BATTLE ROYALE DIRECTED BY KINJI FUKASAKU HK VIDEO 'D BEEN HEARING a lot ...

YALE DIRECTED BY KINJI FUKASAKU HK VIDEO

'D BEEN HEARING a lot of hype over Battle Royale for some time now, mostly from people whose opinions I don't value. Still, I was curious. Since it wasn't available commercially in the States, I snatched up a bootleg from Taiwan and discovered, much to my horror, that the hype was justified.

Fukasaku has directed dozens of films since the early 60s, most of them genre pictures—mobster, samurai and sci-fi movies, including The Green Slime. But in this, his next-to-last project, he has created something special. Based on a popular novel, Battle Royale combines elements from Lord of the Flies, Escape from New York and A Clockwork Orange.

In the near future, Japan is crumbling. Millions are out of work. Schools, for those few teachers and students who bother to attend, have become warzones. The government, in a desperate measure to bring things back under control, secretly passes the "BR Act."

Once a year, some 40-odd ninth-grade students, under the guise of going on a "class trip," find themselves spirited away to a deserted island. Once there, the stone-faced and hard-assed Takeshi Kitano informs them that they'll be playing a kind of game.

The rules (as explained to the kids in an hilariously upbeat MTV-style instructional video) are simple. They've all been fitted with explosive necklaces. Soon, they'll each be given a weapon. Their job is to kill each other in the three days given to them. If more than one person is alive at the end, all the survivors will be killed, via those necklaces. The last kid standing gets to go home.

Each kid is then given a weapon (it could be an automatic, an ax, a pot lid, anything) and sent off into the woods.

The rest of the film, to put it bluntly, is a bloodbath. While some kids try to team up and protect each other, others return to their basest survival instincts quite readily. And in between the killings (you never really know who'll go next), a series of mini soap operas is played out.

The camera work is extraordinarily beautiful at times, the shots composed with great care. The violence, meanwhile, is abrupt and frenetic and bloody. The acting is surprisingly good, given that they're teenagers. And the script, despite the above description, is complex. (The subtitles on the HK edition, while not great, get the job done.)

It's sad, brutal in that uniquely Japanese way and at times wickedly funny. Mostly, though, it's just brutal, although hardly a hack job. Fukasaku (who died while making the sequel) sure did come a long way since The Green Slime.