Before Dino-Ray lamented on the casting of an Asian in The Hunger Games – a movie about a dystopian society that forces a group of teenagers to kill each other to the death for entertainment and sport – there was Battle Royale, a Japanese movie about a dystopian society that forces a group of teenagers to kill each other to the death for entertainment and sport. The differences are, of course, is that Battle Royale had very, very graphic death scenes, killer Japanese girls in schoolgirl outfits that would eventually be cast by Quentin Taratino in Kill Bill, and a story that wasn’t written by a novelist who previously wrote for Nick Jr. (For the record: Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, states that she has not seen the cult movie.)
While it’s taken twelve years for Battle Royale to come out of American distribution limbo – the film being “banned” in the United States being a common urban legend – you can now purchase a DVD of Battle Royale or watch it streamed over the internet through Amazon. All conveniently available the same week before The Hunger Games gets released in theaters! Coincidence? Of course not. Sure, you can still watch the film through illegal copies of bittorrent, but given the crackdowns of pirated material lately, well… may the odds be ever in your favor.
