Cult Classic Battle Royale Is Much More Than Hunger Games Ancestor

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 7, 2012 6:20PM

When asked if the CW was truly planning to make a television series about high schoolers murdering one another for sport, network president Mark Pedowitz hedged a little bit. "We’re not planning to do anything that we cannot get on the air," he said. The network's project, called The Selection is said to be about a dystopian near-future where teenagers are forced to battle to the death. Sound familiar? With crossbow-wielding post-apocalyptic teenage heroines taking to the small screen in NBC's Revolution, The Hunger Games Blu-Ray release scheduled for later this month and the first tidbits of its followup Catching Fire trickling out, the question of just how to quench our thirst for heroic depictions of adolescent violence without taking it too far is decidedly open.

You know who didn't care about taking it too far? The late, great Kinji Fukasaku, director of Battle Royale, the legendary 2000 film antecedent of the current crop of teen-on-teen slaughter epics. Dark, twisted, violent, gory, and hilarious, Battle Royale became a cult classic without ever being officially distributed in the U.S.

While, like The Hunger Games, it is based on an immensely successful book about high school age kids forced by a despotic state to kill one another for sport, nobody who encounters Battle Royale will think the two shared source material. One strives to impart lessons while getting in some satire along the way, while the other is deliriously perverse satire from which you extract lessons at your own peril. One allegorizes High School as you are meant to remember it, as overcoming of adversity along the way to successfully achieving triumph. The other luxuriates in a depiction of the most intense aspects of growing up, high school as a brutal and sadistic game you are lucky to have survived. One was successfully, though somewhat controversially, marketed to teens. The other was outright banned to children under 15 and proud to boast about it at the start of the DVD (a sure-fire way to get kids under 15 to check it out).

Battle Royale is so much more than something with which to beat The Hunger Games over the head. (And besides, the notion of adolescence as Darwinian bloodsport seems nearly as old as our concept of the age period as separate from childhood and adulthood). The presence of Takeski Kitano as the teacher is alone worth the price of admission. Twelve years after its first, the film still packs jolts, shocks, gasps and guffaws, but it is not for the faint of heart. We’d call it ideal midnight fare, which is exactly when you’ll be able to catch it this weekend at the Music Box, where it will be screened in its original cut.

Battle Royale plays Friday August 10 and Saturday August 11 at midnight at The Music Box, 3733 North Southport.