First released overseas more than a decade, the futuristic Japanese survivalist action-drama Battle Royale is finally coming to DVD and Blu-ray for the first time in the United States. Distributor Anchor Bay Entertainment has even cut a brand new trailer to promote the release. You can watch it here below.

The film is based on a popular manga and is set in a time where overpopulation and an unstable economy forces the Japanese government to institute the Battle Royale Act, whereupon one class of students will be taken each year against their will to a small island and forced to fight for their lives. Outfitted with tracking devices and given an array of weapons that range from the dangerous (swords, machine guns) to the absurd (pot lids), the students finds themselves in for the literal fight of their adolescent lives. By the end of the day only one will remain standing.

Battle Royale is the best-known film of the late Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku. Throughout his four-decade-long career as a director he has called the shots on violent Yakuza gangster epics and cheesy B-movies like The Green Slime and the infamous Star Wars rip-off Message from Space. Fukasaku earned some early career respectability for directing the Japanese segments of Tora, Tora, Tora, the 1970 epic drama about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He passed away on January 12, 2003 while in production on Battle Royale II so his son Kenta took over the directing reigns in his absence.

The Green Slime
DVD Remaster
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
Starring Robert Horton, Luciana Paluzzi, Richard Jaeckel
Warner Bros Home Entertainment
Release date: October 26, 2010

The year 1968 was quite a time for science-fiction. On television the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was in the midst of a five-year adventure traveling to strange new worlds under the command of Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Meanwhile on movie screens around the world Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was launching a bold new vision of the future of its very own with Stanley Kubrick’s long-in-the-works outerspace epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke”˜s short story “The Sentinel.” What Star Trek and 2001 represented at a time when the country was neck deep in the bloody apocalypse of Vietnam was a vision of an optimistic future where mankind could sail an endless ocean of stars to places unknown without having to face the threat of flesh-eating monsters on every uncharted world. Some would call such a notion naïve and childish, but both Trek and 2001 made their respective impact on audiences and critics and would go on to become two of the most influential sci-fi entertainments in the history of their mediums.

The same year, MGM also released The Green Slime. Okay then”¦