With Junior Eurovision currently in full swing, our attention inevitably turns to another group of competitive children with blood on their hands.

A high School class are sent to a civics lesson with only one survivor in this Japanese death race from 2000. Let’s call it Death Race 2000. Mass unemployment and civil unrest have sparked walkouts in schools across the country. To get the nation’s youth back in line, the government passes a law that annually forces a randomly selected school class to fight to the death. Still, it beats doing PE.

The grandaddy of the junior-gladiator genre, Battle Royale was denied a theatrical release in a US still reeling from the Columbine High School massacre. Ironically it took the success of The Hunger Games to make its varsity bloodsport premise seem palatable, and the feature was finally given a stateside release in 2012.

But where The Hunger Games handled the mortal kid combat with YA gloves, Battle Royale follows through on the brutality of its premise to deliver a splatter flick for the (if not all) ages. Two of the teens are killed before the battle even officially starts (the film helpfully displays a kill count), and soon the school kids are putting their triggernometry lessons to bloody good use.

Yet despite this wall-to-wall bloodshed, Battle Royale is a surprisingly romantic picture. As the classmates turn on each other, our heroes (Tatsuya Fujiwara and Aki Maeda) are kept strong by their togetherness. And by mixing themes of friendship with the classroom carnage, the movie strikes a unique comic-horror tone.

Director Kinji Fukasaku satirises the high school experience by literally weaponising its cliques, crushes and hierarchies. You thought your local mean girls were a bunch of backstabbers? You should see them with actual swords. One character even finds time between massacres to curl her eyelashes, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment of Romero-style irony that stays with you long after the graphic violence has recessed.

For all its extravagence, Battle Royale still rings true in a way something like The Purge never managed. In fact it has proven incredibly prescient, both in terms of reality TV (it subversively casts Takeshi’s Castle star ‘Beat’ Takeshi) and world politics. The last five years have seen school walkouts protesting gun violence in the US, as well as Greta Thunberg-inspired strikes over climate action around the world. The film’s oppressive government punishes the youth for civil disobedience, but the movie positions the children as a product of their environment.

The result is A Clockwork Orange meets Lord of the Flies, a sardonic classic about neglect and the scars it leaves on society. The Hunger Games may be dominating the box office this week, but Battle Royale remains in a class of its own.