Battle Royale (2000)

   Here is another Japanese gem I've apparently missed for many years.  Not anime, this time.

It's the future.  Unemployment is rampant and adults have grown to fear their offspring.  An act is passed designating a lottery where one randomly selected 9th grade class is transported to an island and forced to participate in the Battle Royale.  40 students go in, 1 comes out.  The kids are fitted with explosive collars, given a backpack containing food, water, a map, a compass, and a randomly selected weapon.  Some of these weapons are awesome, like a machine gun or a crossbow, and some of them suck.  One kid gets a saucepan lid and another one gets a paper fan.  There are also two ringers brought in, winners of previous Battles, just to make things extra unfair.

The story is mostly centered on Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara), an average kid whose dad committed suicide just before the school year and whose mom had split before that.  The only people he has are his best friend Nobu (Yukihiro Kotani), the class clown, and the girl he has a crush on, Noriko (Aki Maeda).  But it does jump around to follow other students to their grisly ends.   A lot of scores get settled and a lot of crushes are revealed.

If you're thinking "wow, that sounds a lot like The Hunger Games," you'd be right.  It's so close, apparently, that an American remake of this movie was shelved.  Normally, I'd be mad about that but the hell with it.  I have enough room in my heart for all films that include children killing each other for sport.