On a spring evening 54 junior and senior high school students lined up on a platform in Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, as the express train neared they held hands, smiled and jumped in it’s path on the count of three. All 54 students died and the police began investigating it, trying to determine whether it was a bizarre mass suicide or if there was something sinister behind it. As they investigate more and more high profile suicides take place and soon people begin talking about the Suicide Club. The police receive a phone call from a girl referring to herself as The Bat who directs them to a website that tracks the suicides…but the tally increases right before the suicides happen. At the scene of the larger events the police have been finding handbags with rectangular sections of flesh sown together and wrapped in a coil. They determine each rectangle is most likely from different people and begin searching through corpses and live people to try and find any clues to the suicides. As they get closer to the truth the idea of a mastermind behind them starts to take shape.
So this movie is really horrible. It’s typical cheesy B grade schlock, bad effects and bad acting. For the first hour or so of this hour and forty minute film it is standard fare horror/police thriller. The cops are investigating the incidents, people are committing suicide, lumps of sewn together flesh keep popping up, and the suicides are gruesome and bloody. Then, something happens and it shifts all of a sudden to a small Rocky Horror type song routine. From there it goes into some bizarre existential self questioning like something Anno would do. Then it just kind of ends. I’m not worried about spoiling this movie for anyone, because honestly, don’t waste your time with this movie. The Bat really has no pivotal role in the movie, yet all of a sudden her character ushers in the change by being kidnapped by a gang of Harajuku weirdo’s who take her to their bowling alley of doom and claim they are the ones behind the suicides. It gets even worse when the leader of them, decked in leather and platform boots grabs a guitar and rocks out in a droopy J-rock goth-ballad. Then, they switch over to a girl who had been questioned by the cops after her boyfriend accidentally landed on her when he tried to commit suicide. She starts wondering what happened and goes to his room to look for clues. She has an epiphany and connects his suicide to this pre-teen pop band and does some amazing numerology to confirm her suspicions. The moment she discovers this, the boyfriends phone rings, she picks it up and on the other end is a wheezy adolescent kid who had been leading the police on earlier and tells her to show up at a concert hall for the truth. At which point she does…then ends up on stage in front of a bunch of adolescent kids and she goes through an existential rebirth, then she’s lead to some large duct work where she is planed by a guy wearing a gimp mask while the kids watch…fucking bizarre.
But it doesn’t end there. One of the cops on the case notices the swatch of skin taken out of the girl, from her tattoo, and hunts her down to try and stop her from committing suicide. As he stakes out the train station a large group of school girls arrive and he fears the worst. Upon spotting her he does his best, in a non-committal, non-confrontational Japanese way, to stop her from killing herself. He grabs her hand, pleads with her to stop, she sneers, jerks her hand away and boards the train. Staring back at him with a look that says both, 'like I'm not that stupid' and 'follow me I know what’s going on'. But as the Japanese a prone to do, he stares after her like a lost dog and the movie ends as her train pulls away.
The first part was ok. Some scenes took way too long, like a huge segment dealing with two night nurses who end up dying, that just dragged and dragged and dragged and was like a throw back homage to classic 70’s suspense horror films. Aside from that, the movie flowed. The cops kept trying to break the case, one cops family gets hit as everything comes to a head and you think with their renewed effort it’s all going to climax…then The Bat gets kidnapped by the Harajuku version of Dr. Frankenfurter and it all really goes to hell from there.
So, don’t watch this horrible movie…there is a follow up that deals with The Bat and I am half way through that one…it’s almost 3 fricking hours long. So, once I get done with that I’ll review it…but I highly implore you to not see this horrible movie. Just goes to show you that a cult classic does not mean it's above being a pile of schlock.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment