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Overview
Quick – name the movie where a dystopian future takes a bunch of kids and dumps them in a remote location so they can battle for their lives with only one victor.
Of course we know that movie?
It’s Battle Royale. What? That wasn’t the movie you thought of?
You aren’t alone. This Japanese horror movie seems suspiciously similar to a very popular book and movie. Thing is – BR was first. So, if you like the other, come see the original.
What do you get with this movie? Of course you get some very subtle killings and death.
Oh, wait, forgot the word not – NOT very subtle killings and death. Gory, over the top killing left and right. Blood spewing everywhere.
Definitely a different feel than a lot of our movies, it holds its own charm as far as horror moves go. If you like Japanes films and manga, this one will suit you just fine.
This is also our 50th regular episode!
Trailer
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Transcript
Stephen: There we go. All right now I got notes perfect. All right, so we all set. Yeah. All right So this is like episode eight for season four, I think battle nine We’re on nine. Yep one to go All right, so so this one should be quick and easy. It’s Hunger Games with less plot. Thank you very much.
Have a good
rhys: day. There you go. Before we do get started, I do want to just give a shout out to a European streamer who I hung out with this summer. He goes by the name of Philly Z and it’s appropriate because he’s a Call of Duty streamer and the movie we’re doing today is Battle Royale.
Nice.
Stephen: Yeah. Tell me how you’re doing,
rhys: dude. Battle Royale is a film from 2000 from Japan. We’ve done Audition. I think that’s the only other Japanese movie we’ve done. Is it? I think so.
Stephen: Oh, That’s interesting.
rhys: We’ve got more in the future lined up, but this is the this is the second one we’ve done so far.
I think I
Stephen: definitely have a lot more Japanese horror in my own library.
rhys: Yeah. Yeah. Then like a lot of Japanese films, this runs an hour and 54 minutes. Japan has never been afraid of just going for as long as they think the story needs to be told.
Stephen: So let me jump in with this one wasn’t one of my favorites.
It’s got some okay points, but I realized watching it because I was laughing. I’m like, Oh my God, I’m waiting for Godzilla to stomp across the screen. It was like a lot of it. I was like, haven’t they done anything different since the seventies monster movies? But I realize, and the overacting, the bad overdub on this movie was definitely enhanced with the way overacting, but I realize that’s more of a cultural thing because the one scene, they have kids sitting on their bed and they have like stacks of manga.
that they’ve been reading. And I realized, oh my gosh, duh, I need to be in the culture. That’s manga. That’s how they film also. It’s the same thing. That’s how the Digimon cartoons and stuff are. It’s that over the top, dramatic over the top that almost looks like a parody. In cartoons, it’s one thing, but they do the same thing in film.
So I’m just saying that because when I first started watching this movie, I’m like, Oh my God, this is going to be a long couple hours. It’s Oh look, a scene. Kids died. Oh look, a scene. Kids died. But when I started realizing it, and that’s the important thing with a lot of these movies, they’re done very culturally.
So when I got understood the culture and understood where their mind is at when they’re filming this, and how this is. For them, a good movie because of these things, then I could appreciate it much, much more. So I just wanted to throw that out there at the start, because my mind shifted by the end of the movie.
rhys: And that’s good, too, because we can sit here and we can talk about the three act format and we could talk about the hero’s journey. That’s all Western civilization storytelling BS. If you go to the other side of the planet, What they consider a good story or a good way of telling the story is completely different from what we’re used to.
And that’s the fun part for me is watching these. And I don’t want to say that, it’s not like I’ve done anything, but it gives you a nice way to build a worldwide amalgam of. This element from Japanese storytelling is really cool. And this element from Korean storytelling and this element from French and this, you can use those and weave those together.
The problem you’re going to run into though, is that whatever culture you’re showing it to is going to be looking at it with the backdrop of whatever they’re used to.
Stephen: Exactly. We put our own filter over top of it.
rhys: Exactly. And one of the biggest problems I had with this film was that when I originally got it it was not dubbed.
Stephen: See, I think I would have preferred that because the dub, the actors were not that good. The
rhys: dubbing is horrible. Yeah. And it’s, the problem is you have, A rather serious topic that’s happening on screen and all the voice actors who are doing it in English are basically doing a Pokemon episode. Yes, it pulls any kind of actual tension or drama that’s actually being built by the visuals out of it because you’re just like.
Wow, it just sounds like Ash messed up again.
Stephen: And kudos, is it, maybe Prime, maybe Max, maybe both, but they, a lot of times will offer the overdub and the captioned version of foreign films. I know the Studio Ghibli stuff over on Max was like that. You could choose English dubbed or captioned. And I’m like, I love that.
Because. Like this movie, I would much rather have heard the original Japanese and gotten the captioned version rather than bad overdub. Definitely. And I think in me and Colin, we’re talking about this with the writer’s strike and the actor’s strike, we might on these streaming services, start seeing a lot more foreign movies popping up as they try and get new content and fill the void.
I hadn’t even thought about that. And I’m like for foreign movies, it might
rhys: be a great thing. It’s actually a good suggestion. If they haven’t thought about that, all you streaming companies out there, yeah. Yeah. You need something new, get something foreign.
Stephen: Maybe that’s why Tubi is growing so quickly and big.
rhys: It could be. They they do have a crazy selection. This movie was based on a novel.
Stephen: I think that’s three quarters of the movies.
rhys: This novel was by Doshin Takami and it was written in 1996. It wasn’t published until 99. It was entered into a 1997 award program, but was rejected due to concerns over students killing each other.
Stephen: Yeah, this would Hunger Games would probably have problems nowadays. This one would probably have way bigger problems getting published or made into a movie or anything.
rhys: It in those factors actually play into the history of this when it was published, they were shocked because it became a bestseller people rushed out to buy it a year after it was published.
I came out as a manga series and then it came out as a movie.
Stephen: Okay that makes sense because you can see the, we talk about movies that reflect if it’s a graphic novel and they have oh, that’s the scene or whatever, this, I could definitely again. I could definitely see the elements of the manga in there.
rhys: Yeah. The screenplay was written by Kenta Fus, Fukasaku and the film was directed by his father, Kinji Fukasaku. Oh, that’s cool. Kinji was working on the sequel, Battle Royale 2 but he passed away from prostate cancer before it could be finished. That sucks. He had been diagnosed with it and they’re like, we should get you into treatment.
And he’s no. I’ve got a movie to make and just went on and made the movie till he couldn’t anymore. So the sequel was completed without him when they did the first battle royale, they had 6, 000 actors auditioned to play the students.
Stephen: That is crazy. And
rhys: I would liken it to I’m trying to think of like the Mickey mouse
Stephen: club,
rhys: I was trying to come up with the book series. I guess the closest thing I can think of would be like Harry Potter, but, because the book series was so popular and if all of a sudden you’re like, I’m going to make a Harry Potter movie, you can have everyone and their brother trying to get into it.
But
Stephen: the movies were made before. The books got big, but after the movies,
rhys: it got huge. Yeah. This was a bestseller beforehand and a manga series.
Stephen: Yeah. In Japan, if it’s a manga series, that’s. Oh yeah, that’s big. I know it’s starting to cross over a lot more here to America. I know a lot of younger people that love reading that stuff.
Yeah. And they even still put them, the, what we would consider backwards reading
rhys: which I like. Yeah. They whittled that down to 800, and then they spent six months in pre production working with the cast on script readings and doing physical tests. Wow. Physical tests became really important because they used no stunt people in this.
Wow. Okay. Every one of those stunts that you see are done by the actual kids who are playing the role.
Stephen: Not that there’s anything super crazy, but, they jump off of cliffs in the water, and and I know that the squibs for the, Bullets are fairly safe, but still there’s probably some shock to that, which I always thought I thought this movie was funny because you didn’t see like what looked like holes.
They just look like clothing. Yeah,
rhys: I’m pretty sure and I can’t even tell you where, but I’m pretty sure I saw that they only use squibs twice. Everything else was, you see the guy shoot costuming comes out, sprays a bunch of red spots over you, moves out of the way. They go on you, you wiggle a couple of times and then you fall down.
So
Stephen: again, it’s very dramatic. It’s almost like a bunch of kids play acting in some ways. Yeah.
rhys: It was banned in several countries and it was not banned in the United States. However, it’s never had a theatrical release because Toei company, who owned the rights to it, were afraid of being sued.
By anyone in the United States populace, because the movie came out, what, two, three years after Columbine, and so they didn’t want anything to do with it. So it never actually got a theatrical release in the United States. It’s been shown at festivals. And you could get DVDs, bootleg DVDs and stuff like that.
That’s the kind of thing I saw it on originally. 11 years after it came out, it was eventually acquired by Anchor Bay to go direct to video for people, but that’s how cautious they were being. About it and it still won’t get a natural national circulation.
Stephen: Yeah, I understand that
rhys: we’re litigious society Yeah Germany followed the same path, but eventually They did get circulation, but the movie is still banned from South Korean television They won’t show this on television in the countries where it was circulated.
It became a cult film People just love this movie. It’s first showing in the U. S. was in 2002 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. The original 113 minute long version didn’t show up in the U. S. until 2011 in Los Angeles. So they had an edited version when it first came across in 2002.
Stephen: Interesting.
And I definitely see you mentioned Toho. That was Godzilla, right? They have the Godzilla rights. For all those years, too, didn’t
rhys: they? Yeah, but this is TOEI, which is T O E I as opposed to T O H O. Okay. It’s not the same company, but when it, the uncensored version came to the U. S., it was planned as a nine day run, and they extended it for another six days because so many people wanted to see it.
Stephen: They’re good. I like hearing, these type of movies that we watch getting good recognition.
rhys: And so here’s my soapbox. Okay. And people are sick of hearing me talk about this, so I’m going to tell the podcasting audience because they haven’t heard me complain about it yet. We’ll
Stephen: make it a clip and people can play it over and over again.
rhys: There you go. Ten years after the Battle Royale book came out, Suzanne Collins wrote A series called the hunger games Collins claims to have not even known of the book or a movie before she wrote her books, but in a snapshot in battle royale, you have a I don’t want to say post apocalyptic, but a dystopian future society where control of young people is.
Commanded by selecting random groups of kids, putting them on a remote place and having them fight each other until there’s only one left. And if that doesn’t sound an awful lot like Hunger Games maybe you didn’t hear what I just said.
Stephen: Name this movie. Incorrect, Alex.
rhys: Yeah. T. L. Schafer. Oh, go ahead.
Stephen: The basic plot is definitely the same. And I’m not a big Hunger Games fan. I was, not the right demographic and whatever. That’s fine. I do think the way they portrayed the dystopian society and got you into the movie was done better with Hunger Games. This one really just went straight for the Kids shooting each other and let’s just keep shooting each other.
I thought the external, the other plot elements weren’t as strong in this
rhys: movie. If you watch battle royale two, you get more of the dystopian feel to it. And it might have again. Maybe this was exactly what they had planned, but it might have been a result of additional money coming in, higher budget being willing to spend more time.
I think Battle Royale is longer. Battle Royale 2 is longer. It’s really hard to say.
Stephen: Yeah. And that’s a personal thing to, obviously there are enough people that like this movie.
rhys: Yeah. T. L. Schafer, a film critic for IGN said we needed to take a moment to thank the hunger games for reminding us how awesome battle Royale really is.
That’s funny. Yeah. Colin’s work has been called a bald face ripoff and the biggest problem for me. Is that people have said, are you willing to take battle Royale and do like a refurbished version? And I don’t mean reshoot it, remastered reedited and then do a theatrical release and they won’t do it because so they said now anyone who sees it is just going to say it’s a hunger games ripoff.
Yeah, preceded the Hunger Games by 10 years. The other funny thing to me is that when the director decided he was going to release this, his audience was like high schoolers. That is the audience this movie is aimed at. The problem is. According to the censors, he went so over the top, the movie was rated R7, R15 plus, which is a really rare in Japan, which meant his target audience couldn’t actually get in to see the movie and Fukusaku tried to push back since a lot of the actors and characters, actually, a lot of the actors couldn’t go see the movie they just made.
But. The sensors were like, no, you can’t do it. And so he just dropped it and he just told kids sneak in. I encourage you to do yeah. The film was labeled as crude and tasteless. And became associated by conservative politicians with a youth crime wave, but this isn’t the first time in history.
This has happened after a clockwork orange came out. Great. Britain said the same thing. Oh, this is causing this huge youth crime wave, which really Yeah. Wasn’t a thing and it certainly wasn’t related to McDowell walking around with a bowler hat on his head.
When the film was released it grossed twenty eight point nine million dollars in Japan alone making it the third highest grossing film of 2001 which you might be like, oh the third highest grossing film of 2001 in Japan. That was going up against spirited away Wow. Okay. And Pokemon forever. So those are the two that beat it out.
Wow. It was a very successful film. It grows 30, 30. 5 million worldwide. And the budget is estimated to have been around four and a half million dollars. Wow. And I bet most of that was for military vehicles.
Stephen: Yeah, probably for red
rhys: paint. Yes. Quentin Tarantino loves this movie. That probably does not surprise you.
Yeah, I was gonna say that doesn’t surprise me. Yeah. And the name of this movie is what actually led to the labeling of video games where you have lots of players and a shrinking battlefield and only one person survives. The name Battle Royale came from this movie.
Stephen: I was wondering about that actually.
rhys: The movie runs for an hour and 54 minutes. It was filmed all over Japan, even though they claimed to just be on one solitary island. Kinji Fukasaku was the director. He did 68 titles before he passed. The biggest one that you would know is Tora, the war, World War II war war movie.
It was filmed with American and Japanese things. He was the director for all of the Japanese sections of that movie. That’s pretty cool. And battle royale too is probably the only other one that you would have any notion of. And again, he passed away when those, he he had a very specific philosophy.
He was an older gentleman. He had been, if I had to guess around 12 during world war two, and he lived through some atrocities of world war two. So like he talks about. Being with a bunch of people when the shooting starts and hiding under dead bodies to make sure that he survived. And his whole point is that most of the people who are noble individuals will be the first people to go when this kind of thing happens.
If you were noble, you will die. You’ll find that your concept of friendship in these situations in the face of such brutality just disappears because everything is about survival. And that in this movie. And I think maybe that’s one of the reasons that he got to the action so fast, because that’s a message that he was bringing to it.
Stephen: And again we’ve got a Japanese filmmaker, totally different culture than what we’ve got in America. So you can’t always apply our same thinking to that. You got to view it for what it is and understanding the culture. And in this case, the director helps you understand the movie a lot more.
Oh,
rhys: yeah. Yeah, we do this for everybody. Take a drink. There you go. He does point out that, when you do have friendship or romance that actually can blossom in that kind of situation, it’s one of the most beautiful things you can experience. And that’s a theme of some of the characters. Yeah,
Stephen: and it’s not just the boy girl romantic relationship.
There’s other various relationships that evolve and happen and disappear throughout this whole movie too.
rhys: Yeah, I’m going to run through the cast. There was a ton of people in this cause the game starts out with 41 people and they had that many kids and they had that many kids cause they would keep track as you’re watching the game.
As you’re watching the show, every time someone dies, this thing pops up, says who they were and then how many people are left.
Stephen: Yeah. I thought that was like morbid, but I liked that, yeah.
rhys: So the biggest problem we’re going to have with this is just, we’re not used to the naming culture. No, not in the culture.
It’s
Stephen: also, this is like black mountainside because all the kids were the same age, they had the like same
rhys: clothes. They’re wearing uniforms.
Stephen: And it’s wait, which one is that? Yeah.
rhys: Yeah. In Japanese you have a Common name and then a more formal name. I’m going to use everyone’s common names.
Just because if you’re not familiar with that like you have Noriko Nakagawa, who is the romantic female lead in the movie, she always refers to the guy she’s interested in, who is Shuya Nanahara, as Nanahara, because that is the polite guy. Informal way of talking to somebody. And once she screws up and calls him Shuya, which is like what his friends call him, and it wouldn’t really be acceptable for her to say that unless they were like an item.
Stephen: Or under fire, maybe. Yeah.
rhys: Yeah. So yeah, I have Tatsuya Fujiwara, he played Shuya Nanahara, who is like the male romantic lead in the film. He’s been in 79 other titles. These people have gone on to work a lot. He was in battle royale too. He’s one of the few people who shows up in battle royale too.
He was in all the versions, the Japanese versions of live action. Death note. Oh,
Stephen: I didn’t know there was a live action
rhys: version. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a live action version here that came out recently.
Stephen: Okay. I thought that was a enemy.
rhys: There, there was an anime too. Okay. Okay. But there was a live action version in Japan too.
Wow. Like a whole series of them. Jeez. And he was in those, and he did a lot of voiceover for Pokemon shows and 3000 of those episodes. Yep. And the Yakuza games, if you’ve ever played any of those, he was voiceover in those. Aki Maeda plays Nariko Nakagawa. She is the female romantic lead. She’s been in 89 titles since she finished this.
Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah giant monsters all out attack. She was in that, yeah, the title I just thought was worth saying out loud. She also shows up in Battle Royale too. And she shows up on a series called CSI Crime Scene Talks, which. I was like, is there, like a CSI had an England show in England.
Maybe they have one in Japan too. Taro Yamamoto plays Shogo Kawada. He is a veteran of the games who is not an evil bastard. He’s been in 64 titles. Bebop high school is probably the only one that our listeners might’ve heard. Shiaka Kurayama has a smaller role in this. She plays Takako Shigusa.
She’s been in 98 titles and we’re going to know a lot of these. Not a lot. 98, I think I have six listed. She was in Juan the Curse. She was in Kill Bill Volume 1 and Kill Bill Volume 2 and Kill Bill The Whole Bloody Affair. And she was in it specifically because Quentin Tarantino was such a fan of Battle Royale.
That’s cool. She was in Blade of the Immortal full Metal Alchemist, the final transmutation. I like that
Stephen: one. I mean Full Metal Alchemist in general.
rhys: Yeah. And she was also in CSI crime scene tasks talks.
Stephen: I’m about to look that up. We need like CSI, Pokemon . They have Detective Pikachu, so That’s true.
That’s true.
rhys: So Suki Takamura plays Hiroki Sugiura. He also has a smaller role, but he’s not, most of the people I’m talking about here have more than one scene. A lot of the students really only have one scene because that’s the scene they die in.
Stephen: Yeah. And some of them don’t even get a whole death scene.
They get shown dead.
rhys: Yeah. He’s been in 56 titles. You would note 13 assassins. He was in 13 assassins. Masanobu Ando plays Kazu Kiriyama. He is the psychotic. Game survivor from a previous game, who’s just here for the fun of it. He’s been in 7 1 titles, and the only one I found that you might be vaguely familiar with is VeggieTales.
FitnessHop. VeggieTales. Yes, yeah, psychotic killers in VeggieTales.
Stephen: I think it was The Artichokes.
rhys: Koushibasaki plays Mitsuko Soma, who is the psychotic female villain. Yeah, she was. She was in 69 titles. She is in One Missed Call, which is on the shortlist for us to talk about. And she has one that’s upcoming.
It’s called Don’t Call It Mystery, the movie. Which that must be maybe based off of a show Takashi Kitano plays Kitano, who is the teacher. And a lot of times while I was taking my notes, I would forget what his name was. So I just refer to him as the teacher. He’s been in 71 titles, including Johnny Monom, mnemonic.
Oh, wow. Back in the day, battle Royale too. He has. Which is interesting considering it’s got to be a flash flashback scene because yeah, I mean he was in the Westernized version of ghost in the shell. Oh, okay with Scarlett Johansson,
Stephen: right? He has
rhys: one upcoming film it’s called in your blood by Hokey Nydan and there’s one other guy I’m gonna mention I don’t even go through look up what movies he was in but his name’s Gokin Nishimura he played Oki In, in this Okie comes to a bed and I do believe by the end of an ax. Yeah. Which he does to himself accidentally
Yeah. But while they were shooting, he was in a garage band and he would have his garage band follow them around where they were shooting, and then during downtime they would play to entertain all the 40 kids who were sitting around waiting for the next call. That’s pretty cool. Yeah. The music this time, I actually paid attention to the music this time as who did it was by Masamichi Amano.
He’s won awards for his music direction for this movie and for his work in Django Unchained.
Stephen: Oh, okay.
rhys: He has 30 other projects under his belt. Bleach the movie hell verse. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the bleach series the berserk trilogy and television show. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the berserk ones.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Attack on Titan. Okay. He’s the music guy for attack on Titan. And he’s got Oh, and Shin Godzilla, and he’s got one in the works based on go west. And I think it’s a television version of it. I don’t know. I, cause they’re always tight lipped with details on upcoming stuff.
So the movie begins with credits over bombastic music and it is like a throwback to like the fifties kind of thing. Very dramatic. Yeah, there’s a kind of info dump. That come up on screen and it’s basically like the world’s gone to hell kids are being Absolute bastards. They’re not going to school the juvenile crime rates through the roof Adults now fear young people so they pass the Millennium Education Reform Act or Battle Royale law and there’s all of this press hanging out and a helicopters coming down and they’re like looking at The survivor for this past year’s battle royale.
And it’s just this little girl smiling psychotically at the camera, holding a teddy bear covered in blood. Yeah. It’s a good way to start. Yeah. Wow.
Stephen: I love the reasoning too. If all the kids in the country are acting wild, we’ll just take random kids and let them kill themselves. Okay.
rhys: It’s really interesting to me because this made me reflect.
A lot of Japanese horror is based around kids. Yeah. Tons of it suicide forest Juwan, the actual Japanese one is about kids coming through one missed call. It’s coming up. Ringu, a lot of this stuff is all based around, kids, not as so much, there are ones with adults, like adults only in them, and they actually tend to be a little more esoteric than this.
So you’re really sitting there going, wait, you got to really watch and pay attention and figure out what’s going on. But Shuya starts narrating his mother left when he was like four and his father hangs himself and he left this note on looks like a roll of toilet paper. It’s just go Shuya, like encouraging words to his son who finds him hanging dead in his apartment. So we cut straight from that to an empty classroom where Noriko comes in and she apologizes for being late, but there’s no one there and the teacher seems disgusted.
There’s a big X on the board and the note saying class canceled because we just don’t want to come. Yeah,
Stephen: basically, every high schoolers dream.
rhys: Yeah, he erases it off the board and he’s walking out of the room and this kid comes from out of nowhere with a knife. Slices him in the back of the leg and takes off.
He drops the knife and Noriko picks it up, hides it behind her back. She’s going to keep this knife. And that
Stephen: does come into play later. It
rhys: does. I do want to point out if you’re watching this on. To be you’ll note that the movie is two hours and ten minutes long and I just said it’s actually an hour and 56 minutes this was because this is the 2001 special edition and so they take all of the dream sequences at the end and call them requiems and just basically let them play out at full speed because a lot of times they’re slowed down or with audio because a lot of times they’re done with just a musical background so when we get to it you know i’ll mention the requiems but There’s really, I don’t know, the one with with the girl’s dream that actually has some information because there’s actual conversation that got cut out, but the basketball game is just a basketball game.
You know what I mean? It’s very high school musical.
Stephen: They’re all go bring in the song and dance with machine guns
rhys: again, eight years before high school musical. And as I mentioned that she continues his narration saying that, that teacher left the school, but regardless how crazy the world was, they still managed to have a good time and they go to this basketball game scene, which comes up a million times throughout this show, right?
Stephen: To show their closeness or the girls that, Oh, I didn’t realize you liked me, that’s several times. Yeah.
rhys: Yeah, there’s a lot of high school drama. Thrown throughout this movie.
Stephen: Yeah, but it’s not not focused on as much, right? It’s like we say with a lot of the British stuff You got to pay attention and interpret what it is to put it together Sometimes if you’re used to hey, I’m gonna sit here with Cheetos and be brain dead and you just tell me everything I need to know Yeah,
rhys: it also is a lot of the standard for How the groups react and treat each other.
Yes. You’ll have groups who didn’t like each other in school. Now you’ve given them a gun and permission to shoot each other. So they’re going to do it. So there it’s graduation. The entire class is riding on this bus. Noriko and her friend have cookies for Shuya. They take a picture with Shuya and Nobu, his best friend, and Noriko and her best friend’s taking the picture.
Nobu thanks Noriko for convincing him to come back to school. Apparently he had dropped out. They take
Stephen: the picture. Say that now, kid.
rhys: Yeah. And the bus enters the tunnel. The nice thing was I started watching Battle Royale 2 when this was over. And you can tell because, they had the crew, you had the class, blah, blah, blah, and they’re all on a tour bus, and the bus enters a tunnel, and you’re like, oh, this is so the students all fall asleep.
Shuya wakes up. He feels groggy. He’s looking away. He’s trying to make his way back to Noriko. And there’s an assistant on the bus with a gas mask who just clocks him in the head with something and knocks him back out. And that’s,
Stephen: Really sets the mood for this movie. Is the adults don’t really care anymore.
Let’s do a club you won.
rhys: Yep. Yeah. They all wake up in an abandoned classroom. They’re all wearing these collars. There are two new students who are there who really stand out because they’re not wearing school uniforms. And they look
Stephen: totally different. Their hair is different. The
rhys: one guy’s got a headband on.
The other guy’s got this crazy, bushy, blondish hair. There are helicopters outside the window. Lots of military are on site. And The teacher gets off of the helicopter. He’s wearing like a jumpsuit like he’s going to go running or something. And he walks in with a whole bunch of soldiers into the classroom.
When the lights come up, the soldiers are instantly aggressive. They’re just itching for a fight. They tell the class to sit. They sit. Kitano says he’s taking the class over again. It’s been a long time since he’s seen them. The students are aggressive at the start. They want to know who these people are, why they’re there.
And he begins to talk about the battle royale law. Some girl isn’t paying attention. So he whips some chalk at her. She gets up to go challenge him. And he just smacks her head and sends her back to her seat. I did watch a making of. And like I said, there’s no stunt people. So like when he whipped that chalk at her, he actually whipped that chalk at her.
They’re interviewing afterwards. And she’s all excited. She’s showing where the chalk, hit her in the arm. Cause it left a Mark on the, cause it’s chalk. He’s walking among the kids, like lecturing them. And it turns out Nobu. Who is Shuya’s friend, is the one who cut his leg, and he knows that Nobu is the one who cut his leg.
He calls him out on it and says, you shouldn’t have come back to school. And then Nobu makes this face and he just smacks him on the back of the head. Again, that actually happened while they were filming this. The kid’s man, that kind of
Stephen: hurt.
rhys: He starts talking about the battle royale law and this student starts to challenge it and he’s Oh your old teacher really supported you guys and didn’t like this happening and they bring in the old teacher. He’s dead, like in a body bag. And so he’s let’s start the video.
Stephen: I love this video.
Classic cheery, Japanese girl giving instructions about death.
rhys: It’s funny because for some reason it reminded me of Sin City. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was like this. These are the things I’m saying, and it doesn’t look like I should be saying these things because of the what’s actually going on screen.
But this is what I’m talking about. Yeah, she explains that the class is lucky to have been selected to take part of this. They should fight with. Energy and enthusiasm,
Stephen: right? And it’s so bizarre and over the top, knowing what she’s talking about. It’s, it just doesn’t mesh up. It really short circuits
rhys: your brain.
Yeah. It’s that disquieting we’ve talked about a lot of times before where the audio doesn’t match the imagery. Some girls whispering. So Katana just whips out this knife, throws it at her and it sinks right into her forehead, killing her.
Stephen: That is a very powerful throw.
rhys: Yes. And on top of that, it’s a good way for class classroom management.
Yeah. I
Stephen: even said, wow, I bet there’s a lot of American teachers that have wanted to do that, have visualized it. That’s right.
rhys: The class is shocked. And The overhead running total. This is the first time it comes up. It’s tells her name 40 to go. He walks over and gets his sword. He walks over and gets his knife.
All the students are trying to run to the door. Now the military like shoots over their heads. They’re pushing them back, hitting them. Noriko gets injured in the arm, like some grazing wound in her arm, and that ticks Nobu off, so he rushes to her aid and goes to attack the soldiers, only to have the teacher slice him in the back of the leg, just like he did to the teacher way back when he was in the class.
So they start the video. And this woman explains that you guys are going to be on this island. It’s been divided into a grid system. You have a map and some of these places are bad places. You can’t be standing in them. And we’ll let you know where those places are at six, noon, six and midnight. So you’re going to get four reports a week a day.
You’re also wearing these necklaces. They monitor your heart rate your breathing. They keep track of where you are. And if you’re in one of those danger zones, they just explode. Now, Nobu starts to yell at them about this, and the teacher responds by pulling out this remote control and turns on Nobu’s necklace.
A good way to illustrate, and for him to get his vengeance, finally, yes. Nobu runs around seeking help from many of his classmates, and this is really what the director was talking about, because all the classmates are like, your head’s going to explode. Get away from me. And basically he’s ends up in the middle of the room.
He looks to shoe. Yeah. Calls to shoe. Yeah. Shoe your calls to him, but doesn’t go over there. And then there’s just this kind of poof and blood sprays everywhere. And he falls dead. Yeah.
Stephen: That one was, okay. To say I like that one Sounds wrong, but as far as the special effects and the deaths and all that goes it’s gonna happen That’s what we’re watching.
But that one was interesting because you expect his whole head to blow up. Yes. It’s just a big gaping hole And it was like a big glob of blood it didn’t keep spewing,
rhys: If that had been a Western movie, his whole head would have exploded. Shuya is mad. He finds the photograph that was taken of him earlier.
He’s going to go attack the teacher, but friends hold him back and Noriko shakes her head. So he stops. They started the video up again. You have three days. You have to have only one survivor at the end of three days. Anyone, if there’s more than one survivor, everyone’s necklaces go off.
Winter gets to go home. Then the teachers like this is your guys’s fault. You brought it on yourselves, respect for people. So the soldiers bring in these bags on these racks and they start calling names. And when your name is called, you get a bag and inside the bag is some food and the map.
And a weapon, but it’s a different weapon for every bag. And so the first kid gets his bag at 1 40 AM and the game starts. Yes. One girl is I’m not playing your game. She throws the bag back at their faces and then walks out without one. Then they call Kawada and he takes his bag and leaves and stops in the hallway.
And then he comes back and points out this isn’t my bag because it was for the other girl. He wants that bag. That’s his bag, which they give him. He was right. And at this point, the teacher’s hey, check out our transfer students. They’re pretty dangerous, huh? Yeah,
Stephen: some of the translation, I am assuming, did not hold over well.
I’m sure it sounded much better in Japanese.
rhys: Yeah, when you take all that goofy thing out and actually put in the like aggressiveness of what they’re saying, it’s so much better. They call Shuuya, he grabs that photograph and tells Noriko he will wait for her outside. When he goes outside, he finds the first victim.
It’s some girl walking. All confused with a crossbow bolt in her neck. Then she like falls down and a second crossbow hits her in the leg. And this guy with a crossbow comes out chasing after Shuya. Shuya does what you should do. Just grabs a rock and hurls it at the guy which hits him. Knocks him down, he drops his crossbow.
Noriko comes out by then and she and Shuya take off. In the meantime, this guy picks up the crossbow and he’s Hey, did you drop this? And the crossbow kid who is like 110 percent into the game now is like charges towards him. And the guy just accidentally shoots him with a crossbow and kills him.
Yep, end of story. Duke’s student number, blah blah blah. She and Noriko make it to a cave, they check their bags, he got the ever useful pot lid.
Stephen: Yes, I love that was,
rhys: And she got binoculars, which are actually useful, not as a weapon per se. He takes a look at her arm. He says, it’s just a scratch and cleans it up.
Now the movie starts to play with time. And most of these is just flashbacks, but there are some places where it gets a little more malleable. This one is basically just a flashback. We see that Noriko really didn’t like many of her classmates. They used to bully her. They would lock her in bathroom stalls.
They would call her short and ugly or tell her to die. That kind of thing. And while she’s talking about this, she refers to Nobu, the poor kid whose head got blown up, which causes Shuya to have a flashback of when they were in a foster home together because they both lost both their parents, and He was done with all of life and Nobu taught him guitar and got him back into, so they were best buddies and then
Noriko is like you didn’t even get a chance to try the cookies Did you and then we see the cookies are with the teacher who was eating them? He’s in command central time.
Stephen: Yeah, he doesn’t have That scene with Noriko stuck in the bathroom stall. I love the Japanese graffiti on the bathroom stall wall too.
Yeah, that was cool.
rhys: The teachers in the command center, he doesn’t like the soldiers. He doesn’t have any. Respect for them. It all looks very high tech for 1989. Maybe. Oh, look, Godzilla. Yeah. Kiriyama, who is the one transfer student I refer to as the psychotic one, is wandering around at night and finds a group of students by the, on the rocks by the ocean.
And they’re just like. Bullying him a little bit. They’re all cool hanging out. One of them’s got a gun. They use Uzis a lot in this movie, except for the pot lid, except for the pot lid and like the guy puts the gun, like right up to him. And he’s like saying something stupid and Kiriyama just spits his gum right at the guy’s face and the guy gets mad and then Kiriyama just grabs the gun and shoots everybody.
Including the guy with the gun and there’s a girl kind of begging for her life and he just shoots her and picks up. He picks up that he picks up a revolver. He picks up a set of nunchucks and looks at him and then just throws him back
Stephen: down on the ground and walks off.
rhys: Yeah, it’s this really isn’t all that we find guns.
I’m
Stephen: good.
rhys: Yeah, we find the girl who refused the weapon bag and her boyfriend. They just go over to a sea cliff and throw themselves into the ocean. So there are suicides in this film. There’s at least. Four students, those two and another pair hang themselves later. There’s this girl in a house and she’s looking at pictures of some boy that she liked, who knows why she had them, she’s hiding underneath this bed thing.
And the door opens up and Mitsuko comes in and Mitsuko basically talks her way into getting close to the girl. And the girl’s weapon is like a taser. Yeah. Yeah. Not the kind that shoots the kind you have to touch them. Yeah. So they’re like being pseudo friendly in till all of a sudden Mitsuko, we actually see her true colors as she pulls out this sickle from out of nowhere and basically just slits the girl’s throat and then takes
Stephen: herself a little bit first.
Yeah. A little
rhys: bit. Yeah. Like a cat with a mouse. Yeah, and then we get the 6 a. m. Announcements. Don’t go here. Don’t go here These are the places that are bad
Stephen: And she’s doing her eyes and makeup Yeah
rhys: She’s curling her eyelashes They’re like,
Stephen: where’d you get that for one thing? And that’s the important thing to worry about right now while you’re killing
rhys: people?
They all got to keep their own personal bags with them
Stephen: When they left. So that’s the important part. I know I killed somebody. I’ve got blood on me, but I got to make sure those eyelashes are curled properly.
rhys: Shuya and Noriko are walking along. Okie comes out of nowhere. He’s got a bandana with leaves sticking out of it on his head.
He’s got the flies. Yeah. He comes running out and Shuya blocks it with that lid. Hey, it came in handy. And in the struggle. Oki just falls backwards, basically onto his own axe, stumbles backward and dies. Yeah,
Stephen: but yeah, it’s one of those head injuries where he’s mumbling a bit and stuff first and are you
rhys: okay?
I’m okay. I’m sorry. I’m okay. Then he falls over dead. There’s some mystery girl we don’t know who like sees this happen and then runs off. Shuya’s upset by it. He asked Noriko, did I do that? And she’s no, it was an accident. And then you have, and this is probably my least favorite scene out of the whole thing, you have some guy quoting math equations while he’s shooting at them.
Yeah. It’s A plus B, he’s okay, I realize that there are people who are nerdy and good at math, but they don’t just spout out Pythagoras theorem, while they’re trying to kill people. At least it gave it variety. Kiriyama, who is the veteran, who is not the psychotic guy, the guy who wears the headband, he comes out, shoots the guy, shoots the nerd with the gun takes the gun, he’s what do you guys have?
And he’s a pot lid, she’s binoculars, and so he doesn’t know He doesn’t bother them. He just takes the gun from the other guy. And then you have these pacifist students and I’m thinking the bullhorn must’ve been the one girl’s weapon.
Stephen: Yeah, I thought so too, figured. They’re
rhys: standing on this hilltop and they’re like, Hey, let’s not fight.
Everybody come here. We’re peaceful. And they’re the hippies. Yeah, Shuuya like yells to them. They’re like Shuuya, is that you? This one girl really likes you. Come on out and Kawada’s don’t go out there. That’s stupid and Shuuya is like this whole thing’s stupid Maybe this is a good way for us to get through it And while they’re debating it, Kiriyama comes up behind the girls with the uzi and just shoots them both
Stephen: See now I thought there was a possibility that those girls Had laid a trap of some sort and they were trying to draw people to them to kill them They didn’t show anything like that.
That’s what I would have done mitsuka
rhys: is also watching she’s like watching from a distance and then when kiriyama comes out She like slinks off. She’s like the hyena versus his lion
Stephen: Yes
rhys: But yeah, he shoots them. And in fact, the last girl who like puts the megaphone right by her voice, so that it will magnify her screaming when he shoots her.
Yeah. Yeah. He’s definitely definitely not a cool
Stephen: guy. He’s into it in
rhys: not a great way. Yeah. She and Noriko are debating with Kawada about killing and how it’s not right. And Kawada’s you guys should just kill yourselves now because you don’t trust anybody. They do the announcements at noon.
In the afternoon, Mitsuko walks into a building and she is met by one of Megumi’s friends and Megumi is the girl that she slid her throat open. She has figured out that Mitsuko killed her. She’s got a gun and she’s just gonna kill her back. And Mitsuko still manages to outmaneuver her, get her gun and shoot her instead.
So now Mitsuko has a gun and a sickle and a taser. Yeah. NCO collapses. Because apparently that wasn’t just a scratch on her arm. Apparently she’s taken some kind of damage. So Shelia carries her to an abandoned clinic, which is marked on the map. He gets caught in some stupid trip wire trap with a signal.
Kawata opens the door. I should mention Kawada fights with a, with an assault shotgun, right? Must’ve been in his bag. He lets them in, he treats Noriko’s wounds and she is like, how do you know this stuff? He’s my dad was a doctor. I
Stephen: would have loved if he said my dad was a dentist or a podiatrist or something.
rhys: It becomes really funny because three times throughout the movie Kawada says my dad was and changes it. So this time my dad was a doctor. Then they make some food. Now we come to Shigemura and Shigemura’s weapon that he got weapon was a tracker that actually tracks people with the callers on.
And he comes into a room with, this is horrible. I didn’t bother learning these guys names. I just called them the nerd trio. There are these three guys. They’re trying to get a generator upstairs into this warehouse. He just automatically pitches in and helps. They want him to stay. And he’s Nope, there’s a couple of girls he has to go find.
And one of the nerds, the head nerd, figures out that the necklaces have a mic on them. So he very carefully opens his laptop and he starts typing to these other guys so that they’re not actually speaking what their plan is. And he’s here’s a shopping list of everything I need. And it’s obviously bomb making material.
Yeah. They’re
Stephen: like, I wonder what he’s doing. I’m like, oh man, really? Yeah. And I also loved his hacking typing, especially as it gets tense. Cause he’s just, he’s super fast. I’m like, man, I have never seen anybody program that fast. Yeah. And you watch though, his right hand is like typing, his left hand is just sweeping the keyboard.
rhys: Yeah, cause you can type that fast and not make any syntax errors while you’re doing that kind of code. Now here’s where you have that typical Japanese time bending because you have Shigusa and she is running and she is running and Shigemura, the guy with the tracker, is on a bicycle behind her and this all happened prior to the battle royale.
She likes Shigemura. He trains with her. She’s as long as you’re behind me, nothing can stop me. And as she’s running in that same suit, she like turns off of the path and suddenly realizes, Oh wait, that’s not, what’s really happening. She’s been alone this whole time. So it was like the past bleeding into the present.
She runs into the guy who got the crossbow from the dude at the start. And apparently he’d been spreading rumors that they’d been sleeping together. And he’s none of that matters now. We’re all about to die. Don’t you want to try and get it on one time? Yeah, he’s smooth. And she’s just calling him out.
She’s no. I don’t. If you don’t like it, kill me. You can try, but I’m gonna fight you with everything I’ve got. And
Stephen: they have the best line of the movie. In that scene, he goes, I love you. She says wash your feet and try again. I had to pause that one. I’m like, that was like the best line I’ve heard in a long time.
rhys: Someone should come up with a list. So everyone’s always coming up with pickup lines. Someone should come up with a list of shut down lines that should be on it. So wash your feet and try it and try again. She like, he accidentally fires a crossbow bolt, which cuts her in the cheek. And then she pulls out a knife, which was in her bag and he starts running.
She takes him down and then stabs him in the crotch. Yeah, violently. Yes. A couple of times and then just turns around, just keep stabbing her. Then she looks up and Mitsuko sitting in the bushes, pulls out a gun and Shigusa runs off and Mitsuko shoots at her. And it looks like she got away, but it turns out she’s not unscathed because in the next scene, she’s lying, dying.
And Shigemura finds her and she knows he doesn’t love her, but she’s happy that he’s there and then she dies. And they do this thing with title cards where they’ll throw up a title card. It’s of course in Japanese, but they give you the translation underneath it. And the title cards are basically showing you what someone is thinking, not saying out loud.
Stephen: Yeah. Before talkies. Yeah. That
rhys: thing. Yeah. So they have those throughout the movie. There’s 21, 21 people to go evening at the compound. Teacher’s giving his announcements. He’s working on a picture. You can see it off to one side. They’ve added even more danger zones because the killings slowed down.
Stephen: Yeah. He is really deranged in a very silent
rhys: way. Yeah. Shua, are all eating. And Noriko’s this is really good. He’s of course it is. My father was a chef. Last scene he was a doctor. He’s got a flask on him. He’s smoking. He’s like the super cool bad boy from school. Yeah.
Stephen: Turns out he Some of these characters, like him, we talk about this a lot with just about everything, but he’s a stereotypical manga character.
He, he fit that
rhys: so well. Oh yeah, all the way to the end, like the entire arc. It’s just ripped right out of a manga. Yeah. He was a winner from the previous battle royale. He was scarred which is why he wears the headband He’s got a big scar on his forehead and he had to kill his girlfriend to survive.
Her name was keiko And actually she like shot him first And in reaction, he shot her and then she died with this smile and says, thank you. And he’s always trying to figure out what the smile meant. And then he’s I know a way off this Island. And I started thinking the guy actually is very clever.
He knows there’s a microphone there. I didn’t, but he doesn’t go into any details about it. He said he was brought back against his will. He will take them with him. And as an assurance, he gives Shuya a gun, a revolver, with a box of ammo. While they’re having this conversation, Psycho Kiriyama is running with an Uzi, chasing this guy on a bike, just outside of the building.
The trio inside said they’ll meet at a shrine if they get separated. Kiriyama shoots the guy in the chest and walks off. And the guy has a flak jacket on. And he’s like celebrating, but just a little too loudly. Overjoyed. Yes. And this was the guy who had the band. Oh, okay. Who would come and perform in between shoots.
So he’s celebrating a bit too loudly. He looks up on the rooftop. There’s Kiriyama with a sword this time. And he jumps down, no more Oda. Then you have this kind of cat and mouse thing around the house. They’re shooting at each other through windows. Yeah. And Kiriyama throws in A grenade stuffed into Oda’s severed head.
Yeah, that was pretty gruesome. Yeah Shuya manages to draw his fire and he jumps out a window, just as the grenade explodes. There’s this chase, he takes Kiriyama, it doesn’t stop him, there’s this reload scene, he shoots him like a second time, and then, He gets up to jump into the water. It looks like Kiriyama has him, but Shigemura comes out of nowhere, like bumps him, so his aim’s off.
So they both end up diving into the water.
We cut back to the nerd trio. Their shopping list is done and they have a copy of a magazine called the Ticking Clock. That was actually a thing in the seventies that was not unlike the anarchist cookbook. It was written instructions in how to make, pipe bombs and explosives and things like that.
So I wonder if the one guy had it with him, or if that was what was in his bag. Yeah,
Stephen: that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah.
rhys: He talks about his uncle who fought in Vietnam and is out fighting in the corner somewhere like that. He’s like some soldier and he’s got a bomb trigger, which they’re going to use to Put into this bomb.
It’s really tiny. I don’t exactly know how that works, but yeah, that’s right. Shuya is unconscious in the lighthouse and the lighthouse is manned by six girls who are working as a team. We think yes, Shigemura saved. Saved him and left. And Utsi, who’s the girl who’s sitting with him, has this huge crush on him.
This
Stephen: is a little awkward, but mostly translation and bad overdose.
rhys: Yeah. She updates him on the death. There are 16 left. Shugimura left a note to tell him to find the nerd trio in the west. And so he plans on meeting them. And he wants to meet up with Kawada. And she’s okay, but I’m going to lock you in because some of the girls aren’t comfortable with having a guy here.
So she locks him in. She goes downstairs and Yuko was the girl who was there when Oda got the axe to the head, who ran off. Oda was like her boyfriend, and so she’s upset by this. And apparently in her bag, she got poisoned. So she plans on poisoning Shuya. A
Stephen: very interesting, subtle weapon. Yeah, the rest.
rhys: Yeah. It all goes sideways. She poisons the food that’s going to go up to him. Some other girl comes in and just grabs that plate and eats it and dies. Everyone’s accusing everyone of killing everybody. Then they do just start killing everybody. Until in the end, Yuko is the only one who’s left alive.
She goes upstairs. She lets Shuya out and then promptly goes to the top of the lighthouse and throws herself off of it. And you get some more of those title cards. What does it all mean? And that Shuya is saying, and he does, he just goes out to the rain and was like, I don’t know what any of this means, but noriko and Kawada are setting up camp at the shrine, and Noriko has this dream with the teacher, they have a day out, they’re eating ice cream, walking along a riverbed, and this is the one, like you watch it and there’s no sound, there’s just the music, but when you watch the Requiem and you hear the sound, it fills in a whole lot of gaps in the story.
It does, but
Stephen: it’s very bizarre, even with the sound. Yeah.
rhys: The teacher, on the other hand, is at the central base, he gets a phone call, it’s from his own child, and she hates him, basically, and they hang up. And I listen to her and I’m like, that sounds an awful lot like Gray Delisle, who voiced Princess Azula.
The American version of avatar, and she’s old enough to have actually done it, but she’s not credited with it. So if she did, it was uncredited, but she does sound like her. Noriko is telling Kawada of the dream. He’s that must’ve been scary. She’s no, he just seemed lonely. Shuya is making his way through the woods and he has this memory of how like frustrated, angry his father was.
His father was just out of control. Then he remembers his father’s suicide and he has this vision of Nobu. With a backward running basketball that bounces up to Nobu’s hands. Yeah.
Stephen: That was one of those, very cool effects. The way they did it, it made it look like the basketball was going backwards.
But you watch it and you’re like, oh, they just ran the film backwards. But it, it had that weird eerie quality. Because he was sitting in the chair and he looked up, and it took me a moment to go, wait a second, that was really backwards. And so I was like, okay,
rhys: okay, it reminds me that they do this.
The Japanese did this a lot with ghosts that they do in their movies where they have the ghosts and in order to get a creepy effect, they’d have the actress, they’d film her walking backwards and then play it forward. So it looks like she’s walking with this really weird motion. It’s because she’s actually going the other direction.
So yeah that’s an. That’s a thing they do. Noriko senses that she is on her way and she runs off to meet him. And of course, Kawata is don’t run off. And she like loses him. She bumps into Mitsuko, which is not cool. And Mitsuko pulls a gun and then suddenly looks over her shoulder.
Looks over Noriko’s shoulder, gets startled and runs away, and there’s the teacher, out in the jungle with an umbrella. It’s oh this doesn’t look too bad. You look like you’re doing okay.
Stephen: Right there, I was like, who is this girl to him? Huh.
rhys: And again, the dream, we’ll talk about it when we get to the end, but she was the only one who showed up to class, she apologized.
She shows up and collapses and the teacher gives her this umbrella and then he just vanishes. He pulls a Batman and then coada shows up and they all. Shuya has a bunch of weapons, all the weapons from the lighthouse he brought. Cause he’s too weak to actually defend Noriko, but he’s gonna have enough firepower if he needs it.
Stephen: It’s very American. Yes.
rhys: Yeah, it’s true. Very Western in his thinking. Shigemoto finds the girl he actually loves with his tracker. Her name is Kotohiki. But he’s never told her that he loves her. She’s terrified of him. She just shoots him. Then he’s Oh, you’re so beautiful. And she’s what? And then you get like the basketball scene where he’s playing and she’s like cheering on the sidelines.
And she’s I never knew. And then while she’s sitting there, weeping about it, Mitsuko comes out of nowhere and kills her.
Stephen: It’s that, you get those scenes where it’s trying to be tender or a surprise and a lot of these kids emotions, and then you get the psycho just dead, no talking, no monologue, just dead. And it really shows a lot of different sides of this whole thing. Cause seriously. If you’re in this battle royale and you only one person is going to be alive.
Hey, I don’t care what my feelings were. I don’t care what about talking, if I see somebody you’re dead, I’m moving on.
rhys: Yeah. And that’s very much her thinking. And we get this flashback of her childhood. Her mother was a drunk. There’s some guy who’s trying to molest her. She kills him.
Stephen: Yeah. He was like the creepiest character ever.
It’s he pulled that off so well, it made me wonder. Yeah. Dude, you’re the creepiest person ever in a movie.
rhys: And she’s eight years old, she kicks him down the stairs, breaks his neck, and it, her mom in a drunken stupor looks up and she’s just so proud of her. And it’s oh, no wonder she’s just happily walking around killing people.
Unfortunately, Kiriyama shows up. And they fight, and she puts up a really good struggle, probably the best of anybody here. But he’s got the flak jacket, and that literally saves him, because the scythe goes down and you can, rips right through everything except the Kevlar. And then he kills her.
And you get another of those title cards, and it’s she was like, I just didn’t want to be a loser. That was her dying thoughts. And there’s only seven left. The Shuya Trio are heading west to meet up with the Nerd Trio. The nerds have hacked the monitoring software at the base using the necklaces as a way to get in, like through a back door.
And the most
Stephen: wild typing ever.
rhys: Yes. Yeah. And there’s another shot of the basketball game thrown in here, the champions and here they are. They’re mixing up bombs. They have Molotov cocktails. They have propane tanks. They’ve got all this stuff. They’re putting it onto a truck. The base panics at the cyber attack.
They’re like, oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen? And the teacher just gets up and unplugs the thing and says turn it back on.
Stephen: Hilarious, I love that. He is so weird in this whole movie, man. He’s definitely snapped. He’s not part of reality any longer, but that was the best. Yeah,
rhys: The kids finalize the bomb, they get it all set, but Kiriyama shows up and screws everything up.
He kills all of them, but one of them, just thinking, you know what, it’s all over now, decides to trigger the bomb anyways. So the bomb goes Nerd panic. Yes. The bomb goes off, just as the Shuya trio shows up, and Kiriyama is still alive, walking through the flames. But he’s blinded. Yeah.
Stephen: And that’s a common Japanese thing too.
You get that a lot in the movies with characters. Being their downfall or their strength, depending on the type of movie.
rhys: And this is the interesting part. Kuat is I’m going to handle this. And Kuat goes in for the kill. And I’m thinking, okay, I’m in a battle situation. I have a combat shotgun.
I’m already going to have one in the chamber at all times. Yeah. But he gets out there and he cocks the gun anyways. And I’m like, is this some nobility thing to at least let Kiriyama know he’s there before he kills him? Because as soon as he cocks the gun, Kiriyama just turns and starts spraying with an Uzi everywhere.
But he does end up blowing his head off.
Stephen: Yeah, you almost were cheering for one of the two psycho ones that had done it before. The one psycho or the other one, you, it’s that weird anti hero thing almost.
rhys: Yeah, Kiriyama, you were cheering for him because he was so good at it.
Mitsuko, once you found out what her backstory was, you’re cheering for her as you’ve had to deal with enough shit. Just go ahead and kill people. That’s fine. Yeah. Now the Shuya, Triel are the only three left. They’re at the seaside and Kawada claims to have set them all up. He’s don’t trust anybody.
There was no Keiko. It’s just us, and I’m getting off here because of you two, and then you hear the gunfire. And back at home base, the troops are like, we’re going to go check the bodies, and she’s no, just go home. So they all leave, and the teacher goes out to this football field, and starts this tape that has Exercises on it and it just starts doing some exercises out in the field.
Stephen: Yeah. Like the calisthenics, which again is a cultural thing. The Japanese do that in groups it’s part of their culture, part of their life. And he’s, it’s really wacky to watch doing it on your own and all by yourself.
rhys: Yeah. And
Stephen: I love that, that, that way is that it’s almost like a kid’s playground.
Cause you see a swing set off on the side and stuff. And then you’re equality.
rhys: A quota shows up, shows him. He doesn’t have any weapons. And the teacher’s you hacked the necklaces. You made it look like the other guys did it, but that was actually you. And he like pulls out his remote and it does nothing.
To Kawada’s necklace. So he pulls out this gun and is pointing it at Kawada and then Shuuya and Noriko show up and they’re both armed as well. So he’s Oh, look at this. So he shows them the picture that he drew and the picture has an illustration of everybody and apparently how they died and it has Noriko standing in the center.
All by herself with a halo glowing around her. And he’s you’re the only one here that’s actually worth dying over. And it’s
Stephen: Another weird quality to him. Yes.
rhys: So he starts walking towards her, and she’s pointing the gun at him. He’s just kill me. Just go ahead and kill me. And he gets really close.
And he pulls out, he’s got, you gotta kill me. And he pulls out a gun. And Shuya just guns him down with an Uzi. And it turns out his gun was just a squirt gun anyways. Yeah,
Stephen: yeah, cause he starts squirting it and they shoot him some more. Yeah. And he’s ouch, that hurt.
rhys: That’s it. They leave him there as dead.
They’re hanging out and his phone starts ringing. He gets up. Walks over and answers the phone and he’s talking to his daughter. He’s I’m not coming home. And she must’ve said something about why aren’t you? That’s irresponsible. He’s if you hate somebody, you get what you get and then hangs up the phone and shoots it.
Then he eats the last cookie. He’s these are really good cookies. And then he dies. Yeah,
Stephen: very dramatic. Just, oh, I’m dead. So
rhys: the trio grab a boat and start to sail home and co autos running the ship. He’s okay, should you come on up here? You just hold this and you just keep hitting the straight line.
You hit the hit land. And Noriko is like, how do you know that? He’s oh, my father was a fisherman. Number three. Yep. So then he lies down on the deck. And he dies, but before he does, he’s he finally understands that smile. And you get the title card that says at the end, I’m glad I found a friend.
And so now you just have Shuya and Noriko. They’re back in the city. They’re obviously on the run. You get this thing saying that they’re both wanted for murder.
Stephen: Which is, I thought, interesting that the government, made them do that and then turned it on
rhys: them. Yeah. And what must have been the murder of the teacher?
Or the 40 other students. Yeah, but they were all part of the game,
Stephen: Oh, go ahead. I got something when you’re done
rhys: I was just going to say they go to Noriko’s home while her parents were asleep and get the knife That oda used to cut the teacher that she’s cherished all this time And then they run off and you get a thing that comes up that says run yeah,
Stephen: The one of the worst lines is go let’s run and That’s what they do.
I’m like, oh, man It sounded Terrible. Yeah, one thing at the beginning that they said when they put him on the classroom to start with, I forgot about was he goes, we’ve told all your parents and then he moves on. I’m like, what the hell did you tell the parents? And are they just Oh that’s a shame.
I guess we don’t have to set the table tonight.
rhys: I have to worry about college
Stephen: prices. Yeah, exactly. And then thinking about this, yeah. The Japanese, from our viewpoint, have some really bizarre, weird game shows. If any culture is going to make an actual game show, like this or Running Man or something, they would be the ones I would think.
Yeah,
rhys: The Requiem scenes come next, and like I said, they don’t make any difference, except the Noriko and Kitano’s shared dream scene. And it’s the scene with Noriko and the teacher, Kitano, and they’re standing at this riverbed, he’s eating like this popsicle, but this one actually has the dialogue in it.
And they’re actually talking just like they’re friends. And it makes sense. Because she was horribly bullied, ostracized, and if she’s going to have anybody at the school who she’s a friend with, it’s probably going to be someone
Stephen: on staff. Which is why she showed up and probably liked his class and
rhys: stuff.
And so the two of them are hanging out, outside, and it’s really odd because It’s odd because it’s uncomfortable, but not like in a sexual way. It’s not it’s more along the lines of, okay, I feel bad for her because she’s always been bullied and her only friend is the teacher. You run into that kind of thing all the time, but how many times do you run into the teacher who has no friends and whose family hates him and his only friend is a student?
Yeah. And then she admits to him that she has the knife and she cherishes that knife, and she doesn’t even know why. And that’s the end of, that’s the end of the their little dream that they have. They, credits run over class photo of the class as graduates, with Kitano as the teacher in the middle, and then off to the side in two ovals you have Kawada and Kiriyama’s photos, because, they wouldn’t have sat with everybody, they were.
And that is Battle Royale.
Stephen: There you go. If you liked Hunger Games, see what did not inspire Hunger Games.
rhys: Yes, what didn’t inspire Hunger Games. I think, honestly especially from a Western standpoint, Hunger Games, On screen because I haven’t read either of these books but on screen it definitely has more of a plot To it, but I think battle royale does a much better job of showing the brutality of what this kind of game would actually look like
Stephen: Yeah without even having uber Bizarre over the top special effects either, right?
Bizarre is some of the acting, not bizarre, but it’s over the top acting. And some of the way kids were killed there really weren’t special effects that made it look realistic. Sometimes, it was almost a play in some ways. When you look at it like that. Yeah. And if you
rhys: look like when hunger games came out, like Burger King had a hunger game stuff for your kids in the happy meal.
Right.
I don’t see any six year old girls running around with the battle Royale logo on their shirt, because this movie would be inappropriate. In that setting and honestly, Hunger Games should be inappropriate to that age and setting. However, we’ve somehow managed to gloss it up to the point that you can sell Katniss Everdeen action figures for your seven year old niece because she’s cool.
She’s a strong warrior. Yeah, who’s killing people. But
Stephen: man. Those kids had better not read Maus. Yeah! We don’t want to corrupt
rhys: them. That’s right, yeah. No, that’s okay, cause, I hunt with a bow sometimes. That makes sense.
Stephen: Ninth graders, they’re good huntin it’s so bizarre.
Yeah, absolutely. So what’s the last one then for our season?
rhys: The last one we’re going to go back to what is probably much more traditional for horror lasagna, A Nice Slow Burn. I believe it’s from Canada, The Black Coat’s Daughter.
Stephen: Ah, yeah, that one’s actually been on my list for quite a while, so I’m glad we’re gonna watch that one.
Yeah, it’s a good one. So there we go, alright.
