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I recently watched Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club) (Shion Sono) and it was weird. It’s about a strange phenomenon, where groups of teenagers get together and kill themselves. In true Japanese gore fashion, there are a bunch of scenes of fairly graphic violence which is always fun to watch. I don’t know, though – none of them were very shocking and I wasn’t too intruiged with the whole police-investigation part of the story.

Then there was this weird sequence where some radicals were trying to claim responsibility for the so-called “suicide club”, which was allegedly convincing these teens to kill themselves. At one point, perhaps at an intended pivotal moment of the film, the eccentric leader of this group breaks into an odd Bowie-like song that just made me laugh (but at least the filmmakers have good taste in what kind of music to rip off).

The mystery/investigation elements of the film include a strange website consisting only of coloured dots: I may be wrong on the colours, but I think it was red for girls and blue for boys. Anyway, an appropriately colured dot (or dots) would appear the day before the suicide(s) occured. Some girl finds this site and calls the cops, which doesn’t help much but at least gives them something to think about. Then this girl is kidnapped by “Bowie-san” and the aforementioned serenade is performed.

The detective, played by Ryo Ishibashi (The Grudge-USA version, Brother), has two teenagers who are really into the pop group called Desert/Dessert/Dessart/Dessret (the spelling of the name changes throughout the film). It’s no surprise that this group is spreading some kind of subliminal message which is influencing all of these kids to kill themselves. It’s also no surprise that something happens to his kids. By the time the musical group’ s performance occurs, though, I had lost interest and probably missed the twist and the silly morals that were possibly trying to be taught. Well, I either missed them, or they were as subliminal as the songs by Desert/Dessert/Dessart/Dessret. I haven’t seen any blue dots on my screen, though, so don’t worry.

There were some cool visuals in this film, and like I said before, some classic Japanese gore (I’m going to be very careful the next time I’m slicing bread). The picture was annoyingly letterboxed, which made for a slightly hampered viewing experience on my widescreen LCD TV. But still, at least I was able to check this film out, even though I wasn’t super into it.