Review of Suicide Club (2001) by Aidan B — 16 Jun 2010

This wasn't the movie I was originally gonna watch. Actually I was gonna watch south korean disaster movie Tidal Wave On Demand but the On Demand service has been shitty lately so I had to pick something else.

Since I've had this movie on DVD for a couple of months I decided to watch it (I'm real OCD with that, I can't watch a movie the same exact day I buy it because I feel that if I watch it the same day I won't ever watch the movie again and therefore that makes the 20 dollars I spent seem worthless, so I like to have my DVDs sit around for a while before I watch them, that makes me feel better.

..yes, I know). But I digress, I liked this movie quite a lot. Though I'm not sure what exactly the hell was exactly going on at the end there. Granted, as I say (a lot of the time it seems), ambiguous endings can work if done right, since it can lead to a discussion if you watched it with another person or you can come up with your own theories and see if they fit the storyline.

Of course if done wrong, the movie just feels like a ripoff and it leaves a poor taste in your mouth. So I'm just glad this movie didn't feel like it ripped me off out of an actual ending. But like I said I greatly enjoyed this movie.

I'm not even sure if I could call this a horror movie. It somewhat resembles a horror movie but it isn't a straightforward one. I can't really explain it, the best thing I can come up with is that Sion Sono is an independent filmmaker and he decided to film the anti-horror horror movie.

There are also elements of dark comedy and avant-garde. So really this movie is all over the place, but it doesn't feel erratic, I think this movie handles different genres quite nicely and there's a perfect balance.

This movie is actually really hard to review, because it's the sort of thing where you'd have to see the movie to actually understand. I was just expecting a gorefest and I'm glad that I was wrong cause a gorefest would have been silly.

Another thing about this movie, it's actually one of the more creative movies I've seen from Japan in quite a while since you can't actually compare it to any other movie out there. I'm quite surprised an american hasn't tried to remake this movie.

Of course, I would guess it's a tough sell to film executives, what with the subject matter and all. I know this is a terrible, terrible review, but I still thought this was a great movie and it takes risks not a lot of other movies before it have done, so that's very commendable.