BattleRoyale Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Every Man for Himself, and God Against All
-- Original title, The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser

And that, in a nutshell, is the pitch for The Condemned -- except, in this case, God's an illegal entertainment start-up. Broadcast wildman and snake-oil salesman Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) has an idea for the ultimate in pay-per-view: Spring 10 death row prisoners from various Third World hellhole jails, strap them with explosive ankle-cuffs, give them 30 hours to kill each other. Last person standing wins and earns their freedom, and the whole thing gets broadcast on the internet -- at $49.95 a viewer, and Breckel's shooting for Super Bowl ratings, with all the profit for him. The 10 include a monstrous British ex-army man (Vinnie Jones), a husband-and-wife desperado team (Manu Bennett and Dasi Ruz), a swift-and-slippery martial artist (Masa Yamaguchi) ... and a late addition to the roster, Jack Conrad (Steve Austin), an American pulled from a jail in El Salvador. Conrad won't say what he was doing in El Salvador, and he won't say what his life was like before he was there ... but Breckel likes the big palooka, and enters him into the competition.

Having explosive devices strapped to you might be the ultimate action-film expression of the terrors of existence -- don't we all feel, even a little bit, like God or whomever could flick the switch at any moment? Connoisseurs of the explosive body-jewelry-fight-to-the-death genre will have noted the similarities between The Condemned and 2000's Battle Royale, the cult Japanese film with a similar pitch -- only in Battle Royale, it's 30 school kids sent off to play kill-or-be-killed, and not 10 criminals. Also, in Battle Royale, the contestants are sacrificed in the name of social order and imposed conformity; in The Condemned, it's all about ratings and money. As I've noted before, if you really want to understand a culture, watch their bad entertainment; you can learn a lot more about Shakespeare's times from Titus Andronicus than A Winter's Tale.

Last month, Scott told you about New Line's planned remake of the cult-classic Japanese film Battle Royale. It turns out that contrary to what was reported by our source, Variety, the studio has not completed acquiring the rights just yet. But otherwise the Americanized version is on its way toward production. So far, fans of the original are outraged at the idea and many people are baffled at how New Line is going to handle the violent story of a class of 9th graders who have to kill each other. Surely, they think New Line is going to screw it up by toning it down.

The New York Times talked with Roy Lee, who has produced remakes of the Asian films The Grudge, Dark Water, The Lake House and The Ring, and who is now producing Battle Royale, about the issues of the film's content and what we might expect from his version. It will take place in America (like all his remakes save for The Grudge) and will still be about high school students. Lee said that to tone down the story, he could make it so the students are in jail (or juvie?) at the beginning, but he sees that as pointless. He also assures that the film will be R-rated -- with a very hard R -- because the original would have received an NC-17 if released in the U.S. Finally he admits to being a huge fan of the original and has no intentions of ruining it with a bad film.

We can all breath easier now, right?. I mean, he must just not have been a huge fan of his other remakes, right? That's why they were bad films (okay, The Ring was okay). Personally, I'm still not assured that Lee will be able to appropriately handle the material over here.

So a few years back there was this Japanese film that was SO outrageously and controversially violent that no U.S. distributor would touch the thing -- it was about a bunch of high school kids who were dropped onto a deserted island and forced to murder each other. It, of course, was Battle Royale, and it's as blisteringly, nastily cool as its sequel is virtually worthless.

So now comes word that New Line Cinema and producer Neal H. Moritz have acquired the rights to make an American version ... because, I guess, we've allowed enough time to pass since Colombine, and it's now perfectly acceptable for Battle Royale to make its way stateside -- if only in an inevitably diluted package full of MTV-style actors.

For the record, Mr. Moritz's previous films include (get this) all three Urban Legend flicks, all three I Know What You Did Last Summer travesties, both of the xXx sweat-fests, all three of the retarded Skulls movies, and the painfully bad Cruel Intentions trilogy, as well as S.W.A.T., Torque, Stealth, Slackers, Saving Silverman, Blue Streak, Volcano, Soul Survivors, and the freakin' Fast and the Furious trilogy, allllll of which give a pretty good indication as to what the American Battle Royale might look like: junk.