Take a random class of 42 junior high school students, shackle them with exploding neck collars, and inform them that they have to kill each other down to the last within three days. If they refuse to fight, or fail to meet their numerical objective, the collars will detonate and they'll all die anyway in a veritable dystopian free for all.

Take a class of 42 junior high school kids, stick them in a classroom and cram them with facts and figures until either all of their intellectual curiosity is quashed, or they go semi-postal and begin bullying one another, sometimes committing heinous crimes, in an occasionally true-life tale of the Japanese education system.

The above analogy is somewhat of a stretch, but it hasn't been lost on the thousands of teens lining up to see "Battle Royale," Toei's latest controversial offering from director Kinji Fukasaku. A combination of "Lord of the Flies," and "The Running Man," "Battle Royale" has splattered its reputation from Japan to Hong Kong and into the nervous hands of U.S. distributors. According to posts on Aintitcoolnews.com, the film's violence has companies both chomping at the bit and waffling anxiously over a North American release.

One scene depicts a girl murdering her lovelorn boyfriend, while another shows an ambitious lad chucking an explosive that has been stuffed inside the head of a decapitated classmate. If this has people balking, the director's cut, due for release in April, should really get them going.

In Japan the motion picture rating system is divided into four categories: R-18 (minors eighteen and under are not allowed ), R-15, R-12, and films for general audiences. The ratings are based primarily on the amount of violence, sexual content, and drug use featured in the film. Nagisa Oshima's erotic masterpiece "Ai No Corrida" (In the Realm of the Senses) got an R-18 for its frank depiction of sexuality, which involves a heroine who removes a vital part of her lover's anatomy.

"'Battle Royale' had enough violence in the screenplay to merit an R-15 rating," says Committee chairman Mamoru Matsuo. "Battle Royale," however, is the first film in Japanese history to receive an R-15 rating for violence alone. The Motion Picture Code of Ethics Committee checks the content of each film in three stages; they begin with the scenario, go over the rushes, and finally review each film after it finishes post production. Matsuo also states that the Committee worked closely with Director Fukasaku during the making of the film and gave the rating with his full consent.

As in America, however, these ratings do very little to keep the kids out of the theaters. Cinemas rarely ask for proof of age, and any minor savvy enough to stay out of a school uniform can easily slip past the box office.

Two months prior to the film's release, then Education Minister Tadamori Oshima, and current minister Nobutaka Machimura began urging theater owners to "voluntarily refrain" from running the film. Yoshiro Mori, Japan's gaffe-ridden, recently resigned Prime Minister, also exploited this opportunity for some photo-op indignation, denouncing the film and calling for an anti-violence campaign. Politicians, and educators alike, are attempting to connect the violence portrayed in the film, with a rise in brutal crimes committed by teenagers over the past decade.

To the seventy-year-old Fukasaku, however, the violence in "Battle Royale" pales in comparison to his own grim experiences as an adolescent. While teens today may be sneaking into theaters, Fukasaku spent his adolescence picking up bodies mutilated by the munitions dropped on Japan in the mid-century.