It's from Daisuke Yamanouchi's early gross-out period, so I'm amazed that I hadn't already watched it. It's not that great, to be honest, but I'm judging there partly by the standards of Yamanouchi's later work. It's original, disturbing and gory, with a unique narrative structure. Mission accomplished.

"This will be grim," I thought, but it's not the endurance test I'd been expecting. It's definitely dark as hell, though. It's a mockumentary gore-horror anthology about suicide. An interviewer discusses this social problem. He says that 31,743 Japanese people committed suicide in 1998, which is actually less than the number we now have for that year of 32,863. Either number is a big jump from the previous year (24,391), though, due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and an economic recession. Japan's annual suicide rate stayed above 30,000 until 2011. Today, it's about 20,000 a year, but that's still 16.3 per 100,000 people. (In the UK, the male suicide rate is 17.4, but the female suicide rate is only 5.7.)

The interviewer then asks dead people why they wanted to kill themselves.

1. The first talking corpse is an old man with a pregnant daughter who's supposedly a schoolgirl but is played by an actress who looks in her mid-thirties. Our hero thinks she must have been raped by her mute, retarded boyfriend... but he still wants to look after them. The best solution would be for him to die for a 30,000,000 yen insurance pay-out.

This goes somewhere horrible. Dad masturbates as he watches his daughter having sex, but that's nowhere near the most revolting or reprehensible thing in this episode. Incidentally, the film's aware that strangulation can cause death erections and release the deceased's grip on their bowels. (Death erections occurred in about one in three executions by hanging, sometimes leading to ejaculation.) Daisuke Yamanouchi was definitely going for the gross-out here.

2. After an uncomfortable, slightly off-putting sex scene, a woman starts slashing her wrists and begging the man she'd just picked up not to dump her. He flees in terror. NOTE: probably not the best way to attract romantic partners.

3. This one's not a story, but just a black comedy throwaway. This interviewee jumped in front of a train. He/she is a mute mess of meat in a box, so it's not much of an interview.

4. A 17-year-old schoolgirl is being bullied by two girls. They hit her while making her say she's happy. They make her vomit and one of them licks it off her face. They rape her with a vegetable.

This goes well for no-one and ends on a knife slash.

This isn't a particularly sophisticated film, but its narrative format is original and I'd never seen a mockumentary like this before. Even the interviewer's framing story isn't what it looks like. Incidentally, this predates Koji Shiraishi's horror mockumentaries and might even have influenced them. It's gross, surprising and imaginative. (As well as being the usual low-budget sleazefest with actors from hardcore porn.) This was an early film for Daisuke Yamanouchi, but it's clearly the work of an interesting filmmaker.