Series 7: The Contenders (2001)

Fresh and Exciting

Admirable film.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Series 7 is what I'd like to call a "thrilledy" or a comedy/thriller. It's a movie about a fictional reality television show called "The Contenders" that takes six people and forces them to fight to the death. Five of the contenders are newly, randomly chosen people who are pulled from a "lottery." They are handed a gun as a way of welcoming them into the show. The sixth contender is the winner from the previous season of the show. It is the Hunger Games before the Hunger Games even existed. Although the contenders aren't necessarily children, young people are not ruled out of the lottery. For instance, one of the contenders in the show is a 17 year old girl. The movie goes from being darkly hilarious to just plain dark as the show's contests show no mercy in killing the other one, no matter who they are.Shot mockumentary style, the movie is very fun and constantly keeps the audience on the edge of their seat; there's no telling what's going to happen next, who's going to die, or who's going to eventually come out on top. Although the ending is a little lackluster, overall the movie is very worthwhile. There's also a cameo by Will Arnett before he was Will Arnett! (And all I really mean by this is before he was famous). Hilarious and dark, Series 7 is not only a great movie, but its also a very interesting look at human beings and what we call entertainment.

Wow.If you can "suspend reality" well enough to wade through the goth/punk/Emo overtones then enjoy.This has been described as "action & adventure, Dark Comedy and Thriller". This is what happens when a posturing art/film goth punk with delusions of talent is given backing. "A mewling abomination" is the politest thing I can say about it.This movie is NOT a satire, dark comedy or any other posturing garbage that is spewed. I'd love to take any of the idiots responsible for this atrocity out into the real world for 2 weeks and give them a grand tour of the real world just to open their eyes but I don't think they'd learn.

I saw this a couple of years ago with very little idea of what what was in store. Since then it has bubbled up to the top of my consciousness maybe once a week or so. As a point of comparison I don't remember too much about the original "Running Man" but I do recall it was a ham-handed "what if" scenario of a brutal futuristic game show that asked me to believe in the fairy tales that good is 100% good and always wins, bad is 100% bad and can't survive the light of day - if only it were so. In these times of corporate dominated media and government domestic spying such notions seem naive in the extreme.So, to me anyway, this film was more about how incredibly effective the corporate media is at manipulating one's persona, and how anyone can fall victim - on both sides of the screen. None of the contestants seemed to have any choices. They couldn't not participate in the killing, but almost more important they had no control over how they were portrayed on the screen, their humanity subsumed absolutely by the stereotypes thrust upon them in the editing room. And we, being the flawed creatures we are, fall for it time and again, even if we suspect we are being manipulated, which I find profoundly depressing.I've seen tons of all sorts of movies, and this is one of the few that I desperately wish I'd had the idea for. The intentional cheesiness of the acting and intentionally lame TV video quality only enhance the reality of the experience. What a totally genius, high impact, low budget, incredibly effective project. Bravo!!!

The concept is great - give 6 people weapons and let them start killing each other. But when they killed Merritt Wever, the film lost it's flavor and became a crappy, yet twisted love story. Personally, I wanted Lindsay Berns to win. I'm a fan of Merritt Wever, and when her character was brutally beaten to death (by a frickin' cane, how dumb is that?), I just didn't care to watch the movie anymore. It's just not believable after that. Are we supposed to think that she got beaten to death by a 72 year-old man with a metal cane? He was barely hitting her with it!Character development was good, for the most part. The movie focused mainly on Dawn and Jeffrey, and very little on Franklin. Everyone else is in between. Development of Connie's character was really good, as I really wanted her to die. Her first kill was tactless and she was a b*tch.But that's just me. I'm biased. All around good movie.