Start crying now, to beat the rush.
A blood-soaked girl, clutching a doll and grinning. A suicide. A stabbing. All in the first 15 minutes of the following movie. Welcome to... Battle Royale.

Last Man Standing
In high school, a friend of mine told me once that there wasn't a single movie I enjoyed or recommended that wasn't horribly violent. Bitter though she was about recommending Fight Club to her as a romantic comedy, I couldn't help but ponder her words. Destruction comes naturally to human beings. Hell, any pulp sci-fi writer or conspiracy theorist could twig you to that fact if you weren't aware already. We live in a world where crushing, breaking, and hurting is just as much in our capacity, and usually much more fun, than building or healing. It's that desire in us that flits across brains wondering, "I wonder if I could rob this place," or "What does baby taste like?" As a matter of fact, the ease of destruction is pretty much the reason why I nearly didn't write the following review. Any fan of Limp Bizkit can break things, but the hard part is doing something positive, something worthwhile, which explains why I've held off on this so long. Describing a bad movie is a good time, giving it the Mystery Science Theater treatment a joy for coming up with new and innovative ways to describe the exact dimensions of the size of the donkey's penis it sucked. A good movie, or I should say, a great movie, does the opposite, leaving its viewer scrambling for words like loose change over a sewer grate. And that's what Battle Royale did to me.

Few films can wear the badge of keeping me silent for their full running time. I'll crack bad jokes, whisper about plot points, and laugh obnoxiously loud (yes, I'm THAT guy. Warm up your tomato-throwing arm). Fight Club did it. The Matrix did it. American Beauty did it. It's the trick of keeping the audience involved and guessing so that if they dare do anything but dialate their eyes, they'll miss something that the rest of their friends will be teasing them about after the credits roll. With people and movies, it's a hit-and-miss type of thing that varies from person to person. Battle Royale did it not just through its screentime, but after the credits.

Sinister Genesis
First of all, you should know a bit of history about the film. Battle Royale was banned in Japan. Let me say that again. This movie was banned in JAPAN. The country that invented and currently corners the market on animated teenage girls getting violated by squid and raising imaginary animals, some of which grow ganja on their backs, yeah, that Japan? They banned this film. And actually, who could blame them?

I, too, would fear this movie in wide release in this lawsuit-happy day and age. Parents would no doubt sue the government into debt so far we'd have to start buying things with eggs again, because media is of course responsible for planting ideas into kids' heads about the drugs and the killing and the teen pregnancies and raves. My dream is to see this distributed the same way Vanilla Coke is in that commercial. As you stick your head through a hole in a wall, you are headlocked into place by a large man as Beat Takeshi hits the PLAY button on a TV/VCR in the alleyway. Two hours later, you'd be let go with tears in your eyes and a crick in your neck, but that's a small price to pay for good cinema.

Game On
The premise is explained as the very-apropo operatic soundtrack starts the film - at the turn of the millenium, Japan's children were running wild. They were undisciplinable, apparently dashing about in their giant robots and floating in the air throwing fireballs while screaming at each other tests the limits of an adult's patience as well as mine. Hence, they do what any other kickass nation would do; institute a death match.

Once a year a middle-school class is selected at random to be sent to an isolated island. There, the teens will be given food, water, and weapons, to be entered in a sort of Survivor meets Lord of the Flies game of last man standing, kill or be killed. If no clear winner is declared after 3 days, unbreakable collars put around each student's neck will detonate. This year's contestants: the 42 students of Class B.

After their abduction and subsequent education on the rules (via the most hilariously cool instruction video for anything ever), the game starts - as the former classmates become one another's executioners. If the idea of the previously mentioned "Survivor/Lord of the Flies" hybrid is off-putting to you, you don't know Jap. You will find yourself intimately introduced to the cast of the island, their lives before their survival gambit, and their eventual deaths. Below, you can meet some of the key players:

Shuya
The whiny manchild protagonist that must be inserted into all popular culture by Japanese law, Shuya's having one of those lives, as opposed to one of those days. His father and best friend dead and his mother missing, Shuya had to have created some serious bad karma early in life, like standing under a ladder with an umbrella indoors throwing black cats covered in spilled salt at mirrors. The boy should just shave his head and have his name changed to Charlie Brown.

Noriko
Shuya's love interest, she's a spunky and clever gal. In addition to helping her rather witless boyfriend, she has a weird connection to the man that put them all on the island, the quirky (as quirky as a sadist can be, anyways) Kitano.

Kitano
The manic-depressive head of the Battle Royale program, played by Japanese film legend Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, he was Class B's former teacher. As can be guessed, he's a stern disciplinarian and not a really big fan of youth - basically like your curmudgeonly old relative, except on a serious power trip.

Mitsuko
Femme fatale has never been a more appropriate label. A wallflower turned tiger lily, Mitsuko is enjoying playing this game of survival a bit too much... but not nearly as much as the next player.

Kiriyama
A tall, silent psychopath hellbent on killing the whole island, one at a time, or all at once. Anyone who's seen the movie The Last Starfighter recalls the Death Blossom manuever, where the heroes create a move where the ship simply spins and releases its arsenal, killing anything in its radius. Now imagine that phenomenon not as an embarrassingly bad computer graphic, but instead crushed into the relative shape of a man. Kiriyama is a survivor from a previous Battle Royale, and came back because he liked it. That should speak volumes in and of itself.

Kawada
The Solid Snake of the players, Kawada also survived a previous BR tournament, and returns to find meaning in the event that forced him to kill his girlfriend. A true jack-of-all-trades, he's mastered killing as well as multiple skills central to the plot. Is there anything this guy can't do besides quit chain-smoking?

RUN!
And that's merely six out of 42 very different stories, all tragic, all violent. I dare not tell you any more, in fear of softening the overall experience. In this age of childproofing balanced with dangerous 'reality tv' style entertainment, Battle Royale is a fresh perspective on not only what humans can become, but what we are, as well. Especially during high school. Again, those with the stomach for movies like these should do everything in their power to get a copy. I cannot say enough about it, although it's quite obvious I sure as hell tried.

And the best news of all?

There's going to be a sequel.