BlazeLime Strong and Moving!

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

BA_Harrison Series 7 sees reigning champion Dawn pitted against five new contenders in a fight to the death.I didn't really get into The Contenders until Series 5, which ended with a tense three-way Mexican standoff that, at the time, I thought couldn't be beaten. Series 6 somehow managed to top this with a brutal knife fight between finalists Rick and Daniel guaranteed to satisfy any viewer's bloodlust.How could Series 7 possibly be any better? Answer: by introducing a romantic angle. It sounds sappy, but by having contenders Dawn (heavily pregnant) and Jeff (dealing with terminal cancer) conflicted by their feelings for each other really adds to the emotional wallop and leaves one reeling at the final outcome.Series 8 is going to have to come up with something really special to outdo this.

charlie lafferty 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.

MBunge There are very few films that would ever be improved by being more like a comic book fanboy, but Series 7 is one of those films. The premise of this movie is that it is actually a marathon showing of back-to-back episodes of a reality TV show called The Contenders. Except this show isn't about boxers or Muy Thai fighters. In this show, 6 people are given guns and told the winner is the last one left alive. TV camera crews follow each Contender around as they kill each other off. The reigning champion in this 7th season of the show is Dawn (Brooke Smith), a very pregnant woman who has already killed her way through two previous seasons and 10 people. Now Dawn's been brought back to her hometown to square off against 5 final opponents; Connie (Marylouise Burke) - a nurse who takes to killing like a duck to water, Tony (Michael Kaycheck) - a drug addicted Guido who decides he doesn't want to play the game, Franklin (Richard Venture) - an old crank who has coated the inside of his mobile home with lead foil, Lindsay (Angelina Philips) - a teenager with the world's stupidest parents and Jeffrey (Glenn Fitzgerald) - Dawn's old boyfriend who is dying of cancer and is married, even though he's really gay. These 6 people fight and don't fight, kill and don't kill, all while a smarmy narrator teases the audience with their eventual fates. Clearly, Series 7 is meant as a black comedy take on the reality TV genre and it does a decent job of mimicking the conventions of the genre. There are confessional moments where the characters talk directly into the camera. The show is constantly building up to big moments and then cutting away from them to stretch the suspense out as long as possible. There are even a couple of good bits where they are obviously mocking the way reality TV show producers edit these shows together to manipulate the audience into thinking and feeling certain ways about the people in the show. But the basic problem of Series 7 is that it doesn't take itself seriously enough. Being too serious is usually bad for any movie, especially a black comedy, but this story needed to be thought out a lot more. That brings in the comic book fanboy. I am one, so I can speak from experience. We take our comics very seriously. Not only can we rattle off ridiculous bits of trivia, but we actually sit around and think about stuff like…who would win in a fight between Werewolf by Night and Vixen from the Justice League. We try and figure out how Iron Man's boot jets would work in real life. We try and explain why Modok doesn't kill Captain America when he has him tied up and at the big giant head's mercy. We don't just enjoy out comics, we enjoy coming up with our own explanations for how the things in comics could and would actually happen. Series 7, however, doesn't spend any time at all thinking about that stuff. It establishes that people are chosen by lottery to participate in The Contenders, but that's where the background information ends. I t's never explained who is running the show. It's never explained how a show like this exists. It's never explained what these people are playing for, other than their lives. I t's never even really explained how the game works. Imagine watching an episode of Survivor where no one ever explained to you that the players can win immunity by doing certain things. The way the contestants behave wouldn't make much sense, would it?Series 7 doesn't bother to think about how a murderous reality show would have to be set up. It just has these people being followed around by camera crews wearing bullet proof vests, but that doesn't make any sense. There'd be camera guys getting shot left and right, both deliberately and accidentally. A reality TV show about people killing each other would have to be different in certain ways than The Amazing Race or Big Brother, but this script never bothers to wonder about any of that. That lack of intelligence or care undermines the whole film. The actors all do a decent job, but the script puts them in situations and behave in ways that don't make any sense because the script never bothers to consider how a show like this would work in real life. Series 7 was made when reality TV was still a newish genre. Perhaps back then, you could more appreciate the satire because how a reality show worked was less certain and less well understood. Today, though, we know so much about what reality TV is and how it's made that it's hard not notice that Series 7 is rather lazily put together.

joshua-kennedy Despite the potentially fascinating premise, Series 7 is weak attempt at attacking reality television. Aside from its bargain basement production values, which present an eyesore 10 minutes in, the overall tone of the film is misguided. Several reviewers have attacked the acting in the film, but I think the real problem is this lame attempt to make the film into a farce. Aside from the fact that the jokes are not funny (a pregnant woman swears a lot, a young girl gets a bunch of guns), it doesn't gel with the overall tone of the film. Had the makers actually made Series 7 to bear a striking resemblance to actual reality TV-colorful yet hollow edits, lame sound effects, sweeping camera motions-maybe their point would have been more solid or at least more palatable. Instead Series 7 meanders through the already harried world of death and game show. You can just imagine the director slapping himself on the back for stating the obvious