[DVD] Suicide Club

"But before that, lots of food and fornication!"

Japan. They have some magnificently strange cinema there. This would be one of those. It starts out, simply enough, with 54 schoolgirls lined up on a subway platform. When the subway train approaches, they leap out onto the tracks; the resulting tidal wave of blood and body parts drenches the waiting passengers. And from there it only gets weirder.

This is one gloomy film, like "Seven" or "Fight Club." The director, Shion Sono, develops his story around mysterious online shenanigans, a J-pop all-girl group, and blood that seems to spray from the body like a geyser. Sono definitely seems to be saying something about popular culture and its Pied Piperesque influence on youth, but the message just doesn't seem to crep its way out from underneath the medium. In one of my particularly favorite scenes, a group of school children are sharing gossip over the deaths, and it turns from giggling rumor and sick joking to the development of the titular organization. It's not a perfect film, by a long shot, but it's effective, in a half-film noir, 1/4 social commentary, and 1/4 gorehound's delight. It's a 2 1/2 count overall; a little more of a cohesive direction, and it would have been a 3 count, easy.

David Lynch would bust a nut over this, to be sure.