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 eries 7: The Contenders is the kind of movie that
can only be made with a small, even nonexistent, budget, and done in guerilla
filmmaking fashion. It's a take on the "reality TV" that has swamped
(or plagued, depending on your perspective on the genre) prime-time network
television for the last few years, starting with Survivor. It is the kind
of movie that would never survive the critique of a Hollywood suit, and if it
did, surely would not have turned out as it did in this instance. It's the kind
of movie where a writer with one credit to his name uses the money earned from
that first movie in order to make his directorial debut. And that's how you get
a movie like Series 7.
Series 7's premise is a simple one: in the not so
distant future, America's #1 game show is a reality show called "Series
7" where 5 random contestants in the same town are picked to compete in a
kill-or-be-killed tournament. The five must not only compete with each other,
but also compete with the champion from the previous series, making it a total
of 6 competitors. The (unlucky) chosen 6 must then hunt each other down with a
lone cameraman from the show following and filming their every movement, shot,
and doing the sit-down interviews that we're all familiar with (i.e. characters
sit down and talk about what just happened, how they're feeling, what they think
will happen, etc.).
To be sure, Series 7 isn't the first movie to mine
the "reality TV" satire route. The Japanese movie Battle
Royale did it as well, and went a step further and used teenagers as
competitors instead of adults, as is the case with Series 7. The primary
difference between the two movies, besides the obvious utilization of Japanese
and American actors, is that Royale had the advantage of a big budget,
where Series 7 obviously does not.
Series 7 is filmed using
roaming digital video cameras that captures the image in bright light, with all
the stark ugliness of reality in full bloom, and is intercut with
"character background" set pieces that breaks the reality continuity.
Of course, in order to make a movie, the director had to cheat a little, and we
sometimes get two-shots in order to capture emotional scenes between two
characters that is simply not possible in a "real" moment. In that
way, the "reality TV show" façade does come down, but that is insignificant
when compared to the many elements that the movie does so well.
The characters are one of Series 7's biggest draws.
They include a perky 18 year old name Lindsay whose parents are so gung-ho for
her to win that they buy her new weapons and drives her around for her
"kills." Another competitor, and the movie's star, is Dawn, a
30-something survivor from the previous game, who must win one more time in
order to leave the game (and oh yeah, she was chosen to play the game at a very
inappropriate moment in her life -- she's pregnant, and as the game begins,
she's 8 months along and ready to give birth).
There's Connie, a 60-something
nurse who at first seems ill-equipped to deal with the game, but turns out to be
far more shrewd and cunning than anyone thought, especially the other competitors.
There's Richard, a crazy old man who lives alone and doesn't look like he'll
stand much of a chance. Then there's Jeffrey, a artist dying from testicular
cancer, who has a deathwish and a history with Dawn from their High School days
when the two were sweethearts. Finally there's Tony, an out-of-work loudmouth
with 3 kids, who brags constantly, but turns out not to be so tough after all,
and is the first one to die.
Forget, for one moment, that this is a movie, and you can
actually believe everything the characters are saying in their sit-down
interviews. The actors are so good in their roles that it's almost impossible to
guess that these people were in a movie and not actually involved in a warped
game show. The movie is filmed in a way where we see the 5-second blurbs that
proceeds and follows a commercial break if this was actually a TV show; of
course this isn't a TV show, and there are no commercial breaks. In fact, if you
actually inserted real commercials where the commercials are supposed to go and
show the movie on TV, you could actually believe that this is an actual
TV show, split up into different segments, with exiting blurbs to tease you
about what's to come, and introduction blurbs to tell you what's already
happened before the commercial. And, let's not forget, it's also a good way to
pad the movie, which is already short at just over 80 minutes long.
The movie, as a whole, is well-done, well-acted, and
well-scripted. Brooke Smith, as Dawn, is outstanding, and brings vulnerability
and a gung-ho mentality to the movie. She's tough when she has to be and
completely delicate when necessary. Glenn Fitzgerald, who plays Jeffrey, Dawn's
former sweetheart, does a good "man on the verge of dying." But I have
to say that the standout is Marylouise Burke as Connie, the church-going nurse
who wax poetics about the show's brutality, the brutality of her fellow
competitors, but proves to be far more brutal than all of them combined when the
fit hits the shan.
Unlike Battle
Royale, Series 7 is not as bloody. In fact, just because of the
small number of competitors, the movie's "kills" are few. By
comparison, Battle
Royale's 40-plus competitors allowed the movie to show wholesale
slaughter of the most violent kind. Yet, while I sometimes wished the sit-down
interviews didn't last so long, the movie still held my attention, and after a
while I really didn't mind the lack of killing. My personal bloodlust
notwithstanding, the movie is a satisfying sit-through, and the twist at the end
is quite excellent. I didn't see it coming at all, and nowadays where I can
almost predict a movie plot point by plot point, I appreciate being surprised
like that.
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