Badmovies.org Forum

The premise: A class of Japanese junior-high students are armed, dumped on a deserted island, and forced to participate in a huge death match. The sole survivor wins a ticket back into society.

All right... I'm intrigued. Unfortunately, most of the information available on the flick in written in Japanese. The handful of English reviews I've come across just leave me wanting more.

And so I turn to my fellow b-movie freaks.

Does anybody out there have any more info on this picture, or -- better yet -- heard any word of an American release? As far as that goes, I'd even be interested to hear about an English translation of the novel on which the film's based or the manga adaptation.

The flick's only been out in Japan about a year, so I'm not exactly holding my breath that it'll already be available here, but one can only hope it will be in the foreseeable future.

At any rate, for those who've yet to hear of this movie, you can check out the official site if you'd like -- of course, it's in Japanese, but it does have trailers. Battle Royale

- Chunkstyle

I was hyped to see it when I read a write-up in PULP.  I'd also like to see an English translation of the novel.

However I don't see it coming to the U.S. anytime soon.  I don't think any movie studio would be too excited to bring over a movie about a bunch of middle-schoolers killing each other.  Least not in the current political climate.  Considering the controversy surrounding it in Japan, I doubt we'll see anything more than bootlegs.

Once again, I wish I understood Japanese.

Scratch that.

"Survivor" was pretty popular.  Maybe BATTLE ROYALE could piggyback on that.

Well, it's rumoured to be getting a UK release quite soon, with a UK DVD/VHS release before the end of the year.

It's also getting a Hong Kong DVD release at some point towards the end of the month. This place.....www.dddhouse.com.....is where I get all my HK DVDs from and they should have it up online to order within the next few weeks, with the big advantage of it being ridiculously cheap aswell. It'll be NTSC aswell so you Yanks should be able to play it, but it might be released as a region 3 disc although most are released as region 0 over there. It might be worth checking them out regularly to see when it arrives to order. I use this company all the time and they're excellent.

Battle Royale has got a real big buzz going for it on the underground internet scene. I'm surprised you guys didn't hear about it 6 or 7 months ago. I've been l;ooking forward to it for a long time as I'm a big fan of Takeshi "Beat" Kitano.

Well, I've managed to avoid resorting to ordering from overseas distributers thus far (having been able to find a lot of the titles I wanted locally), but -- as Mr. Rising pointed out -- here in the states, a lot of folks are paranoid about anything involving guns and teenagers, so I'm not getting my hopes up. I guess there has to be a first time for everything, so what better movie to take the plunge on...

Forgive my naivete, but could I assume that most all titles available from the site you mentioned in your post are mostly in non-English languages? Considering the considerable British population of HK, would they happen to be subtitled or such? Just curious.

Anyway, thanks for the information. Who knows, a region 3 release might be just the excuse I need to finally get my box decoded.

If you click on the titles you're interested in onsite it tells you the subtitle options available for them. Quite a few come with an English dub though.