Before there were the Hunger Games, there was Battle Royale.
Imagine if the “kids today” were so ungrateful and disrespectful that the government decided it needed to sort them and quell rebellion through pitting the children against one another in a fight to the death… This is Battle Royale. Forty-two students, half boys and half girls, are gassed and transported to an island where they are given equipment, exploding tracking collars and three days to reduce their own number to just one winner.
Yeah, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does make for a fun, bloody thrill ride of a movie.
You’ll see kids killing kids, and kids killing themselves. You’ll see kids get shot and stabbed and blown up. It’s just wall to wall dead kids right up until the end.
Watching BR, I can’t help but think, “If I’d seen this 10 years ago when it came out, I might have been shocked.” Instead, thanks to the torture-porn style horror films, this is merely an action film with a slightly twisted premise. And of course, I can’t help but compare it to the Hunger Games. The book, in its way, is fairly ruthless, but when HG was translated to the screen it was sanitized for mass consumption and so many of the fights and deaths of the film lack the gravity they held in the book.
Anyway… I enjoyed it. I think I’ll track down a copy of the book…
Be sure to keep an eye on Final Girl and the rest of SHOCKtober.
UPDATE: Check out other participants – Blog @ Rotten Cotton, Life Between Frames