I thought this film was terrible... I could see it was trying to make a satirical point about 'today's vacuous youth' or whatever, but did it have to do it in a structureless, horrifically drawn out 2 hour+ feature??
We spend the first 20 minutes watching various students, teachers, café workers and doctors wander around a rural university campus, and chit-chat in annoyingly long mundane scenes. And then, one by one they start to faint, convulse, and die inexplicably, in patience-trying protracted death scenes. One particularly annoying character chokes and gasps for 5 minutes before dying...only to come to life again and then spend another 5 minutes dying.
There is no explanation for the deaths . Some early chat about urban myths is dispelled mid- way through the film, and the focus is just on watching all the many characters die. There is no structure to this film, no protagonists to root for. The characters swap around interchangeably, so a fairly interesting girl who appears to be a key character for the first 20 minutes suddenly dies and we are left to follow her underdeveloped friends for 20 minutes until they too die, and we are left to follow some random people they crossed earlier in a café and so on and so forth.
The tone is all over the place, and later in the film juvenile humour prevails. We are invited to laugh at one dying character who believes his intestines are falling out of his ass, so walks around clenching his butt desperately, in several tasteless and horribly judged scenes.
It does function at several unbelievably bad moments as an unintentional comedy...but if you're brave enough to try, I'd recommend watching it on DVD so you can skip past all the ming-numbingly dull sections where nothing happens or the characters just repeat what they've said about 20 times :S Seriously, don't the Japanese have script editors??
