The Prize of Peril (1983)

Too much of everything

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I'm going to be a philistine and admit to enjoying The Running Man more than The Prize of Peril. I also preferred The Most Dangerous Game, The Tenth Victim, and Series 7: The Contenders. In fact, of all the films I've seen in which people are being pursued for sport, this is the worst one. Perhaps the film would improve if it were available in French--the English dubbing is appalling--but the film is technically graceless, featuring ugly Eastmancolor cinematography and an unattractive and uninteresting cast. Even Michel Piccoli is unable to save the film, which is neither intellectually vigorous enough to 'make a statement' nor camp enough to simply entertain.

Robert Sheckley is a great sci-fi writer whose short stories are witty and absorbing.Yves Boisset was definitely not the kind of director who could do him justice.Yves Boisset could succeed in treating committed subjects (the Algeria war in "RAS" or racism in "Dupont -Lajoie".But in "le Prix du Danger" ,he's shooting us a line!The lead is an unambitious actor,Gérard Lanvin,who has made turkeys by the dozen (only "une Semaine de Vacances" and "Une étrange Affaire" are above average in his filmography)He is here no more than Van Damme and co.Michel Piccoli and Marie-France Pisier are supposed to provide the movie with an intellectual alibi,but their cardboard characters and their underwritten parts do not help.A faux pas: there were many of them in Boisset's eighties' career.

Prize of Peril (1983) is a real good movie. It's about a unemployed family man who's tired of being poor and wants to give his family a taste of the good life. So he signs up to become a contestant on the hottest show on television,"The Prize of Peril". After the board of directors on the television show decide that he's the one for the job and is slated to run the gauntlet live on T.V. He has to survive for a few hours running a specially designated route from an unknown location in the middle of the city back to the television studio. All the while he's being filmed and followed by a television camera crew. Five hunters are chosen out of thousands of applicants to chase and terminate the runner. Will he win the "Prize of Peril"? Watch it and find out!A few years later Hollywood decided to remake it as the Running Man. The producers of that film decided not to read the Stephen King book and took only a couple of the characters names from that novel and mixed it with this film. It's a real hoot to see how much the Producers of the Running Man took from this French film. Their are scenes from this movie that are exactly the same as in the Running Man. They even have a final confrontation between contestant and host as in said picture. I encourage you as a movie buff to go out and seek a copy of this film on video.It may be dubbed and the picture quality is not that great but it's a fun and exciting film. I highly recommend it.

Even though the version I saw on video was dubbed, this is still a really well-made and relevant film about violence and the media. "The Running Man" with Arnold Schwarzenegger is a big pile of s--t compared to this film. (I wonder if Steven King ripped off the Robert Sheckley novel that this movie's based on for his 'Bachman' book.) One of the guys hunting down the hero is played by the butcher from "Delicatessen"; he gets his in a particularly nasty fashion (recalling F.Murray Abraham's demise in "The Name of the Rose"). The video is out of print (Lightning), but if you can track it down it's well worth the time and effort.