It’s been a hot minute since there’s been active Watching Hour coverage here at The Movie Advocate. So if you’re a fresh face around these parts, here’s the deal:
The Watching Hour is a weekly film series at the Starz Film Center, highlighting new and old cult, genre, or otherwise bizarro movies. Quite simply, The Watching Hour is usually the best thing to do in Denver on a Friday or Saturday night. From Giallo to schlock, Blaxploitation to Aussiesploitation, zombies to martial arts to who-knows-what, and everywhere in between. This is good ol’ rock and roll cinema spectacle. Not to be missed. (See the schedule, buy tickets, get directions, etc. here.)
Up to bat this week is a little seen bit of madness from 2001 called Series 7: The Contenders. This movie was entirely off my radar until the trailer played in front of Stunt Rock a couple months ago. And damn if this trailer didn’t throw me off my Stunt Rock good-times groove.
Because Series 7 is a mockumentary reality TV show about people who are selected at random to play a game, and the goal of that game is to kill all the other contestants by whatever means necessary. If you kill everyone else, you win. And to do that you have to transform yourself from Average Joe into a cold blooded killing machine. I know, right?
Naturally, Stunt Rock, through a ballsy and innovative combination of stunts and rock (and wizardry) got me back en route to Party City in no time. But in the couple of months since then, I haven’t been able to entirely erase the Series 7 scars from the dark shadows in the corners of my brain. It’s not that this seems like it will be a particularly enjoyable moviegoing experience, but something about it clicks.
Reality television has had the same cultural trajectory as Muzak. I remember starting a new job some years back at a copy shop that pumped a terrible, soul-numbing Muzak station through the store. My body literally revolted. I couldn’t think straight; once maybe I dry heaved. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the fact that I would have to keep coming to work here for a very, very long time. I wasn’t getting a new job, and the Muzak station was not going away. I never learned to love Muzak – as if my life were some mundane riff on Clockwork Orange – but I learned to tolerate it, even ignore it.
Reality shows are the Muzak stations of television. (Some would say that television is the Muzak of television, and to those people I would say… you have a good point. But stop trying to muck up my analogy. And get out of my parentheses!) Once upon a time, when reality shows were new, those who saw them for cheap, embarrassing, compromising, society-destroying monstrosities could get angry about it. Really angry! Dark satire angry! But reality TV has been around for so long at this point that no amount of complaining is going to make it go away. Reality shows are a landmark on the American cultural landscape. Life goes on.
Remember 10 years ago when everyone had an opinion about reality television? When Survivor was but a glimmer in Jeff Probst’s eye, and Paula Abdul wasn’t considered a gatekeeper of good taste? Back when you didn’t have to be a cultural studies PhD candidate to have an opinion about The Real World and how it correlated with the decay of American Society? Series 7 is from those passionate salad days of reality TV hatred.
So Series 7 is the story of a game show where the contestants hunt and kill each other? In the post-mod contemporary television landscape, where the backlash against reality TV has already occurred, and then forwardlashed again, this premise feels a little cliché and past it’s prime. To be sure, it’s probably both. There’s something about it, though, with its inclination toward savage, in your face satire. It’s not nuanced – it’s proto-farce. It’s angry about reality TV in a way we can’t be in 2010.
It's good to be back in the Watching Hour saddle. Watching Hour, hit me with your best shot. Hmmm… or considering the subject matter of this week’s movie, I think I’m going to revise that: Watching Hour, show me a good movie. Yeah...
-Ben