View Larger Image

Suicide Club (Suicide Circle) Director: Shion Sono Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: Unrated Running Time: 99 minutes Studio: TLA Releasing Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2003-11-18 Buy from Amazon

From 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. Are the jumpers part of a cult? What is the connection to the website that chronicles suicides...before they happen? And, what is the connection to the Japanese all-girl pop group "Desert?" Suicide Club is a stylish, bizarre thriller that examines pop culture and disaffected youth.

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 75 Average rating: 3.5 "Suicide Club great horror movie" Part of a wave of sophisticated, stylish, and very gory horror films that have emerged from Japan since the late-'90s, Suicide Club attempts to merge the ultra-violence of Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive, Audition) with the David Lynch-esque psychological terror of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse). It succeeds best on the first count. The gore, of which the graphic splattering of 54 schoolgirls across a train station is just the beginning, is positively stomach-churning, and director Shion Sono effectively conveys a spooky, film noir mood throughout. He does greathowever to turn his film into a statement about pop culture, social conformity, and the media's fixation with violence. He also injects hearted attempts at humor that miss the mark amid the film's relentless gloom and gore. As a result, it's difficult to tell if Sono is actually cynically exploiting social issues to add an unnecessary element of sensationalism to an otherwise well-made, a violent, good horror movie "Simple" This movie really deals on where you are as a person. If you are a surface person, you will look at this movie and just see another violent film and you will assume the plot is shallow because, simply, you are shallow. If you are a person deeply in touch with who you are, then you will understand this movie's purpose. It's that simple "Don't Kill Yourself!!" Please do not hurt yourself because you don't understand this movie. This is a great movie with a strong message and some people just don't get it. It may take two or maybe even three viewings to understand what they are saying but its clear as day. In my opinion its just like Fight Club. Some people will only see the violence and thats it. The message completely goes over their heads because they are blinded to it. Its about the influence, whether good or bad, of pop culture on the youth. Its about the growing population. Its about adults not taking responsiblity. The acting was great especially the young girl whose boyfriend takes a swan dive off a building. The cops were all great. See the movie and evalute it for yourself but its not for the kids. Its disturbing, violent and just plain scary. American directors please leave this one alone!! Do not butcher this one like you did the Ring or The Grudge or Dark Water. This movie and Battle Royale are two of the greatest. "First Rule of Suicide Club: don't talk about Suicide Club!" 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 "This is, by far, the strangest movie that I have ever seen " I refuse to rate this. It does not deserve any stars. Okay, there are some people on here saying it is horror... some say it is satire... some say it is art... some say don't take it seriously... some say some other crap... in all honesty, this movie makes no sense at all. It was very good until... yes, the Rocky Horror Picture Show wannabes. It really started to unravel a bit before that. And I can kind of understand the point the movie is trying to make... BUT THERE IS NO PLOT!!! Nothing is tied together, nothing is explained, there is nothing to explain enything! You never figure out what the Suicide Club is, how it works, or what the hell all those little kids had to do with ANYTHING! Did they kill people? And, if they did, how the hell did they convince people to kill themselves? By saying "Oh, you're not connected to yourself!" Now tell me, why in God's name would that statement make you want to kill yourself? Or was it the little Prosti-Tots that convinced everyone to kill themselves by some kind of subliminal message in their terrible, terrible music? This movie makes no sense. NOBODY IN JAPAN KNOWS HOW TO MAKE A MOVIE!!! This movie reminds me so much of that piece of crap TOMIE that it makes me vomit. I rented that one too. It made no sense by the end. No one in Japan knows how to make movies. This movie proves it. Was it actually a hit in Japan??