Suicide Club AKA Suicide Circle(2001)(Review)[Foreign Friday]

Among the list of heavier titles on the Extremity Iceberg sits a weird Japanese film titled “Suicide Club”. A seemingly random outburst of suicides amongst mostly high school students has police baffled. They don’t know why this is happening, they just notice that there’s a trend. The deaths vary from Gruesome and gory, to quiet and painless.

We, the audience, bounce back and forth between 3 main narratives – the investigative police force, the alternating groups of students participating in the deaths, and an online hacker who is tipping off police to what they think will happen or whose causing it.

It runs in multiple directions including meeting a gang-type leader who claims to be the sole responsibility for all this, but the police don’t think its that simple.

For an Extremity film, this one’s rather silly. The subject itself is disturbing, but the deaths are done with such glee and firehoses of gushing blood, that this film is actually rather easy to sit through. None of the deaths themselves are all that disturbing – minus the one major setpiece in the first few minutes that kicks off everything – but even that one is shocking in a ‘catch a laugh in your throat’ sort of way.

If you’re interested in the harder Japanese genre cinema, or descending the disturbing movie iceberg with me, then this is an easy watch. It’s quite difficult to find anywhere (I had to buy a copy off of a Facebook group) but it’s actually a bit of fun. And it’s shot in a way that’s better than a B-horror film, but still reeks of an independent cinema.

3/5
‘Til Next Time,
Mike Cleopatra

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