What's this, another Hall of Fame induction? The legion of three fans were clamoring for more, so here's more. Of course, this is October 29th as I write this - in two days, we horror fans will be privy to the absolute best friggin' day of the entire year. All Hallow's Eve, the end of the harvest, Samhain, call it whatever you will, but it absolutely rocks. I plan to pass the day doing nothing but watching horror movies, and sincerely hope that all the horrorphiles out there are doing the same. There's many, many movies that I hold virtually synonymous with Halloween as a day - not only the first two "Halloween" films, which combine to form my favorite film of all time, but "Hellraiser II," "The Howling" and "Child's Play" as well - all of which I saw for the first time on October 31st of some year or another. So wave your freak flag high on this day!And while I really should be inducting one of those very movies listed above, I recently revisited an extremely awesome, gutsy independent horror film from the land of the rising sun - and what the hell, I had to tell somebody about it, so here goes.
By and large, Japanese horror is an entirely different animal from its Western counterparts. When most Americans think "horror film," they immediately think of the conventions of the slasher film - a masked killer, a virginal heroine, and, of course, the moral that if you have sex you will die. Like, very painfully. While I LOVE all of those conventions, Japanese horror films have been very endearing to me in the recent years specifically because they have their own set of conventions that are no doubt as sickening to Japanese film snobs as slasher conventions are to American cinephiles, but viewed through the prism of an American horror film watcher, it's as fresh as the morning dew.
"Suicide Club," however, is a very different animal from most J-horror films. The buildups are anything but slow-burn, there's no ghosts with long hair down the face to be had. Nope, what this movie has going for it is wall-to-wall disturbing stuff being thrown at you; yes, it has some very difficult scenes to watch, not only for the gore (which is plentiful), but for the implications and scenarios that it brings about in your mind.
The movie catches your attention with the opening scene and never looks back. We watch as a massive group of happy, laughing teenage girls walk around the Shinjuku train station in Tokyo. They appear to be the pictures of teenage innocence, their school uniforms and giggling dimeanors serving as stunning antidote to the chaos that will follow. The group of girls walk up to waiting position to board an oncoming train, grab hands, proclaim "a one and a two and a three" and casually throw themselves in front of the speeding train. The deaths of many of the girls are shown in graphic detail.
Unbelievable. Unfrigginbelievable. And we're not even five minutes into the movie.
In many ways, this is a mystery film; for much of the movie, Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi, who is every bit as good in this as he is in "Audition" and the American version of "The Grudge") goes in circles. Clues about the wave of suicides plaguing the youth of Japan come from seemingly every direction, as two grotesque rolls of skin show up at police headquarters. Meanwhile, a hacker known only as "The Bat" informs the police about a web site tying the suicides into strange red and white dots on the site's computer screen, and the notion that the deaths are subliminal in nature is raised.
Explaining the plot of this movie is complicated, because it is a very complex film. In addition to Ishibashi's investigation of the suicide cases, there's the plot thread involving his family, and the VERY personal loss that Ishibashi endures in the late stages of the movie. There's also a J-pop girl group named Dessart that shows up repeatedly throughout the film; while at first their catchy songs appear to be nothing more than an ironic counterpart to the self-inflicted mayhem being shown with reckless abandon onscreen, rest assured, the appearances are not in the film for no reason.
But for much of the movie, what we witness is the strange hysteria that sweeps the country. Upon seeing the initial group of high school girls commit suicide, there are several more groups of characters within the film who proclaim suicide to be "cool" and "edgy." Many of the characters are of high-school age, although a few are not; perhaps the movie's most grotesque and disturbing scene involves a housewife and a kitchen knife. I'll leave the specifics of that one out. Needless to say, it's pretty rough to watch.
The film also boasts one truly endearing character in Mitsuko (Sayako Hagiwara), whose boyfriend commits suicide on the first day of the death boom. Eventually, it becomes up to Mitsuko to put all of the movie's proverbial breadcrumbs together and discover the cause of the mysterious wave of suicides.
Yes, folks, this is a horror film with something to say. The wave of hopelessness and the new "death culture" that causes mass hysteria in the fictionalized Japan of "Suicide Club" raises startling questions about who we are as human beings and just how much we occasionally succumb to the fads of modern society; simply put, this movie is an amazing allegory for how we live our lives. And while I just spelled out what I believe writer-director Sion Sono was attempting to convey with this film, the movie itself is much more subtle. While there are countless gory deaths shown in explicit detail in "Suicide Club," perhaps the eeriest shots are the various tracking shots of the high-school age boys and girls, doing nothing more than standing or walking around Tokyo. This is a movie that is about the fear of death before your time, and the tragedy of thinking that this very same fear is cool.
And while "Suicide Club" has an ending that seems to suggest that one of the movie's possible causes is the ultimate culprit in the maelstrom of death and moral decay, it is not definite. As a horror movie with the power to make you think, this is essential viewing of the highest order, and if there was a hall of fame for horror movies, this would definitely be included.
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