Going on a school field trip has never fuckin' sucked so fuckin' bad. Sharing a Kodak moment with your friends. Waking up to a what-the-fuckin'-shit-hell-is-fuckin'-going-on nightmare. A fuckin' outrage as Professor Kitano takes over the class. No fuckin' talkin', not even a fuckin' whisper. A necklace that will fuck you up. Watching your best-mate's neck gush. The transfer students with two very different fuckin' agendas. Watch out, Death Note's finest will light you the fuck up with a pot lid. Mitsuko's smile. The way Kawada smokes. Kazuo, zero lines of dialogue and total fuckin' ownage. The boys from Anonymous try their fuckin' best to hack the system. Yummy spaghetti. The greatest fuckin' lunch ever served at a lighthouse. Kawada vs.…

Run.

When you've already presented the main plot on the table in the first five minutes, and the rest of it are mostly predictable, what do you use to drive your film forward while keeping it interesting?

Testicle mutilation.

Wait. No.

Characters. That's right. Characters. Good ones. The ones with depth. And director Kinji Fukasaku, or rather, author of the original novel -- Koushun Takami, delivers. 43 of 'em! (Including Kitano-sensei.) The hardest part of telling a story about teenagers stabbing, choking and shooting each other is to make the audience care about them. Once that obstacle is crossed, what we have is an emotional, intense, shocking and insane little cult classic.

What makes Battle Royale even more special is…

Was really excited to see this film as I’d heard good things about it from critics and knew that it had been used as a stick to beat the hunger games franchise with for years. I will admit after watching the film that the hunger games did shamefully steal the basic premise of its franchise from this film however  I actually much prefer the Hunger Games films as a franchise. I found that I got a much better sense of the outside world and the way that it exerted control on the game and the way the game was used as a terror weapon in the latter. The battle in battle royale is not televised so I can’t really see…

I was really expecting this to have some sort of disposable message that is forced down the viewer’s throat. Nope, we jump right into the action and that’s all that is necessary. Looking back at Hunger Games, that movie got wrapped up in the politics of why the games exist and all of the behind the scenes junk. In Battle Royale, we get a little of that, but it’s not the same snoozefest garbage that Hunger Games is.

I think what makes this movie so good is the way it handles it’s characters. It takes into account that they are teenagers, and it allows them to act as such. The teenagers form friendships, alliances, and hold grudges against each other.…