The Long Walk has never been filmed, but both it and The Running Man leave their stamp all over Series 7: The Contenders, the directorial debut of I Shot Andy Warhol co-scribe Daniel Minahan. Framed as a televised marathon of a lethal reality TV program, the film includes a viewer-discretion warning and regular cliffhanger montages of what we're about to see in the next "episode." The only things missing are the commercials: Think of Paul Verhoeven's excellent fake TV spots in Robocop.
Our attention is grabbed right off the bat, before the ground rules can be established, when a pregnant woman walks into a convenience store, shoots a customer in the back of the head, and then loudly demands to know if there's any bean dip. The action is shot on video and presented matter-of-factly, by people who don't look like actors. "Real people! In real danger!" proclaims an omnipresent narrator. "The only prize is the only prize that counts: your life!" The pregnant woman is Dawn (Brooke Smith), the reigning champion of the deadly TV show The Contenders -- now in its seventh season, hence the film's title. Having won twice, she has to win one more round to gain her freedom. The rules of the contest are simple: Be the last of six contestants left alive. No suicide is permitted, no one other than a contestant should be killed, and no hostages can be taken.
Participants are selected at random by government ID number -- all but the reigning champion live in a particular area that has been chosen for the game -- then notified in the middle of the night by masked operatives (similar to the way MTV notifies Road Rules applicants that they have been chosen). This time around, the contestants are Tony (Michael Kaycheck), a middle-aged schlemiel who hits a punching bag to prove he's still in shape; Connie (Marylouise Burke), a conservative Catholic nurse who, surprisingly, supports euthanasia; Franklin (Richard Venture), an old man without any distinguishing characteristics; Lindsay (Merritt Wever), a teen virgin; and Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), a cancer patient who quite literally doesn't have the balls for killing.
Dawn quickly goes about calling all the other contestants and terrorizing them, hoping to flush them out. Tony, who is well-versed in pro-wrestling taunts, throws around insults like "God should come down and fuck her mother just for having her" while simultaneously managing to turn his wife and children against him (go figure). Young Lindsay's parents get wholeheartedly into the swing of things, driving her to a kill as if driving her to school. Franklin, not being much of a character to begin with, doesn't do much, and Jeff simply waits for death, as he was doing anyway prior to being selected.
And Connie? Once she makes her first kill, and the first kill of the contest -- a lethal injection delivered to one of the others who's been seriously injured in an act of near-suicidal stupidity -- she gets over her distaste for murder and becomes the most ruthless of the bunch. Indeed, she seems to be the only one capable of working out a master plan rather than relying on the run-and-shoot technique the others employ.
Meanwhile, the narrator reminds us that this is a TV show and gives an idiotic and brief history of Newbury, Connecticut, where the action is set. He calls the climactic episode "a very special season finale" and delivers play-by-play commentary on an instant replay of a shootout. Despite these and other satirical touches, the film's strength is that it draws you in as though it were a real reality show. Like Kinji Fukasaku's controversial Battle Royale, in which ninth graders must kill each other off as part of a government antidelinquency program, the satiric touches take a backseat to the tension the characters are feeling. Where Fukasaku's film is more like a Hollywood actioner in its execution, however, Series 7 has a low-budget look coupled with ultrarealistic gore and unstylized deaths shown without any cinematic flash.
The cast is uniformly good -- especially Brooke Smith in her portrayal of Dawn, who has to be the ass-kickingest pregnant chick since Frances McDormand donned the funny-lookin' fur hat up in North Dakota. Part of the actors' strength, though, may in some ways also be a weakness: These folks all look and act like real people, rather than stars. But take a gander at The Real World, Survivor, and their ilk, and notice how those casts don't look like the rest of the population. While TV executives may someday devise contests in which real people are actually killed, it's unlikely that anyone as plain-looking as Dawn would be cast in the lead. Unless the point is to gradually eliminate from society anyone who isn't glamorous, of course.
