Series 7: The Contender

Nauseating and insidiously compelling in equal measure, writer/director Minahan’s debut opus Series 7: The Contenders is the filmic equivalent of channel-surfing all night long on American network telly.

If nothing else, it’s intriguing in conception, basing itself as a marathon feature-length version of a TV show (entitled The Contenders) in which six contestants – selected at random – are assigned to kill one another off (or be killed themselves) until there is only one survivor. Nonetheless, the results are quite mind-numbing.

If taken at face value, Series 7 is an indefensibly vile piece of work altogether, custom-designed to satisfy cheap audience cravings for the worst kind of mindless, sensationalised violence. Director Minahan, pleading irony, claims to have crafted the film as a conscious satire on the sadistic, exploitative nature of Big Brother-style ‘reality TV’; and the format certainly fits the bill, with attention-deficit jump-cuts and edits perfectly mirroring the general flavour of the programmes The Contender sets out to satirise (Cops, Boot Camp, Survivor, etc. etc.).

However laudable its intentions may be, Series 7:The Contender still can’t help ending up horribly reminiscent of the shows it purports to lampoon. If you‘ve no objection to watching one stretched to feature-length, then it may fit your idea of a good time, but not one of the pivotal characters inspire any sympathy or even interest, and the only thing bordering on emotion Series 7 invokes is a boredom so severe it verges on coma.