Yes, Freedom Haters!

We're back with another 20 year old movie we've NEVER SEEN BEFORE.

And this one is a real doozie.

It's called The Lonely Guy and it's got Steve Martin in it.  One of our favorit comedians here at Freedom Haters. 

Right when he was still pretty damn hip and with it, movie wise before he got all crappy (I'm looking at YOU, Pink Panther!!).

And it was written by Neil Simon.

What could go wrong? 

Well, more or less, everything.

So seldom does Freedom Haters attend a movie on the opening day matinee.

 But such was the case with Steven Soderbergh's new flick, The Informant. There was something about Matt Damon packing on pounds to play Mark Whitacre--a Midwestern agricultural exec who cooperates with the FBI to help bring down lysine insider trading. But all isn't what it seems to be........

Pre-dating the release of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (which kicked-off a renewed interest in the slasher genre) by a few months, “Drive-In Massacre”, written by Buck Flowers and John Goff from a story by director Stu Segall (“C.B. Hustlers” and “Teeny Buns”), had me hoping for a kind of cinematic missing link between what horror films in the 70’s were compared to some of the more mindless ones in the 80’s.

Somehow, I’d missed seeing this thing over the years. I don’t know why. One look at the video cover art may offer a clue. “WARNING: The Red Stuff On Your Hot Dog May Not Be Ketchup!” Classy, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Undaunted, I popped some popcorn and crossed my fingers. Sometimes you can find a diamond in the rough wrapped in an ugly package. Other times you find the opposite. Other times you find the cinematic (and I use the term very loosely) pile of crap that is “Drive-In Massacre”.

I finally got a chance to see The Running Man.

It's only been about TWENTY TWO years since it was released.

But that's not going to stop us here at Freedom Haters from reviewing the movie.

We're like Ain't It Cool News...IF IT WAS AROUND IN 1987!

The year is 2017. The biggest game show in America centers around killing people. Convicted criminals are set loose in a ruined urban landscape (from the earthquakes of 1997) and chased by a group of hunters called Stalkers.

If the criminals (called - natch - Running Men) elude the Stalkers, they get to live out their lives in tropical splendor.

Now, seriously, I've never, EVER seen this movie. I remember when it came out. I like Ah-nohld. I like Steven King. But, for some reason, I never saw the movie.

So this is my take on seeing this movie that was first released in 1987 in 2009.

• Arnold is a great Terminator. He might be an ok governor. But he is a HORRIBLE actor. The non-action scenes alone prove this.
• Reality TV in 2009 is way scarier than anything they dreamed up in this movie. One of the other popular shows of the future is called "Climbing For Money". In this show, a contestant climbs up a rope to grab money and get away from Dobermans. This doesn't even come close to The Cougar.
• Apparently the TV newscasters in 2017 look exactly the same as chicks from the Duran Duran Rio album.
• WTF happened to Maria Conchita Alonzo? That's got to be strange to be the costar of a movie and then nobody know who the f**k you are a few years later.
• Richard Dawson does a pretty good American accent.
• Did I mention that Ahnold is a bad actor? Let me just reiterate that point.
• Even in 1987, Ahnold's catch phrase "I'll be back" was already being used by the Governator for self parody.
• They actually did use the phrase "digital video", during a scene when Maria was looking through some film archives. She found some incriminating evidence on a video stick. But then, just a few scenes later, Richard Dawson is awarding someone in the audience a complete set of "Running Man" VHS tapes.
• The coolest scene - and the one I remember from the trailer - is where Ahnold is being shot into the game set through some kind of high tech pneumatic tube. Couple of problems with this:
  1) No one in the home audience in the future gets to watch this scene
  2) For some reason, the tubes are lit up in cool colors. Seems a bit unnecessary considering that the Running Man contestants don't really need to see where they're being pneumatically shot to.
  Actually - the whole thing was stupid because it would have been way less trouble for them just to drive them to where the game was being played.

UPDATE: Ok. So I was just going back and putting in some links. I actually didn't even finish watching the movie, because, frankly it was pretty boring. I only found out these bits of trivia because I glanced at the IMDB entry.

• It was directed by Starsky from Starsky and Hutch!!!
• This movie and Predator are the only two movies to feature TWO governors of American states!

Enough of my yakkin! Here's some video!!!