That guy was funny. The movie was great, the end really disappointed me though. *spoilers ahead* You finally get to a part where they begin to describe the organizational structure behind this, puzzles start to fit together, you get a very slight taste of the whole child/buddhist/identity-paradox thing, and then bam. It was over. They just dumped it into credits. No real explanation of how large numbers of people could be simultaneously brainwashed. No explanation of why the kids are there, how they got there. I kept wondering, who is taking care of all these kids? How are they organizing tours and events and stuff like that? I watched all the way through the credits because I thought it was some kind of joke. Beyond just a cool factor, it had potential to be a truly challenging intellectual thriller, along similar lines as Battle Royale.

-I sort of take it for granted that Japanese movies on some level are going to be inexplicable. Check out Spiral, or Pulse. Western logic doesn't completely apply.-

Do you mean Spiral, from the Ringu series, or Uzumaki? Uzumaki is one of my favorite movies, I like anything written by Junji Ito. The problem with that movie is that it's a pretty long comic series to condense into one movie, Uzumaki could have easily been a 4-hour epic, and would have been better if it were. They had to cram a lot of unique scenes into into a pretty short film, and so there's kind of the expectation that you are familiar with the manga. I've seen Kairo too.

I will accept that Japanese films are inexplicable to us gaijin, up to a point at least. I don't think this is the case so much with Suicide Club, however. I looked to me like a case of rushed filmmaking at the end. It occurred to me that perhaps they were gearing up for a sequel, I have mixed feelings about that. Never read Ryu Murakami, perhaps I will look it up sometime. I'm fairly illiterate when it comes to Japanese fiction.

I didn't find Suicide Club to be that gory, I'm a big Miike fan though. Even his movies are pretty tame compared to some films (Evil Dead Trap, Guinea Pig series). The neat thing about Miike is his brilliant eye for imagery, his sense of the surreal, and of the absurd. I saw Gozu over the weekend, which is a pretty good example. A lot of people cringe at comparing him to Lynch, although Gozu was a very Lynch-esque film. His TV series MPD Psycho reminded me a lot of the Twin Peaks series.

I have to disagree on Battle Royale, I thought that was a masterpiece, although not a horror movie, per se. A completely unique, challenging, and cohesive concept for a movie. Same could have been for Suicide Club, sans the cohesive part at the very end, when it was just getting good. The rest of the movie was great. Just shoulda been a bit longer. I guess this was the same problem for you for Battle Royale, a movie gets talked up so much it's impossible to meet expectations.

I had considered that. It's just a hypothesis. Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies. I don't think the ending did justice to the rest of the movie. I don't know how you could have made a satisfying ending for Apocalypse Now, but so many fascinating directions could have been explored with SC, which makes it so frustrating for me.

I could blame the director; there were talented classical composers who just couldn't make good endings. But it wouldn't be fair based on having seen only one of his films. The movie was good, don't get me wrong. But it could have so easily been great. I like obscure endings, I don't necessarily need to be shown every single little thing, but you have to draw the line somewhere when you endeavor to tell a story.

First, you've got Dessert, running off coded, possibly subliminal messages with mainstream pop songs--what a great idea. You've got this underground society of children with the apparent ability to influence people to commit suicide. That's a potential movie in itself right there--barely touched. There's an entire nihilistic philosophy of relationship and relative identity, never very well explored. There's the kid on the phone, who is he? How does the website tie into all of this, really? There is apparently an adult who removes the skin, what is his relationship to this group? What is the real significance of removing the skin and attaching it together in a roll--there is potentially so much more to this than just a "whoa, that's messed up" factor. My greatest fear is that this is all being saved for a mediocre sequel.