Here's your list of friends in the order they died.

I just saw Battle Royale, a film which, according to IMDB, is banned in the USA due to "teenage gang wars."

Battle Royale, for those of you too lazy to click those links, is a movie set in the near future in Japan. In an effort to control the youth population, the government occassionally (and randomly) abducts entire high school classes and sets them loose on an island full of weapons with orders to kill and kill and kill until only one survives. I'm not sure how this is supposed to quell social unrest, but it doesn't matter: Battle Royale is so gloriously violent, it could only have come out of Japan.

Actually, it does remind me a bit of Mean Guns, a poorly-acted low budget American film made three years prior to Battle Royal. In that kill-fest various near-do-wells were set loose in a prison that was cached with weapons and told to kill one another until one one remained. When I saw Mean Guns late night on HBO one night, I remember thinking, "Man that movie was pretty poorly made, but I'll be damned if there wasn't potential in there for something more."

Battle Royale capatalizes on that potential, and rocks the house. And while 41 may seem like a low body-count for a 114 minute movie, each killing is made with brilliant and unique style. But all the virtuoso violence would be for nought if you didn't have a sense of who each of the 42 students were and what they were feeling. Battle Royale provides as much, all served up savagely, unexpectedly, and as bombastic as a hand grenade stuffed inside a severed head and thrown through a window.

Boom, baby.