Battle Royale‘s gleeful violence led to government outcry and huge box office. But underneath the schoolgirl skirts and decapitation, there’s a social message of a kind, planted by a master of Japanese cinema.

Based on a controversial novel, Battle Royale takes place in a Japan near collapse, with 10 million unemployed and hundreds of thousands of students rioting in the streets. Fearing a full-scale youth revolt, the government passes the Millennium Education Reform Act, meant to scare teenagers into obedience. Each year a high school class is chosen at random, sent to a deserted island, and forced to kill each other. After three days, if one kid is left standing, he or she is allowed to go back to society; any more and they’re all killed on the spot.

This year’s students think they’re going on a class trip, but find themselves in a garrison with their old teacher, Kitano, watching a hilariously campy movie that explains the rules. They’ve been outfitted with necklaces that will explode at the end of three days. To keep them on the move and in each other’s way, danger zones are announced throughout the day, areas the kids have to avoid or die. Everyone gets a weapon at random, from a pot lid to a machine gun, and before the meeting’s even over there are bodies on the floor.

Set loose on the island, the kids respond in different ways. Some commit suicide while others embrace the killing, settling old scores with machetes. One group works on an elaborate escape plan, and a group of girls sets up an imaginary safe zone in a lighthouse, which suspicion turns into a blood bath.

The protagonists are Nanahara, a sensitive orphan, and Nakagawa, the girl he’d always liked but never approached. They struggle to stay together and face down two ringers, Kawada, a teenage Rambo who won the game three years earlier, and Kiriyama, a crazy red-haired killer who signed on for the fun of it.

The death count mounts with occasional bursts of inspired ultraviolence, like when Kiriyama chops off a kid’s head, stuffs a grenade in his mouth, then tosses the whole mess into the building where Nanahara and Nakagawa are hiding. Kitano, the teacher, seems oddly obsessed with Nakagawa, and while the students may have been sent to kill each other like fighting cocks, the real war is between youth and age.

The violence is extreme and stirred up plenty of controversy, but it’s hardly a run-of-the-mill slasher flick. Director Kinji Fukasaku is best known in the U.S. for the Japanese half of 1970′s Tora! Tora! Tora!, and renowned in Japan for a groundbreaking series of Yakuza films. His obvious skill shows on the screen. Crisp visuals and intricate fight scenes are interspersed with long shots of the rocky island setting, and oddly incongruous moments, like classical music playing over shots of shock troops, can be darkly funny.

Fukasaku took on Battle Royale after reading the novel, because he saw his own story in the students sent off to kill and die by the older generation. At age 15, his class was conscripted into the Japanese army in the last days of World War II, working in a munitions plant that came under artillery fire; after the carnage, the survivors had to clear away the corpses, which Fukasaku says taught him a lesson: “Adults could not be trusted.”

Battle Royale was condemned by the Japanese government and sparked a debate over media violence, but was still nominated for a Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2006 plans for an American remake were announced, but after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, the project was scrapped. And even though it can be hard to find (it’s never been officially released in the U.S.), it’s worth watching both for its hyperkinetic action and the broader ideas it hints at — the breakdown of social bonds when people are forced to kill or be killed, and the betrayal of a generation by its elders. And Japanese schoolgirls gunning each other down.

Tags: battle royale, cult classics