Battle Royale (2003)

This movie was highly recommended by /Film and Filmspotting. Battle Royale is a trip of a movie. So effed up that it’s no joke.

I love the film. Don’t get me wrong. I have to admit that I was going to see this movie yesterday and in the first twenty minutes I stopped it. I thought that the movies would be too brutal for me to enjoy.

This movie is about an futuristic version of Japanese society where the misbehaving kids are selected in a lottery to battle it out to the death. Last man standing. I decided to rewatch it again and I was about to dismiss this movie as torture porn, but it’s not.

Some parts of it were really sweet with the romance between Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara) and Noriko (Aki Maeda) in the midst of the bloody carnage around them.

Bloodlust, revenge, deception were all key elements of this movie by Kinji Fukasaku. This movie is not for the squeamish. Some kills were so effed up that I had to cringe.

You might also get to see a familiar face, Chiaki Kuriyama. She was later cast as Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill when Tarantino saw this movie.

My rating: ***1/2 stars.