Suicide Club
54 schoolgirls leap in front of a subway train. Much Hilarity Ensues as police officers, school kids, serial killers, and everyone in between reacts in their own way, while unraveling the mystery of an internet suicide cult (ironically, this film has gained a cult following since 2002). Directed by Sion Sono.
Tropes used in Suicide Club include:
- Anyone Can Die
- Blond Guys Are Evil (Once again, Genesis- the only blond in the entire movie.)
- The Coroner (To some extent- while cleaning up a scene of a mass suicide, one of the crew casually states "Here comes an ear," while scraping body parts from the side of a building.)
- Creepy Child: Most of the suicides are by young people, so damn near everyone, but especially the mysterious boy who keeps calling Kuroda.
- Does This Remind You of Anything? Genesis strongly resembles the character Genesis from the Final Fantasy VII Compilation, and both resemble Japanese pop/rock singer Gackt (of course, Final Fantasy Genesis didn't appear until four years after Suicide Club)
- Actually, it can remind people of Frankenfurter. Apparently they later admitted the character was an homage to him.
- The actor, Rolly Teranishi, is most well known in Japan as a musician from the band Scanch. He kind of looks like that outside of the film, too.
- Driven to Suicide
- Evilly Affable ( 'Hi there, my name's Genesis. I've had delusions of grandeur since I was a child...')
- Expy: Suffice it to say that some people's first reaction upon seeing Genesis was "Holy shit, it's Japanese David Bowie!"
- Gratuitous English
- High-Pressure Blood
- Idol Singer (The pre-teen idol group Dessert, whose songs and promotional material contain subliminal messages encouraging suicide.)
- Kick the Dog (A villain in the film, Genesis, literally does this.)
- Kids Are Cruel (A pre-teen pop band uses subliminal messages to get as many people as they can to off themselves.)
- Large Ham: Genesis and his gang. Also the four women who hang themselves during the suicide montage.
- Lyrical Dissonance
- Mind Screw: The movie jumps headfirst into this territory towards the end. The penultimate scene of the film is frustratingly similar to the ending of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series.
- Narm: Some people found that several scenes that were rather gratuitous were amusing and burst out laughing at the English Subtitling.
- A particularly narmtastic scene happens when a little girl sees a commercial for chocolate, and her dad tells her to ask her mother for it. Cue the mother slicing a daikon and continuing into her own fingers without her smile wavering. And the kid's response? Go back to the living room and say "Mommy's funny!"
- Red Herring (Genesis)
- Spell My Name with an "S": The idol group's name is spelled both "Dessert" and "Dessart".
- Suicide Is Painless (As all but two of the hundreds of deaths in this movie are suicides, it's bound to happen at some point. Good examples are a woman intentionally chopping off her own fingers as she prepares a meal, and a comedian stabbing himself in the throat in the middle of a show- both done with smiles on their faces.)
- Verbal Tic: The child who calls Kuroda clears his throat after almost every sentence.
- Villain Song (In one particularly surreal scene, Genesis suddenly breaks into song, complete with a guitar and his own backup band, while one of his men rapes and murders a woman in the same screen. Almost certainly an intentional subversion, as Genesis ironically turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the suicides and is merely a random psychopath who REALLY wants the attention.
- Your Head Asplode (In the opening scene of the director's cut)