The setup of Series 7: The Contenders is similar to the hit show Survivor, only on The Contenders the contestants go around killing each other off until there is a winner at the end of each series.

Current champion Dawn (Brooke Smith) who also happens to be eight months pregnant has returned home to Newbury, Connecticut to square off against five contestants: an unemployed father (Michael Kaycheck), a deeply religious nurse who also happens to be an angel of death (Marylouise Burke), a teenager (Merritt Wever), a crazy old man (Richard Venture) and an artist suffering from testicular cancer (Glenn Fitzgerald) whom Dawn happened to be in love with back in high school.

The camera follows Dawn and the other five contestants around, capturing how being in the game is affecting their lives and those around them as well, leading up to the time where they either live or die in the name of fortune and glory, not to mention ratings.

There really is nothing worse that watching a film where you say to yourself "Hey! I might be on to something here!" only to watch your enthusiasm fritter away in the blink of an eye. Brooke Smith, best known as the kidnap victim from The Silence Of The Lambs, does a credible job here as Dawn and, for a while, made me have compassion for her character's reasoning for continuing on with the show (she killed to protect her unborn baby).

But, as with the other characters in the film, after a while I couldn't care less what happened to any of them simply because I thought they were all pretty much jerks who deserved what they got. These aren't people; they are white trash caricatures with little to no redeeming value to them at all. Since they populate most of morning and afternoon television in real life, why the hell would I want to pay ten bucks to watch a movie about them?

This is more the fault of writer/director Dan Minaham than it is the cast. His hand-held digital camera technique is fresh out of the Blair Witch Project School of Filmmaking (yawn) and his writing is not much better. Minaham seems not to know if he wants the movie to be taken seriously or for laughs. Moments of poignancy have less emotional conviction than an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon and a good majority of the intended jokes are painfully unfunny.

Series 7: The Contenders is an interesting idea for a satire gone sour after about twenty minutes. The movie, a dark humoured goof on the whole decrepit "Reality Television" genre, shows some potential in its setup and initial introductions of the show's contestants, but as soon as it begins to try to make a statement (and take itself seriously), it gets real old, real fast.

I try to watch as little television as possible. One thing I do avoid for the most part (save the occasional episode of Cops) is the "reality shows" clogging the boob tube. On the whole they poorly made and acted to the point that they fall into the realm of self-parody. Series 7: The Contenders comes as too little too late and too lame to boot. If you want to see a smart, funny satire on the whole "reality as entertainment" genre, rent Albert Brooks' wonderful 1978 comedy Real Life and skip this film altogether.

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