Suicide Club (English Release Title); directed by Sion Sono, 2002 Frank greedily slips his next selection into the DVD tray in hopes of bolstering his latent maleness on some asian school girls…The packaging of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club makes it clear that despite a series of festival presentations (most notably resulting in a jury prize at the Fantasia Festival?), this film is difficult to pin down in genre. Is it mystery, horror, black comedy? This not surprising. Despite self-proclaimed what is a “wicked social critique,” on the DVD summary, a film that hinges on illogical plot points and silly gore effects that would make John Waters weep is decidedly unclassifiable. That is not necessarily a good thing, though some directors have made gore-horror-humor-satire work. Check out Bruce Robinson’s 1989 How to Get Ahead in Advertising, or Belvaux et al.’s 1992 Man Bites Dog (English release title). But, an overall muddling of plot and blood in Sono’s film is more than a bit distracting. The film opens a group of Japanese schoolgirls throwing themselves from a train platform in a mass suicide. This sequence is cut against an all-girl pop music video, and then against a couple of nurses listening to the afore-mentioned pop video. Frank doesn’t think it takes an Einstein (or even an Eisenstein) to guess that one of the nurses would be the next to do herself in. So, at five minutes in we already know that the evil, self-promotional, money-grubbing pop industry is somehow involved with leading young girls to their death. Sit back for 85 more minutes in developing this theme.Down at the police station, bad dialogue ensues. “A suicide cult? Ridiculous.” The cops, except your token non-conformists, are not suspicious about the incident. It is just an accident. An accident? What the hell? And note that after the film goes out of its way to show how atomized a group of schoolgirls falling under a subway car gets, forensics has miraculously already pinned an exact death toll at 54. By leap of faith, a mysterious Internet miner soon turns up a web site which predicts the deaths with red and white circles. Now Frank has been told that as an American blockhead, he simply just doesn’t “get” Japanese film. But, the entire line of police involvement and investigation, is far from naturalistic. It cannot be said to be formulaic, either, as that would imply an obvious narrative course. Still, there’s three words that kept Frank from flicking off this DVD at this point in favor of some more entertaining gore, such as Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter. And those words are: Wheel-O-Skin. Frank watched the movie until the end just to find out how a bunch of giant toilet paper rolls of sewn-together human flesh are appearing at the scenes of the mass suicides. The distractingly too-silly answer (forgive the spoiler): Wood Planer.Two highlights in the film include Det. Kuroda’s melancholic ride on the subway—A poignant look at how alone everyone can be in a crowd—and a second intriguing scene that shows some teen one-upmanship atop a school building. Discussing the suicide club scandal, a group of students find themselves on the roof of the school. Of course, this plays out in another silly bloodbath featuring a flap of skin and an ear stuck to a window ledge. The scene portends a false lead that should stir up the middle of the mystery. Was it another strike by the suicide club, or just a bizarre and unfortunate accident? Sadly, a bunch of gross-out gags again muddy up the intrigue. Finally, a note on production values. A film that so overwhelmingly relies on shots of computer monitors, should give a thought to temporal aliasing. The flickering scan lines throughout the film are more then a bit annoying. A tip: Either shell out for film and a light meter or move on to DV. Also, jump cuts to things like a character’s tattoo are played out. Of course we know from such forced details, that we will soon see that same tattoo hanging off the skin-wheel a few scenes later. Suicide Club, in this ignorant gaijin’s POV, offers a lot of gory black humor mocked-up as scathing social commentary. In any culture, this is the earmark of a cult film, but not a cult classic. In short, this film proves one thing; it isn’t easy, but there is one way to make Japanese school girls less then attractive to the normally-oriented male: show them being sliced up with a wood planer, or turn them into exploding bags of blood. And, if that’s your trip, dude, then viva, Suicide Club! “Ugh!” quoth the Frank “Eject and fire up the whiskey and cigarettes.”