BATTLE ROYALE

The summer of 2001 was a terrible time for cinema, especially if you were a young projectionist like I was at the time in the Highlands of Scotland. Spooling the likes of SHREK and PEARL HARBOUR on repeat had me a tad disillusioned. Then word started to spread online about BATTLE ROYALE, a Japanese film that stretched the boundaries of good taste. The premise of forty two school kids battling each other to death on a remote island piqued the cult movie loving side of my brain in a big way. When I saw it on a weekend trip to Glasgow at the end of that summer on its opening weekend, my faith in cinema was restored.

I will never forget that first viewing in the newly opened UGC/Cineworld (gone but not forgotten!) of one of my favourite films of all time. The dystopian tale of a class of high schoolers forced into a sadistic game of death by an authoritarian government via the “The Millennium Educational Reform Act, aka the BR Act” grips from the first scene, where the blood soaked winner of the previous game flashes a chilling smile while clutching her doll in front of a feverish media. Directed by a 70 year old Kinji Fukasaku two years before he sadly succumbed to cancer, with his trademark whipcrack pacing and confrontational style, BATTLE ROYALE entertains and shocks in equal measure, even to this day.

It is a film that shouldn’t really work the way it mixes shocking, arterial spraying carnage with sentimental melodrama via a classical soundtrack. The large cast of lovestruck teens, rebellious computer nerds, stone cold psychos and a never better Takeshi Kitano as their pissed off teacher ensures that you are never given a second to rest over its 113 minutes. As the cast falls, a real streak of anti-authoritarianism rises, influenced by Fukasaku’s own childhood during World War II, and it is one that seems to be more relevant than ever now, 25 years after its release.

Undeniably influential, this is an essential adrenaline rush of a film for any genre fan. In equal turns thrilling, violent, funny, lyrical and angry; it is everything you want a cult film to be. It is everything I want every film to be! This is easily my favourite genre film of the century, and one of my favourite films of all time. This is cinema.

Iain MacLeod