'Suicide Club' offers brutal plot

[Comment Below]

By Kristina Stafford

Grade: B+

This movie starts out with a rather shocking scene: 54 teenage schoolgirls assemble on a platform at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo to commit mass suicide. The adolescent girls line up along the side of a subway train, hold hands, and one-by-one jump to their deaths as the train passes them.

This leaves the station in complete chaos, as blood and body parts are thrown from underneath the train, splattering on the appalled passers-by, and terrifying them out of their wits.

Three detectives and the chief of police take the case. One of the detectives suggests that a suicide cult may have been involved, but the chief of police quickly dismisses the theory. The detectives start to seek a connection linking the 54 schoolgirls together.

Soon after, a hacker who prefers to be called "The Bat" calls the police and reports a strange link between the suicides and a website she found, which has nothing but red and white dots. She agrees to help the police solve the crime.

Two days later, at a high school in Tokyo, a group of students who are on the school roof during break begin to laugh and joke about the mass suicide. As a joke to imitate the 54 schoolgirls, they end up standing on the edge of the roof, jokingly pretending to get ready to jump off. They pretend to jump off the roof, but their joking ends up getting serious, as some of the students actually take the leap to their death. Moments later, after witnessing the death of their classmates, the remaining students standing on the ledge jump. The very next day, the suicide boom spreads all over Japan.

In one of the most brutal scenes of the entire film, a mother is chopping vegetables in front of her daughter and proceeds to chop off her fingers. The camera sees the mutilated hand and splattered blood all over her face as she slices her fingers into small slivers.

If anything can be said of this movie, it will keep you on the edge of your seat with its off-the-wall plot and gruesome death scenes. The movie continues to twist and turn through a simple, yet well-told story, with the detectives trying to get to the bottom of the case.

Suicide Club has one of the most interesting plot lines I have ever seen. Though the movie is not a modern masterpiece, the gripping story will keep the most restless of viewers on the edge of their chair. If complete mutilation is your cup of tea, you will love Suicide Club; otherwise it may make you completely sick to your stomach.

Originally Published: Issue 824 - November 18, 2009

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