The Suicide Club (Jisatsu Sākuru)

  I've only seen two* movies from the ridiculously prolific Sion Sono, but his stuff seems to be designed to make people throw up their hands/roll their eyes and exclaim 'Japan!!!'. He's a good director, though, and works hard to give his movies their fucked up reputation.

 So I didn't know what to expect from the Suicide Club, but it begins by having fifty-four schoolgirls cheerfully join hands at a train station and throw themselves in the path of a speeding train. Despite some terrible CGI, it's one hell of a first scene.
 Two nurses soon join the suicide craze that's sweeping the capital, and the police is powerless to do anything. I mean, a lot of the time they're trying to discern if it's even a crime; There doesn't seem to be any connection, at first - the girls in that first scene, for example, came from eighteen different schools. But then a website pops up that keeps track of all the suicides before they're even reported, and the police start finding long rolls of stitched together skin cuts belonging to the dead. And we, the viewers, are aware that a shitty teenybopper band called Dessart probably have something to do with it as well.

 Yeah, there was never any chance this was ever going to arrive at a coherent explanation, but it's fun for a while to watch detective Kuroda (Ryō Ishibashi) make one gruesome discovery after another, or a bunch of teens playfully psyching each other before jumping off a school terrace. And the movie doesn't skimp on the gore; there's nasty chopping board scene which gets taken to an almost comical extreme, and use of a hand plane that's probably not been approved by any carpenter union.

 The film also seems to have a cogent point about the eternal disconnect between kids and their parents, but beyond that it's anyone's guess what all that open-ended weirdness at the end means. My guess is that there is no real message here and Sono is just trolling us; At least it's some inventive, ridiculous trolling.
 More worrying is the gratuitous sexual assault (Japaaaan!!!) and that we're forced to sit through several all-singing, all-dancing videos from a motherfucking J-pop band. Uncool.
 Guess that comes with the package; Despite all that, and that it sure as hell doesn't stick the landing, it gets by for a long while on batshit energy and daring. I don't often care for these extremely manga/anime-damaged movies, but I'll keep giving Sono a pass as long as he keeps them this entertaining.

*: I almost didn't count the excellent Cold Fish, which I didn't remember was by him, and I'm definitely not counting the terrible Prisoners of Ghostland.

 Also, while reading up on Sono after watching this I found out he's been credibly accused of sexual assault and pressuring actresses for sexual favours in exchange for roles. So... yeah, take that into account.