I love all my peeps, you know that? That's why I watch these films sometimes, even when I know they're going to be awful. I watch them so you don't have to. If you couldn't tell where this review is going by what I've said, well, you'll figure it out by the end. The rest of you? Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Battle Royale II picks up three years after the first film. The "hero" of the first film, Shuya, has joined a terrorist group and struck out at Japan in multiple terrorist attacks. The Japanese government, in response, institutes the Battle Royale II program, where a group of misfits and losers is once again fitted with the suicide collars, but this time instead of being told to kill each other, they are sent to kill Shuya and the rest of his terrorist group.

And right off the top is where the whole film falls apart, and it goes downhill from there.

One of the strong appeals of the previous film is that each person in the film had their own distinct backstory and personality, that you got a sense of who they were, and how they reacted to being placed in such a horrific situation. They were everyday people put in a bad place. Even if the characters were two-dimensional cutouts, they were at least two dimensional. The characters in this film serve no purpose other than to scream, spurt blood all over everything, and occasionally run around looking like they've been through boot camp.

No, I'm not kidding, ALL the kids (except when they were doing something scripted) moved like they'd been through some kind of boot camp training, including proper weapons handling, breach tactics, advancing under covering fire, and other stuff like that. Of course, as soon as a dramatic moment calls for it, they forget all their training and act like total loons. Never mind that these kids have never ever held a gun before in their lives, but three days of fighting terrorists are apparently enough to turn the survivors into combat-hardened veterans who can take on human waves of disposable soldiers who appear to have never been in any kind of boot camp in their lives, Rambo style.

The director even has a beach assault scene where he tries to channel "Saving Private Ryan" and fails miserably.

Also lost is the dramatic tension of a bunch of friends being forced to kill each other to survive. To reinvigorate the tension, they set up something where each kid has a partner, and if the partner dies, then the first necklace starts beeping, then about a minute later blows up. Wow, great way to waste manpower and add pathos. Usually, it's the women who end up being on the receiving end of this, so that they can shriek and panic, instead of the guys, who mainly stand around looking bishy and emasculated while trying to act macho.

It just doesn't work.

And let's not even get into the plans of Shuya and his fellow terrorists, which seems to be "stand around for three days, shoot kids who are stuck in the same situation as us, act all angsty, then at the last second evacuate some people through an escape tunnel while everybody else stands around and dies for no good reason."

Even the teacher can't live up to "Beat" Takeshi's weird old guy - he's just this freaky guy who for no well-explained reason switches sides and also has an explosive collar. Go figure.

Don't bother with this putrid turd. 1 out of 5 stars on Netflix.