The Unknown Villain - Boy Number 6 Kazuo Kiriyama

Battle Royale is a movie probably little known outside of fans of Manga and those "Tartan Asia Extreme" DVDs, and hence its chief antagonist does not have the reputation he deserves.

He is Boy Number 6, Kazuo Kiriyama.

Nothing behind the eyes

The Manga apparently gives him a complex backstory, that he is an intellectually superior child that had been rendered essentially sociopathic by an accident in the womb that caused to all intents and purposes a partial lobotomy.

The film just presents him as a blank "transfer student" who's first act one the game the commences - the game being the teens fight to the death until only one remains scenario pinched by The Hunger Games - is to be able to kill a gang of 6 heavily armed opponents with a paper fan.

Throughout the film he kills without mercy, using his movie standard M10 with everlasting magazines to kill boy and girl alike without making a sound. The only utterance he ever makes is when he makes an  inhuman cough into the megaphone used by two girls in a failed attempt to unite the students, before using it to broadcast a dying girl's death rattle to the whole of Battle Royale island.

The face of death

He is a killer far above any campy Bond villain or lumbering Michael Myers, and it is time he was recognised as such.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.10.14