writhes with ideas.

I can't stop thinking about it. I made the mistake of looking, now I'm forced to watch, even when I close my eyes.

JSG

3 out of 5 stars

Gory but half-hearted social commentary November 26, 2003
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

Beneath the surface, Suicide Club is more than just another stylized blood bath. The director Sion Sono's vision of a bleak satire/commentary on the state of modern Japanese culture is apparent throughout the film. However, the underlying themes are so poorly executed and unstructured that they are eventually lost among the bits and pieces of plot/characters/limbs scattered throughout the film.

As far as gore and shock value goes, Suicide Club won't disappoint fans of Audition or Battle Royale. The first 5 minutes of the movie inside Sinjuku station set a reverberating macabre tone throughout the movie with promises of wall-covering blood, strewn limbs and human-skin rolls (wink wink) to come. Director Sion Sono (also a noted gay porn director and experimental poet) does an excellent job creating and maintaining the creepy and sinister undercurrent throughout the movie. The problem is, the undercurrent simmers and simmers but never boils. The plot is at best non-linear and mostly illogical, peppered with characters with unclear motives, an out-of-nowhere Rocky Horror-esque musical number, and existential soliloquies that fans of Neo Genesis Evangelion would instantly identify. There are plenty of impressive moments throughout Suicide Club, but it is unclear whether they serve to enhance or befuddle the main mystery of the suicides.

It's really a shame because Suicide Club is really a social commentary with underlying themes that cut deep into the Japanese psyche. The suicides baffle police detectives partially because the truth is hidden somewhere in bubble gum pop music, internet message boards and instant messaging, phenomena on the other side of the generation gap. The suicidal slogan "To connect yourself to yourself" while trite to us Americans post-teens, is nevertheless an important commentary on the Japanese society that is historically obsessed with community and nationalism at the cost of individual liberty and identity. Perhaps the real horror of Suicide Club is that the premise of the movie, in the eyes of all the over-studied students, over-worked salaryman, and over-disconnected families of Japan, is not really that far fetched.

Unfortunately, all its earnest intentions at social satire are mostly drowned in the blood of Suicide Club.

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