Here's the pitch: The State forces kids into a death match where only one is left standing.
Yes, but it's also the storyline for Battle Royale, the brutal, harrowing and little-seen Japanese film that beat Hunger Games to the plot by 12 years. And that film was based on a 600-page Japanese novel published in 1999.
But with Hunger hysteria at a high point, Battle Royale - which Quentin Tarantino called his "favourite movie of the last 20 years" - might finally get the attention it deserves.
Set in a near-future Japan where youth crime has spiralled out of control, Kenji Fukasaku's tense, tragic and timely film focuses on a group of 42 students who are taken to a deserted island overseen by the bullying Kitano (played by the always steely Takeshi Kitano).
They're given a deadline (three days), a duffel bag (each with different weapons and implements), and an order to slaughter each other until there's just one survivor. If they refuse to co-operate, all will be killed.
Imagine Lord of the Flies with gunplay and sharp metal objects and you've got the idea. But when Battle Royale hit the film market in 2000, it couldn't have been released at a worse time. In Japan, where it was a hit, it was hotly debated in terms of glorifying violence. In the US it was just a year after the Columbine massacre and a year before 9/11. No-one in the early 2000s wanted to go near it. A decade on and Battle Royale has built up a fiercely loyal following after being released on video a few years back.
There's been a virtual war online as Battle Royale and Hunger Games fans go at each other as if they are the last two survivors in this ongoing teenage war.
"Hunger Games is like another Twilight, taking a [great] concept and [weakening] it with a love triangle that bores the [life] outta me," charged one Battle Royale fan on a You Tube Battle Royale vs Hunger Games page.
"In every Hunger Games post, a Battle Royale fan has to pop up and claim it's a rip-off," moaned one HG loyalist on another blog.
Now, with The Hunger Games finally hitting theatres and Battle Royale getting a renewed push - courtesy of a recently released four-disc repackaging on DVD and Blu-ray - movie fans will be able to make up their minds about which they prefer.
Whatever the outcome, it will be good to see Battle Royale - which, it should be noted, is not for the very young or the faint of heart - move out of the shadow world of word-of-mouth cultdom and into the broader daylight of wider circulation.
- Cary Darling
