Did you know that Stephen King wrote books under a pseudonym? Richard Bachman was the perhaps poorly known pseudonym for Stephen King when the movie portrayal of the Richard Bachman book came to movie theaters as the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger The Running Man (1987).
(Richard Dawson as Damon Killian, left, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards in the movie The Running Man).
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as wrongly convicted Ben Richards, who must try to survive a public execution gauntlet staged as a game show. Richard Dawson stars as the host and runner of that show, Damon Killian. The premise underpinning the show is that society is corrupt, and a way for the governing power structure to keep the populous under control is to control the message of the system while entertaining the population through television, game shows, and real violence in the name of entertaining the public.
(Maria Conchita Alonso as Amber Mendez, top, Yaphet Kotto as William Laughlin in the movie The Running Man).
Members in opposition to that government control, include Amber Mendez (as portrayed by Maria Conchita Alonso) and William Loughlin (as portrayed by Yaphet Kotto). Mendez and Loughlin are unwittingly drawn into the gauntlet game show and allied with Richards, though Mendez begins the movie unaware of the government ruse and Richards’ victimization by it.
(Jesse Ventura as Captain Freedom, top, Professor Toru Tanaka as Subzero in the movie The Running Man).
The ostensible entertainment factor of the game show is that there are recurring figures within the game show tasked with bringing about the public executions that are featured within the dystopian reality of this game show world. Subzero, Buzzsaw, Dynamo, Fireball and Captain Freedom were five of the stars called into the gauntlet against Ben Richards, the combat veteran with the skills to flip the script and physically run the gauntlet in of the game show within the movie The Running Man.
(Jim Brown as Fireball, top left, Erland van Lidth as Dynamo, bottom left, and Gus Rethwisch as Buzzsaw, right, in the movie The Running Man).
For fans of the perhaps more popular and more fully developed trilogy of books that became three films, namely The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, the Bachman book The Running Man with the movie discussed here is an inspired conception for what came later. While the target audiences for the two are arguably different given the way the goals of the stories and characters populating them, the core development of the action between the two larger stories suggests a conceptual relationship. A core difference between the two is that notions for how the genders relate to each other, in the movie The Running Man for sure, uses tropes that were more prevalent in the 1980s.
(Stephen King circa 1987, from the jacket of the book Misery).
For me, The Running Man was entertaining on the level that a cult classic movie is entertaining. The fare is not going to contend for any movie awards, nor is it really best in genre for the type of story that it aimed to tell. The story itself moved things along well, and from the level of offering rooting interests as well as characters to cheer for or against, the movie worked. From that perspective, The Running Man movie earns a rating of 3.25-stars on a scale of one-to-five.
Matt – Saturday, August 3, 2019
Matt Lynn Digital 