OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Battle Royal High School

Having nothing to do with the book and movie franchise that inspired The Hunger Games, Battle Royal High School was a manga that ran in the late 80's that got its own OVA one-shot which was directed by Ichiro Itano who also acted as director on Gantz. The anime came out about halfway through the series run covering most of the first half of the story, so it has an abrupt ending to it which doesn't work against it because the plot is a margarita mix of shonen anime cliches. There are sentai heroes, demon slayers, super karate fighters, and an entire mountain range of fan service. It's the equivalent of someone pitching you their idea for a dream script and they keep upping the ante with more outrageous additions of mismatched character types. Since OVAs at the time were making animated adaptations of whatever they think might stick to the wall, the anime industry wasn't all that scrutinizing when it came to figuring out their target demographic, and this particular OVA is a shining example of that.

Riki is an egotistical young martial artist with plans to become a famous fighter by taking on all challengers while wearing a leopard mask. Simultaneously, Riki's opposite in a parallel universe Byoudo is a warrior that conquered the magical Dark Realm who realizes that part of his power is flowing into his doppelganger as part of a prophecy. Byoudo enters our world and inhabits his counterpart's body leaving Riki mostly in charge when conscious, even though the whole propecy was a scheme planned by his subordinate Kain, the mistress of a race of parasitic fairies that inhabit people's bodies similar to John Carpenter's The Thing. All this attracts the attention of a third party which monitors for any dimensional anomalies, so they send literally beam down from their orbiting satellite their "Space-Time Continuum Inspector" named Zankan who can morph into a Power Ranger with armor similar to Iron Man. Another addition is yet another outside character, a wandering monster buster named Yuuki who has spiritual powers and a wooden sword that doubles as a lightsaber. Yuuki gets possessed by Kain, and then gets into a fight with Zankan while one of Riki's love interests becomes infected by dark fairies leaving her as a pile of parts that Riki has to use his new supernatural powers to bring back to life piece by piece. Byoudo still in Riki's body then faces Kain in Yuuki's body as the two have a climactic battle that ends up destroying their entire high school. Byoudo then returns to his world and turning back time so that no one remembering anything that happened, even though its left ambiguous as to whether or not Yuuki survived since it his body was destroyed in the final fight.

Battle Royal High School is a product of the age it was made in with gratuitous amounts of blood, boobs, and violence. There is some decent fight choreography at the beginning, and the monstrous human mutations are something right out of a Lovecraftian nightmare, even though the constantly changing plot is seriously disorienting making it difficult to keep up with all the conflicting characters and their motivations crammed into an hour-long anime feature. Animeigo released this in America on VHS and DVD with a dodgy dub that are now out of print.