Cromartie High – The Movie (Japanese: 魁!! クロマティ高校 THE★MOVIE, Hepburn: Sakigake!! Kuromati Kōkō The Movie) is a 2005 Japanese surreal comedy satire film directed by Yūdai Yamaguchi (who had previously made Battlefield Baseball) and starring Takamasa Suga. The film is based on the manga Cromartie High School by Eiji Nonaka which had also been previously adapted as an anime series.

The film opens with a black-and-white documentary-like section which recounts the checkered past of Cromartie High, built in 1920 and destroyed six times since then. Then on to the present day school full of violence and thugs, a school so desperate for students, they even enroll a gorilla and a bad-tempered robot. Takashi Kamiyama (played by Takamasa Suga), a top student, comes to the school to try to join his hapless friend Yamamoto (Tak Sakaguchi in a cameo role) but Yamamoto can't even pass the entrance exams for Cromartie so Kamiyama is left to go it alone. His efforts to improve the school include starting a Global Defense Force to protect earth from aliens. The aliens when they do arrive are space apes Gori (screenwriter Shōichirō Masumoto in a furry suit) and Lla (both straight out of the 1971 TV series Spectreman) and the plot becomes a series of parodies of science fiction films, martial arts movies and high school comedies among others.

Director Yamaguchi has said that the author of the original manga, Eiji Nonaka told him to "Do whatever you want" when he learned that a film was to be made of the manga. Yamaguchi took him at his word and did not read the manga or look at the anime version before directing his film. Because of the episodic nature of the original manga, the screenplay took a year and a half to write.

The name of Cromartie High School was taken from the American baseball player Warren Cromartie who was a star player in Japan for a number of years. Cromartie was unhappy that his name was being used for a school of thugs and delinquents and in 2005 filed an injunction to delay the screening of the movie. The film's director Yamaguchi was able to reach a compromise with Cromartie to allow screening of the film as long as a disclaimer was added that no real person was involved. Cromartie said he still intended bringing a civil suit.

English voice cast

Cromartie High was shown at the 9th Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival on July 17, 2005. The movie was released theatrically in Japan on July 23, 2005 by Media Suites and the Japanese DVD was issued on January 2, 2006 by King Records (キングレコード).

The New York premiere of Cromartie High School was in June 2006 at the 2006 New York Asian Film Festival, presented by Subway Cinema. Soon afterwards in July 2006, an English-subtitled and English-dubbed DVD was released by Tokyo Shock as Cromartie High - The Movie.

Todd Brown at Twitch Film gave a very positive review calling the film "deliriously fun stuff" with a "fantastic visual style" and "jammed with bursts of stylish action, visual gags, film references and as much plain old oddity as Yamaguchi can possibly jam in there."