Sometimes, you hear about a film with a premise so bad that you wince visibly, but the idea of the film creeps inside your head and sets up a little camp. It keeps whispering things in your ear, making horrible promises it just can't hope to keep, dire threats impossible to carry out, anything to get you to see it. Eventually, an opportunity to watch it pops up, and you do so for no reason that you can quite understand.

Such was the case with me and Battle Royale. The plot sounds like something scraped from the bottom of the B-movie barrel - adults, terrified by increasingly rebellious youth in the face of economic collapse in Japan, set up the Battle Royale program. The program randomly selects a class of students and places them on an island. There, they are each given a random weapon (ranging from sub machine guns and hand grenades to binoculars and a tin lid), and three days to kill each other off until one remains. If more than one remains at the end of three days, the necklaces all are wearing blow up, killing all remaining survivors.

What comes out is actually something very different. Not everybody instantaneously devolves into a killing machine. Each person copes with being forcibly told to kill people they have known as friends - some cope through suicide, others make pacts, and still others try to find a way to manipulate the system and save everybody. While each character is a two-dimensional cutout, the fact that there are so many characters in the film and you still manage to get a sense of some sort of personality from each one of them is pretty much an amazing feat in and of itself. And there are some chilling scenes - one, in particular, of friends suddenly turning on each other in a sudden fit of suspicion and misunderstanding actually gripped me.

If you can get past the subject matter, this is a good film, and comes well recommended. 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix.