Versus and Suicide Circle (aka Suicide Club)

The Verse-Filled ROSSMAN

Double review day.

Let me cover Versus first. Versus can basically be summed up as such: Zombies with fucking guns and samurai swords. That's all there is to it. If you don't find that quickie summary cool, then you suck the dingleberries off of yak ass. Honestly, it doesn't require any more defining than that. It's just an hour and a half of people and zombies killing the shit out of eachother (sometimes several times per person) with cut-ass-rugged weapons. The only reason I merged Versus' review with Suicide Circle's was because I really wanted to review Versus, but didn't have much to say about it. I guess I could have just filled up a page with mad ramblings about how sweet it is to see people get shot or sliced open, die, then come back as zombies and try and kill their once partners with guns and swords too... But that would get repetitive fast. So, if you think that idea for a plot kicks your ass for you, this movie is for you.

Now, onto Suicide Circle. It's been a few weeks since I last saw it, and I still can't fully wrap my thoughts around it. It was.... strange. I don't even know if it really had a plot. I'll try and walk you through the movie, but I don't want to get too spoilery because the greatness of movies like this is that you never see what's coming next.

I first watched Suicide Circle without knowing either jack or shit about it. I only knew how it began (and even knowing that didn't stop me from being shocked and almost vomity). The movie begins on the platform of some train station in population-heavy Tokyo. Just as a mega super Japanese train is about to fly into the station 50+ school girls line up, hold hands, and throw themselves on the tracks. The result is probably 342.67% grosser than you can imagine. Really. Imagine the worst right now.... Nope, not even close.... No, that's even farther from the grossness that spews from the screen after the old number 9 rolls on by. Just, just give it up and watch it for yourself. Trust me, I know what I'm doing.

Anyway, so all those kids go *ker-splat*, and the police are baffled. And seriously disturbed and sickened. And so was I. But soon a couple of bags are found in the area that contain long rolls of human skin stitched together. Yeah, it's that kind of a movie. Then a super secret website is discovered that counts all of the suicide victims that have been mysteriously suiciding across Japan. The zany thing about the site is that it counts the dead seemingly before the suiciders even go through with their life-ending misdeeds. Don't worry, it gets even supercalifragilastically more bizarre from there. A crazy man in a bowling alley, a spunky J-pop band filled with nothing but 10 year old girls, more bags of rolled up skin, and a child who sounds like Gollum who keeps calling the police station all play a big part in the mad scheme of things... I think. Once again I must state that after the credits were done rolling I still had no fucking clue what just happened or if everything that I had just watched even had a point. I don't know if Suicide Circle was a social commentary on the stupidity of Japanese kids (although, what today isn't?), or just the troubled film-child of writer/director Shion Sono. Even if it was a commentary, I'm sure he was wacked out of his gourd on goofballs when he committed this to celluloid. No doubt about it.

Looking back at it, it appears that Sono was just trying to make a movie with the same impact as Battle Royale or Meet the Feebles. You know, a shocking but feverishly entertaining piece of sickness. But what he ultimately failed to do was get a plot across. At least the two examples of cinematic genius that I just pointed out had a thin plot running through them to keep the shocking disgustingness tidily sewn together. That made them a bit more enjoyable. What Suicide Circle does instead is to focus on making individual scenes stick out in your brain so much that you will have tormented and morbid dreams for weeks after you're done with it. SC has more memorable scenes in it than any movie (horror or other) that I've ever seen. It even tops Battle Royale for bloodiness and crazy ways to die or feel pain. Christ! That housewife with the big ass knife segment had me rewind the movie twice to make sure I saw it correctly.... And, yes I did. The schoolkids on the roof of their highschool had me cringing! And the jumbled mess of once-human-bodies on the coroner's slab had me rethink my tuna sandwich I had just made for dinner. That's really what Suicide Circle should be used for: the Jenny Craig Diet. "Whenever you feel like scarfing down a large, stuffed crust meat-lover's pizza, watch 200+ Japanese youths become road pizza themselves!" It'll curb even the most gluttonous of appetites.

Hmmmm, you know, maybe Shion Sono is trying to get troubled teens to kill themselves with this movie. Maybe he's tired of all the fukus and pink cell phones. Maybe, he's trying to start a high school fad for kids to follow. I mean, seriously, you could start pulling your pants down and start taking dumps out in public and 90% of Japanese teens would embrace it as the "new fad-u" of the week. They are so fucking gullible. I mean, did you know that for a time Japanese school girls actually bleached their hair and rubbed shoe polish all over their skin to look "American" (shoe polish on the face being an arrestable hate crime in the States, btw)? And then there was that fad where they all started fucking Japanese business men for money (that's right, one of their fads was to become full-out whores). So why not try and start a fad where it was cool for them to kill themselves. They're just going to grow up to become whiney housewives or horny AV girls or... Wait a minute! If Director Shion Sono gets all of the hot Japanese school girls to kill themselves.... then who'll pose for all those Bluebird photos?!?! Who'll do all that J-porn?!? Oh shit! The man must be stopped!!.

So, what did I think of the zombified Versus and the bizarro Suicide Circle? I find that I have to give Vs 23 out of 25 Points of Awesome Grossness, and SC 22 out of those same 25. Versus was plain and simple mindless fun with the undead, and Suicide Circle was just absolutely weird. It was an entrancing weird, but weird nonetheless. If you can handle the head trip, I recommend both... And don't just walk away from Versus when you think it's over. The main movie is good, but the epilogue makes it GREAT. That was just so sweet!

The Circle is Now Complete
JAIME

I will never trust my brother's taste in movies again. Not that that zombie flick was all that bad... I even thought the lead was pretty cute. But that Suicide Club movie was just a waste of time and human lives. Oh man, I couldn't even look at any food for a few days after seeing it. My oatmeal looked like splattered teen brains. My dinner salad looked like the face of a confused Japanese girl staring up at the headlight of the Tokyo Express Line. My peanut butter and jelly sandwich reminded me of that ear that the police guy had to scrape off of the ledge of the building after that kid jumped, just not far enough away from the edge. And what was with those creepy kids singing that "Send me Email" song?! They were too peppy to be in this movie. Were they the masterminds? What was up with Mr. Bowling Alley too? Was he the only sane one in this whole mess of a movie? Urgh... Thought too much about it again. I better take some more Pepto and go to sleep, and pray that I don't keep dreaming of my retarded friends trying to pull me off of the roof with them when they try to fly like the birds in the sky.

I'll give the zombie thing a thumb up, but the Suicide Jamboree was just too much of a mess to get anything but a thumbs down.

The "I WIsh He Was Suicidal"
KUNI

Kuni is the super bomb with the dead girls. Kuni likes to waiting with the street and then does the sex thing with the sailor fuku girlies in the end. Kuni is alllllllllright!

Kuni is not a zombie man though. No zombies here, because they are the dead also, but not the sexy dead like the girlies. Dead girlies is many times more ultra loving!

Kuni thuuuuuuuumb up for dead movies. Yes!!!

Holy shit! Rossman here. I... I'm not sure, but I think that Kuni just confessed to necrophilia above. Ummmm, if that's illegal in the state of Georgia and any cops are reading this, then just send me an email and I'll be sure to tell you Kuni's address and where he hides all his spank mags. They might help in convicting him. I think some of them have to do with beastiality if that helps.