I wouldn't say he's really a
bad writer, but he definitely has a lot of failures in his carreer, mainly for a tendency to caricature himself, both in terms of plot and of style. When he's focused and careful, he can bring amazing plots and his style can be efficient and enjoyable. That's a far too common issue when a writer becomes such a star that editors lack the authority to object and criticize.
As for "The Running Man", it's just a unnecessary and crappy spoof of the rather good movie
Le prix du danger, which itself is based on the excellent short story "The prize of peril" by Robert Sheckley, a forgotten Sci-Fi genius who definitely deserves more glory (I try to use every occasion I have to mention him and his work).
Since I'm posting here, I have two more movies to mention, both amusingly crappy in their own ways. Before getting to it, I have to tell something about how I know them. In my city, there's a small theatre that specializes in (mostly) artsy movies, or at least its purpose is not to feed on blockbusters. It's also the only theater that systematically shows movies in subbed version instead of dubbed. In this theatre, a projectionist created a weekly special night, "L'Absurde Séance" ("the absurd séance" - I guess) where unusual movies are shown. By "unusual movies", I mean obscure Asian movies, interesting B-Movies, underrated treasures and, of course,
nanars (crappy funny movies, in French). This is how I've seen these movies on
big screen, including
Turkish Star Wars. Yeah, I know, you're jealous.
Now, to the movies.
One is French, it's
La revanche des mortes-vivantes (The revenge of the living dead girls). It's a very odd, very failed attempt at a vaguely erotic zombie movie. It's... hard to describe. The "plot" revolves around the death of three girls, killed by poisoned milk, and rising from the tomb to get their vengeance due to chemical waste dumped in the graveyard by a local factory. The costumes, the acting, the plot, the characters, the random softcore erotic scenes: all in this movie is plain ludicrous, except for the gore fx, which are efficient if completely over the top and sometimes plain gratuitous.
The other is Italian, by the late master of
nanars Bruno Mattei (accurately nicknamed "the Italian Ed Wood"):
Rats - Notte di terrore (Rats: Night of Terror) is a post-apocalyptic flick showing the tragic adventure of a band of bikers who roam the surface of the Earth after humanity had been forced underground for a century due to a nuclear war. One night, they find an old hotel with plenty of booze and food, and decide to stay there for the night. Little did they know that the place was already inhabited, I'll let you guess by what (oh well, it's in the title anyway). Caricatural characters (and not in a flamboyant way), loose plot, unconvincing FX, lame acting, crappy shooting: a very efficient cocktail that makes this movie as fascinating as a car wreck or a burning building. The fact that the black girl's nickname is "Chocolate" should tell you something about the core disaster this movie is.
By the way, some more stuff about Turkish Star Wars: the website
nanarland.com,
the French reference about nanars, provides
some video excerpts of this movie, which are pretty representative of the overall stuff. Have a look, it's worth the loss of some neurons.
