Director – Sawa Suicide, Producers – Keith Geller, Jeremy Kasten & Missy Suicide, Photography – Edwin Schiernecker, Music – Thavius Beck, Production Design – Seth Meisterman. Production Company – Beige Lion Productions, LLC.
Amina, Bailey, Bully, Draven, Evan, Fractal, James, Joleigh, Mary, Quinne, Rigel, Roach, Roza, Sawa & Soren (Suicide Girls), Don Bagley (Caretaker), Anthony Ezzillo (Izzy), Ken Edling (Police Officer)
Fifteen of the models from the alt modelling site Suicide Girls are sent to a remote house in Maine for a calendar shoot. While wandering through the woods, Evan messes around and removes one of the crosses at a graveyard. Not long after, she goes missing. As the other girls search for her and try to get on with the shoot, others among the group disappear too.
SuicideGirls.com is a website that features models in a variety of poses ranging from fetish to nude and kink poses, along with a good deal in the way of celebration of alt culture. The site was created in 2001 by Selena Mooney and Sean Suhl. Since then it has smartly marketed itself producing books, comic-books and burlesque events. This has also included several films, most of which are video documentaries of various modelling shoots. Suicide Girls Must Die! is the only of these that acts as a work of fiction. The film is directed by Sarah Remtech who modelled under the name Sawa Suicide and elsewhere has a number of credits as a camera assistant under her own name on films such as Hard Candy (2005), Zodiac (2007) and 31 (2016).
Suicide Girls Must Die! blurs a line between reality and fiction. It’s not quite Found Footage but it does have the girls messing around with cameras shooting themselves and it would appear largely improvising what is happening. The promotion makes a big deal of the fact that the film was made without a script, which should not exactly be regarded as a positive in my book.
The girls are all heavily tattooed and/or pierced and all take alt identities as a Suicide Girl. You can try and work out what is staged – probably the scene with a state trooper entering the bus to admonish them for pissing on the roadside and the scenes looking for the missing girls – and what is not – the plentiful party scenes, the modelling shoots. Mostly what we have feels not too different from a glorified home video.
On the other hand, hardly any of the girls are actors and most of the film consists of them messing around, getting drunk or modelling. What you end up with is a bunch of girls who look barely past the age of legal having a party and the rest of the time looking bored and affectless. Oh and quite a few scenes where they take their clothes off for the calendar shoot. There is not even any point-of-view character among them, they are just an aggregate group. Indeed, with the confessional booth scenes, what the film feel exactly like is a slasher version of Big Brother (2000- ) or one of its counterparts. The only one who gives a decent performance is Amina who bosses the others around with a practical, hard-headed certainty.
It even feels like a misnomer to call Suicide Girls Must Die! a horror film. You are well over two-thirds of the way into the film when all that happens is that two girls go missing, one of whom turns up a little later. There are scenes where the first missing girl disturbs the cross in a graveyard and this leads to the very vague suggestion that some type of Supernatural Retribution is being enacted.
It is a horror film without any clear kind of identifiable menace. There is not even anything approaching a plot, let alone the effort to develop suspense or anything spooky out of the situations. Girls go missing and the rest sit around and debate whether they should search or even if they should care about it at all. Right at the end we get what look like some leafy monstrous creatures appearing and chasing the girls. All before an incredibly lame twist where [PLOT SPOILERS] everything is revealed as all a prank played on the girls. Cue some more confessions where the girls say they would never have guessed it was a joke on them.
Trailer here