Suicide Club! The comedic sensation that has taken Japan by storm finally comes to the US! It's laugh out loud funny! It's a riot, I could hardly contain myself! It's funnier than that Jim Carrey movie where he makes all those faces! Well, not exactly, but once again, the audience had a hard time distinguishing between funny, and not so funny, sigh.

Any movie that opens with 54 young school girls jumping off a train platform, head-on to a moving train, can't be all that bad. A rash of sudden suicides are plaguing Tokyo, and the authorities are baffled. Children are jumping off of buildings. A young woman stuffs her head in an oven, while another chops her hand to bits (in a particularly gruesome scene). What the heck is going on? Rolls of skin are left at the crime scenes and the coroner is left with what appears to be a human jigsaw puzzle. Is there some sort of weird suicide cult? Are the kids succumbing to some sort of weird peer pressure? Maybe the young musical sensation "Dessert" (a pop girl band of 12 year olds) has something to do with it, as they seem to be everywhere. With their hit songs "Mail me" and "Jigsaw puzzle" (ahh, now it all comes together, jigsaw puzzle again) they are on every TV and radio, their posters are on every wall, and their tunes even emanate from just about every cell phone!

The police are baffled, there's an anonymous tipster named "The Bat" who clues them in on a web site of just red and white dots. Dots seem to represent the victims and appear just before a suicide is committed. The police also receive phone calls from a young boy, with a disturbing "tick" or cough after each sentence. There are no easy answers in the Suicide Club, but with so much going on, it's nearly impossible not to be entertained!

Suicide Club has moments of extremely dark comedic undertones (nothing laugh out loud funny, but you get the gist) as well as sheer horror and terror. The film is gruesome in its depiction of violence, so be warned. While Suicide Club may not offer any easy answers, it's a fun and wild ride that had my attention from start to finish. Not to be taken too serious or too lightly, fans of the bizarre and macabre should get a kick out of this wildly disturbing film.

Special Mention goes out to the German short Subject "Forklift Driver Klaus : First Day on the Job". A ten minute film told in the style of a 70's training video in which Klaus gets his forklift driver's licence and we visit with him, his first day on the job. Extremely funny and gory, nothing seems to go right for poor Klaus, as body parts get loped off left and right. The narration is extremely funny, as are the reactions and short animations, describing what to do as well as what not to do to stay safe on the job.

Thumbs up.