#329. 'The Running Man' (1987) (Paramount+)
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The main event is 1987's The Running Man, timed to the Edgar Wright remake hitting theaters, and the hosts split sharply: Sonny finds it merely "fine," a cheap-looking, chintzy production that he remembers being better on cable as a kid, complaining specifically that Arnold Schwarzenegger's wardrobe (leotard, Hawaiian shirt) feels all wrong and that it's a notch below both Predator and even Commando; JVL flatly disagrees and calls it "a great movie" in spite of its amateurish direction, buoyed by his enthusiasm for having just reread the original Richard Bachman/Stephen King novel, which he explains shares almost nothing with the film beyond its bare premise and which he's convinced Edgar Wright is actually adapting this time. Both JVL and Mike single out Richard Dawson's Damon Killian as a genre-defining villain performance and praise Jesse Ventura's commentary-booth charisma, while the trio nitpicks the movie's nonsensical arena geography, Maria Conchita Alonso and Jim Brown's roles, and the mid-eighties dystopian satire (including cameos from Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa playing themselves). Before the review, the customary lengthy check-in runs through Sonny's saga of taking apart and failing to correctly reassemble his absurdly expensive Sub-Zero fridge, JVL's excited plans to buy a custom home arcade cabinet for his son "G-Money," and Mike's bizarre discovery that his son's new Scholastic paperback of Louis Sachar's Holes had sixteen random pages from an unrelated children's book bound into the middle of it, which spins into a JVL digression on book-printing errors and collectibility. They close with a box-office rundown covering Predator: Badlands, Wicked for Good, Zootopia 2, and the bloated three-hour-plus runtime of the next Avatar sequel.
From the show notes
Fridge talk! Arcade talk! Book printing talk! Stalker talk! We've got ALL the talks!
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00On your marks, get set, kill him. I'll be back. Only in a rerun. Go!
Mike00:00:23Welcome to the Sub-Beacon Podcast. I'm your co-host, Mike Warren. Joining me, as always, are my two co-hosts who are some crack stalkers out there, Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Join us over at Sub-Beacon.com to hear new episodes every Friday. Tell your friends and family if they want to listen to this show, they've got to do it at Sub-Beacon.com. Say hello to us on Instagram and say hello in the comments on Sub-Beacon.com. We're going to be talking about The Running Man, the original Running Man, later on in the show. But first, Sonny Bunch, what is happening in your life?
Sonny00:01:04Not much. Very briefly, I just want to say, you know, so I talk about my fridge on this show. I feel like I talk about my fridge too much on this show. You've got like the dream fridge, but it is a great house of the barbie. It's a great it's a great fridge. The people who put it in before me, it was very funny when we moved in the lady next door at the time she has since moved was like, how do you like that fridge? And it's like, the fridge is legendary in the neighborhood. But but it's it's really nice. And I did I did like a full kitchen nightmares style breakdown and cleaning of it this week just because it was it was it was like there was there were there were some like little mold spots, whatever. I was like, I got to get rid of all this. But it's great. It like breaks down. It's like very modular. You can take everything out and like break it all down. And even the like the shelves themselves kind of come apart. You can take apart. But it was but but as as I was going to put it all back together, I realized I was doing it wrong and I could not figure out how to get it back. I couldn't figure out how to get all of the shelves back in the spaces they were in before. It was like I was failing an IQ test. I was like, I literally just took this thing apart for six years. I have lived here and it has been exactly the same. And something is different and I can't figure out what and I can't figure out how to fix it. And eventually I just made the best of it by changing things around further and getting like so it has one of these like it has like it has like a pull out crisper drawer at the bottom. Right. Which is like kind of that's that's kind of built in. You can't do much about that. You can't change that around very much. But then like all the other shelves are, you know, through and there's like a cheese and deli meats like wire mesh drawer that you can pull out. And eventually I just like I got to the point where I was like, I'm going to put this here because this is slightly more convenient from where I used to have it, because now now I like don't have to bend down. I can just I just pull it out right there. And and I made I made the best of it. But I swear to God, every time I open the fridge now, I'm like. Where did you go? Where did it's going to drive me and say it will drive me insane until the motor burns out on this thing and I have to replace it with another twenty five thousand dollar fridge or whatever this thing cost when it when it was put in. It's like it's
Mike00:03:26like one of those it's like one of those puzzles where, you know, like we have one of them just like sitting around in our house where it's like a it's like a wooden block and it can only go. It's like three wooden pieces and they only fit together into the right shape. Yes. If you if you perfectly place it and like I've taken it apart and put it back together a million times and I'm often like, wait, how do I put this back together again? Yeah, that's exactly how I feel. It's
Sonny00:03:51exactly how I feel about this. I feel like you would I feel like you would actually love this fridge. I feel like you would have a lot of you would get considering how much joy you get out of your your your washing machine, your dishwasher. I feel like you would you would really but and I would never. Here's the thing. I would never in a million years have bought this for my house. I would never would never have even considered it. It would not have been on the sheet of options that uh my kitchen remodeler would have brought to me because he knows I would not spend a not 20 20,000 but it was it's like a 15,000 dollar fridge. It's like some insane some insane amount of money. He just he would know that I would not spend that amount of money on this but I do kind of it is kind of amazing. It gets real cold real fast. This sounds like the kind of purchase we've
JVL00:04:43talked about these before where things that are obscenely expensive and you think okay well they're but they are worth a lot right like having had it you you might say I would never spend 15,000 dollars on this fridge but you might spend 10 right like like if somebody said is it worth 9,000 dollars I think you'd probably say yes it is right yeah I mean it's it it's in that it is
Sonny00:05:11it is like it is honest it's very it's very nice is is the problem it is it really is the rich and once you have it once you have it you can't go back and forth.
Mike00:05:18Once you have it you can't go back.
JVL00:05:20Can't go back. Like Jerry can't go back to steerage. Right.
Sonny00:05:23Well that's that that's the real problem though I mean like I like it is it is a genuine I do like dread the day that the motor burns out on this thing because like I don't know what I don't know what we're gonna do Frank I guess you just buy a new motor for it I don't know I like
Mike00:05:37honestly don't know what the what the what the but then you have to do the cost cost analysis right like how much is that motor can you get another if if you can get another like 10 years out of it out of this refrigerator or more for like half of what you'd spend to
JVL00:05:55buy is this a custom install or is this an off-the-shelf high-end brand well it's sub-zero
Sonny00:06:02so it's not it's not they didn't they did not make this like I don't think sub-zero like fashioned this in their factory to fit in this space I assume that there is a I assume there's like a it's a model but it's definitely it's a weird size. It's like it's not that deep like I've owned deeper fridges than this one. It's it is it's it's and it's like it's like flush against the wall like right where the right where the double oven is that's right next to it you know like it's it's it is I I can't imagine it is actually custom in the sense of like a one a one shot deal but it's definitely like built for a specific space.
JVL00:06:47Yeah.
Sonny00:06:47Does that make sense?
JVL00:06:48You don't want depth right real luxury in a cooling product is width not depth because you don't want to be reaching deep back into the thing you want all the things right in front of you.
Sonny00:06:59You want things in front of you not you don't you don't want like a walk-in.
Mike00:07:03And you want to show that you have the width right you have the space because. No you don't need to show it to people you know it's there. Well okay fair enough fair enough.
Sonny00:07:12You just want people to marvel at it when they when they happen to come to your house like oh that old thing.
Mike00:07:18Well I'm sorry this is going to bother you for the rest of this refrigerator's life Sonny but I don't know it's that's good content I guess JVL yes speaking of you you've got an update for us if I'm correct about speaking of big purchases and and that we have to be
JVL00:07:37careful because I'm pretty sure my wife has stopped listening to the show altogether and and that's good that's good yes I so the thing and we talked about the arcade the home arcade last week I'm just going to very very quickly two things happened first I found that there is a guy in New Jersey who makes these at the very high end and the fact that he is local to me so I am G money and I are going to actually go to his workshop on Sunday afternoon and get a demo so we're going to be able to see the thing and lay hands on it and make all of our decisions is a big deal he one of his policies is if you live within 200 miles of him he'll do the delivery and set up of the thing himself so that you don't have any like oh what goes where what I like it just you know turnkey and and I just decided I'm I've been having a lot of feelings about flash leaving for college next year and I just thought what am I going to pinch pennies over making memories with my kids while I still have them I have nine years left G money that's it just nine years he's the one kid in the family who really likes video games video games kind of a thing we do we go to retro arcades together all the time we could play gauntlet in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games and Mortal Common all that shit Marvel versus Capcom time crisis we're gonna be able to play all that stuff to our hearts content in our house all the time he'll be able to have his friends over and be like oh you know we gotta go over to his house he's the one who's got the crazy. arcade game right what you're gonna you're gonna try and nickel and dime yourself out
Mike00:09:22of this amazing experience JVL it pays for itself what you've just described that is you you are getting so much more out of it I'm totally on board I'm totally on board
Sonny00:09:33with this can I can we go can we rewind just one second because you you you mentioned you mentioned setup which I had envisioned this thing as just kind of like a they just roll it in and you plug it in but it does he have to like.
JVL00:09:47Assemble it there no no no so it's it's fully built out but the setup includes you gotta put it on your wireless network right and because the whole thing is run by a PC right okay and so you just gotta make sure that the the computer is up and running he'll actually give me a tutorial on how to run the operating system because the the big box which is the the name of the emulator program has its own OS uh and so you gotta be able to favor because again there's gonna be like thirty five thousand games on this thing and that is too clunky to navigate all the time what you want to do is set up a favorites folder for it right and uh and it's also it's gonna have the LCD uh uh marquee to it so that it is gives you like the full animation marquee of whatever game you're
Mike00:10:37playing on the marquee i mean yeah you you want the the white glove service uh when it
JVL00:10:42comes to it comes to this huh i mean it just it just seems like it makes sense
Mike00:10:47right perfect right don't think about it anymore jonathan yeah don't think about it
JVL00:10:51and he's done the only question is whether or not it's possible for him to deliver by christmas and i'm pretty sure the answer is no to that i think it's like a two to three month wait so but this will be g monies and my christmas present to the family get him
Mike00:11:05get him to take a picture of the build and put that in the box and i sent you guys pictures
JVL00:11:11of what i think he might like to put on the side because he and i are going to choose
Mike00:11:15the arcade art ourselves he would like right this is your episode this is what he would like this is nothing to do with what you would like to to look at pretty wild isn't it but i don't even know how to
Sonny00:11:26describe that i mean i i've played all these games i know i know what's i know what's going on and in the the costume uh the physics of various things you know they call it boob
JVL00:11:40physics is that what you call it jiggle physics jiggle physics the jiggle physics of the dead or alive series uh no i actually think that g money is going to select a star wars themed rap just because he loves star wars and that's that's great because also this thing will have the original star wars like the vector graphics you know what i'm talking about right oh yes yeah it'll have a flight stick to control for that star oh god that's gonna be great that's gonna
Sonny00:12:07be great jvl i support it flight stick yeah you can get a flight stick too so you get
JVL00:12:12it with again so the console is enormous and so you get it with four players but there's also a trackball in case you want to play trackball games like centipede and you can get you get a four-way joystick by our golden tea right you can do a four-way joystick as well for people who are really into verisimilitude for ms pacman games because the four-way joysticks perform differently than eight-way joysticks on pacman yep and you can get a flight stick for all of the kinds of games require a flight stick and
Mike00:12:46the original star wars is one of those it's all on the cabinet together it's not you're
JVL00:12:50not switching them out as you need them it's all there and there's so much space on the cabinet you just shift to the you shift to the position that you it's kind of like the
Mike00:13:00wide refrigerator you know it's all right there for you i gotta say i am i'm a little
Sonny00:13:04bit disappointed by this aspect of it because i'm imagining i want i want one of these it's like a lazy susan where you re you wheel the the console control panel around so it's only showing if i'm playing uh golden t i only want a trackball nothing else nothing else
Mike00:13:22nothing else on the or if i'm playing the one that like flips you know where it like
Sonny00:13:28flips on that access if i'm playing the four man x-men arcade game i want to be able to wheel around all four joysticks yeah you know but i don't want i don't want to have that trackpad there frankly that's uh that's a little bit gauche i want you know is this
JVL00:13:46a thing you can do can you i mean i'll ask we're gonna be in the we're gonna be in the i mean i assume for enough money he'll do whatever you want exactly you should ask
Sonny00:13:53you should you should what's how do i hide the controllers i don't want to use at any
Mike00:13:58given point this is good that's what i've got all right um so i'll just share uh something that i've never experienced before and i don't even know i don't quite know what where the discussion will go after this it just it just seems like an odd thing that i experienced and it made me realize despite being spending my entire career sort of in the publishing world writ large um that i don't actually understand how books are put together um so we're sitting uh the other day in the evening the the youngest one is down uh for the night and the older two are doing their thing and my oldest is sitting in the living room with with my wife and i reading a book and i'm overjoyed because it's a chapter book it's holes by lewis sacker if you guys are familiar with sure classic um so it's it's not a comic book or a comic adjacent book it's it's a it's a real chapter book comic books are real books i know i know i know i know we point is it's it's like the kind of book that i've been hoping he was like super into it like all these other distractions in the sort of evening time before bedtime that could have pulled him away and he's just engrossed in this book so we're sitting on the couch talking he's sitting in a chair reading and all of a sudden it kind of interrupts us uh as we're as we're having a conversation it says something's wrong with the book it's like what he's like there's another book in here like all of a sudden there's another book and it's there's no more of the book that i'm reading and there's another one and i'm like what what are you talking about and i'm thinking lewis sacker he he wrote i remember reading holes at some point but like i was a little past it when it came out age-wise but i remember lewis sacker's other books the sideways stories wayside school books there's always kind of he always kind of played around with the form and i was like well maybe there's some there's something going on that he's like not picking up can just get a binding error so i take a look at the book page 90 is holes i'm looking at page 90 okay there's holes and he says see look on the other side page 91 you know the next physical page it still says page 91 the font is different the spacing is different and the story is different it is from a completely unrelated book and i'm flipping through is this a new copy it is a so it is a new copy we purchased it from you guys will know the uh godforsaken scholastic book club just like it's like the net it's like imagine if the book fair never ended you know
Sonny00:16:51oh wait i don't know what this wait what is the scholastic book club
Mike00:16:56this is different from the book fair it's but it's related it's basically the the flyer that
Sonny00:17:01they send home yep oh yeah yeah you can send away no no yep yep oh yeah and so we're all i love that as a kid i love that i mean like look there's new goosebumps mom and dad i need to read the new
Mike00:17:15goosebumps every month every month rl stein um yeah it's it's a total racket anyway so um this came from that and so i'm i'm i'm looking through it and there are 16 pages from a completely different unrelated book and then when you get to uh what is that that would have been page 106 the it it starts back up with with holes again but interestingly it starts at page 106 of holes so they're like literally there are 60 it's just a it's a it's a error but it got me thinking like how does something like this happen what like how is it and i realized i didn't understand how books are actually put together in a mass way and um how how could an error like
Sonny00:18:02this happen anybody have any ideas or just marvel at the jbl you have more experience with books than i do what's your what's your i have a guess but what's these things happen all the time
JVL00:18:15they happen in all binding mediums whether they are magazines comic books or books the lower you go on the scale of publisher the higher the error rate because the less quality control there is and so something being published by uh oxford press it's unlikely to have an error like this something being churned out by scholastic gonna have a lot of these errors
Mike00:18:45hold on jvl i have to stop you right there are you saying scholastic is not a high quality
JVL00:18:49printing i mean they're basically publishing on newsprint right i mean this is the paper they're using is basically newsprint and not not current modern newsprint news in like 1970s newsprint 100 percent uh and and so you're gonna have periods where uh the collation being done because right pages are printed and collated and then bound and they're bound with glue and there's zero stitching going on at the level of scholastic right uh you're gonna get you're gonna get errors like this sometimes you'll get uh cases where the pages are inserted upside down i've seen that right that that's the thing that happens sometimes you'll get them where the pages are cropped wrong so the chop has happened where the you know the paper should have been chopped here and here but it was chopped there and there and then you're missing part of it so i will do two things first of all keep this book because printing errors are historically the single most collectible thing in the worlds of collectibles now i don't know that holes is ever going to have a market for this but in comic books or stamps or baseball cards you get an error people want that so it's
Mike00:20:04so funny by the way i don't mean to interrupt you jvl but it's so funny you mentioned that because my son's first thought was who maybe i can sell this uh because it's a smart he had the same thought and i was like i was like i don't know if a cheap paperback version
Sonny00:20:19of holes is gonna go put it in a polymer bag immediately no gotta send it off to cgc jesus
Mike00:20:26christ what are you even doing anyway the second thing you were you were saying jvl the second
JVL00:20:31thing is if you are interested in book binding there is a piece in the new yorker like 15 years ago about the guy who binds robert carrow's books just search for it it's this guy who like who was basically semi-retired and was just waiting to publish the final volume of carrow's last book which was lbj was it the lbj yeah it was the second or third book in his lbj and uh it's just a fascinating look into the world of actual book binding and book publishing and how that works and the difference between like rough edge you know so page leaves whether they're rough or smooth or whatever um if you just go to barnes and noble and poke around there are a lot of interesting things happening with actual book publishing right now where the people are doing cool stuff with not just the dust jackets but with the actual fit the cloth covers on them and the bindings and the leaves right yeah yeah
Mike00:21:36and it's really it's very cool yeah i i've come across a little bit of this in my very my tip you know dipping my toe into the waters of sort of book collection and and sort of high quality which which is more just sort of like i'm observing it from afar i have too many other things going on and not enough money to like get into it because you could you could really sink a lot of money into that into that uh that collecting uh hobby but it's you know all of the things about you know the uh what is it called when they've got the sort of um the the gold on the outside of the leaf of the pages right that gold leaf gold leaf i guess is what it is yeah so um it's it's all kind of interesting or the plates you know the plates for like illustrations and things um so uh anyway sonny do you did you have a theory on on on on this that no i mean
Sonny00:22:29that's just that jbl is right i mean these things just happen because it's a cheap publisher and the pages just slip in there i mean the only other thing it could possibly be is that somebody put like uploaded the wrong file to the printing press with like a random chapter
Mike00:22:43inserted but what was so what was so odd about it is it was it it was literally in the middle of a chapter in the middle of a scene and it was the same pages just from a different book right it just it just fascinated me that like what what what would be the actual like what is the error itself that led to that and i understand that's like unanswerable
Sonny00:23:04but bottom line millions of sheets flying around these cheap printing presses with nobody
JVL00:23:09overseeing them i mean that's just where where was this where's the book printed was
Mike00:23:13it printed here or in china i i i haven't looked at that that's a good question i would assume it's printed overseas so um again it's cheap it came maybe maybe not a lot of books
JVL00:23:25are printed here in america like you'd be you'd be shocked if you go to barn barns and noble most of the books there are are going to be printed in america because shipping
Sonny00:23:36books is expensive like that's true yeah like you they're heavy because of volume well i
JVL00:23:41mean when you're shipping books you're shipping them containers and so it's not really the weight it's the volume yeah yeah and books do get kind of big you know for for i would say their volume to uh to cost is reasonably high right that's what shipping is all about right the volume of a car is also quite large but a car is valuable right books are cheap so correct so all right anyway uh so i will we've sent
Mike00:24:10off to to get a another copy but i did it was it was also heartbreaking too because like as i said he was really into it and like it he got cut off at like in the middle of a of a scene as he said a really exciting thing was happening and i kind of want to be like don't don't lose that excitement and interest in this
JVL00:24:29book is the author still alive uh yeah lewis sacker's alive you want to find him on like twitter or facebook and just reach out to him with a picture of that and like just as a sort of like hey my kid was freaked out when he got here and and found somebody else's book in
Sonny00:24:49the middle of your book i bet it would tickle him did you find did you find what other book it is
JVL00:24:54did you like search for it yes i did lady chatterley's lover it was uh it was another
Mike00:25:01kid's book it was um so uh well we can debate whether to keep this in uh it was a um it was a very recently published children's uh focus chapter book about a young man in um an urban city who was fighting against gentrification and it was published in like 2019 and just that sounds seemed very of that moment and of that time and uh yeah uh anyway so it just it it just fascinated again it wasn't like it was from another lewis sacker book yeah or another book of the same time period or same type it was just something completely different so anyway uh shall we move on i think we shall uh box office predator badlands we talked about the original predator movie last week on the show predator badlands number one at the box office 40 million dollars making some money this is a disney movie i guess i didn't realize that um
Sonny00:26:07well it's it's 20th century 20th century which is owned by disney now right right right um so uh
Mike00:26:12i guess a nice little haul but but maybe disappointed i have no i have no idea what
Sonny00:26:1740 million 40 million is a good number for this it's like that it was one it's either the highest or second highest opening after alien versus predator i forget um uh so it's it's a good number it you know it was pg-13 which helped it was not it's not r-rated it also just helped that there has not been fuck all in theaters for like a month oh yeah really like since tron aries i guess um uh so like they're they're just hasn't there hasn't been much in theaters but like you know 40 40 million dollars good number it's a good number for this series good number for this movie this i don't think it was super expensive i think this cost about 90 to 100 million dollars so like that's uh that's a that's a solid open uh and it it it uh it it proves the faith in the um in the series that was kind of rekindled after the movie prey was right there were a lot of people at the time when prey came out they were like oh why isn't this in theaters this is so good it should be in theaters and i just looked at i looked at them i'm like you if you put this movie in theaters it it might be good i didn't like it as much as all the other critics whatever that's neither here nor there um the movie might be good but it will bomb because the last movie the last predator movie was very bad which was people that was the shame black no it was the predator yeah the predator the shame black one that movie was very very bad and people will
JVL00:27:38this movie because it's shame black like you shame
Mike00:27:42yeah well it was just he was there at the beginning how could it be bad he was he was
Sonny00:27:47in the original it was let me tell you it was a terrible movie um so uh anyway i if they had put prey in theaters it would have bombed and it would have killed the series instead they put it on hulu where it did fine um and then this movie comes out and this movie is the reward for making prey which again is considered to be a good movie um it does it does well at the box office you got to be smart about these things you got you got to remember that the audience only remembers the last film in the series whatever happens to your that's why mission impossible is the lowest grossing movie in that series because it came after mission impossible 2 which was bad which was like famously terribly bad it took my theory is great it took like two or three entries for the series to get back on track after that so
Mike00:28:32um all right well any other box office thoughts we got again it's it's besides let's see we've got well the running man coming out this weekend the the remake or or whatever we've got uh wicked for good wicked for good is going to be coming out
Sonny00:28:47wicked for good is going to put up put up enormous enormous numbers so and then and i still think i still think zootopia 2 will do very well as well i think zootopia 2 is because zootopia 2 will be the first family movie yeah in like six months yeah i like i i genuinely can't like since before i guess elio maybe and nobody went to go see elio i don't know yeah um so uh i guess since i guess like really since the live action lilo and stitch i'd say this is gonna be the first first big anyway i think that movie is going to do pretty well uh i think that'll be that'll be that'll do big numbers and i think wicked will do big numbers avatar 3 i did you see the runtime for avatar 3 came out no three hours and 15 minutes baby three hours 195 minutes in pandora
Mike00:29:33we're going back to pandora for a whole day well the irony the irony of that runtime is that is also length of time that people who see it will be thinking about it afterward
Sonny00:29:45yeah and then completely forget about it i have hi yo hi oh i i uh i was always fairly bullish on avatar 2 that was a movie that i thought was going to do well um despite a lot of naysaying like there were a lot of people who were like oh no nobody cares about the original avatar but i think avatar 3 might do very poorly in relation to the other avatar movie when i say it's gonna i like if i say it's going to bomb i what i mean is it'll gross 800 million worldwide instead of 1.5 or 1.8 billion dollars worldwide it's a relative bomb i think i think it'll do like 300 million domestic and 500 million overseas or something like that but that is that would be a disappointing number for this series i i just get the sense i get the sense that people are kind of over at this time i don't know but uh but a lot of people were saying about about the last one and they were all wrong so maybe i'm just wrong this time
Mike00:30:41by the way by the way uh a quick it's not even a correction but just we were talking about family movies um because i was thinking about what family movies haven't come out um the one that has come out since lilo and stitch is uh how to train your dragon um oh yeah and that did all right yeah no it's it's the number seven on the on the on the year uh number seven movies so i am i'm
Sonny00:31:02totally have you guys watched any of those movies have you seen any of the how to train your dragon
JVL00:31:06movies yes do your kids love them my kids like the first one fine
Sonny00:31:11yeah but nothing nothing after that my kids my kids never got into them so i have never gotten into them i like you know it's never it's never i've i've seen zero of them but it's it's big for universal that it's a big part of their theme park experience that's right that's right so all
Mike00:31:29right well uh that's the box office and we're talking as i mentioned we're talking in light of the fact that a remake of the running man is out this weekend in theaters we want to watch the running man and it just happens that it came out the same year and has the same star as the movie we talked about last week the running man starting arnold schwarzenegger from 1987 sonny bunch give us a big boy review of this 39 year old movie the the running i almost called it the
Sonny00:32:01terminal man the running man is um so last last week we talked about predator last week we talked about predator which is another arnold schwarzenegger late eighties arnold schwarzenegger peak of his peak as like pure action star um movie and and i argue that predator is a perfect movie and i the running man is a very good example of a movie that is not a perfect movie is still kind of entertaining is still kind of but it's it it has none of the charm or skill or quality that sets a movie like predator apart from the pack so terminal man or terminal man i keep calling it fucking terminal man i don't know why the running man is um the running man is a pretty straightforward story uh arnold schwarzenegger is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit he gets put into a uh squid game style um uh live murder show and reveals that the government has been lying to everybody blah blah and and and it's all fine it's everything in this movie is is fine um it's got some good performances especially by richard dawkins dawson richard richard dawson sorry richard i'm terrible with names today richard dawson uh of the of the family feud plays the the um the host of the show and he's he's amusing uh arnold schwarzenegger is arnold schwarzenegger but i want to say again like a step a step weaker than in predator he's not playing to his strengths here quite the same way um maria canchita alonzo is is fine in this she's fine uh jesse ventura is like jesse ventura is the best part of this movie in a weird way for me like i find him so amusing as the like puffed up uh uh gladiator guy you know but everything about this movie just looks kind of cheap and chintzy the action is all very like shoot a guy shooting then shoot a guy falling it's very much like cut on the cut on the action and then cut to the result of the action which is boring it's just boring to watch particularly in the early going all of the stuff in the actual arena is again kind of cheap and chintzy and fake um it looks like a movie that was made for no money uh which i don't think this was really it just looks that way um i don't know i i like this so much less now than i did watching it on cable as a kid it's what it's i'm having like weird reverse nostalgia where i like i remember this being better than it is and i don't think it works really very much at all this time around i don't know am i am i jbl you're making a lot of faces over there i want to i want to hear your hard disagree wow i disagree okay go on let's get into it here's
JVL00:35:10what i will agree on is that had this been directed by john mctiernan it would be another level up yeah but it's a great movie and it's a great movie in spite of the sort of amateurish direction to it and uh so i did two things i i watched it but i also went and reread the book oh yeah actually i think i only just i don't think i reread it i had there was a time in my life where i had read every stephen king book but i hadn't done the richard bachman books
Mike00:35:46which there are like what five or six of them they're originally four there's seven total
JVL00:35:51now yeah um but this was a this was the first richard bachman book i think maybe not the first richard bachman book i don't think it was and i i hadn't read it before and here's the thing that i find interesting the running man book is fantastic this movie is fantastic and the two of them share almost nothing yeah the the the they share the nub of a premise yeah but even that nub of a premise is very very like like it's only the most basic elements of the premise which is that there is a tv show and on the tv show there is a guy who is being hunted and that's it that's then the end of
Sonny00:36:39of the similarities between them just quick quick fact check uh uh rage came out in 1977 the long walk 79 road work 81 the running man 1982 those are the gotcha okay so um so
JVL00:36:56when the i first saw that edgar wright was remaking this i thought to myself what the hell is he doing like this this is why do you remake a great movie like this and having read the the book this week i know exactly why he's doing it which is that i believe that edgar wright is making the book he's making the book yeah and that has never been done on film before it's good and did you
Sonny00:37:19make did you read the whole book jbl you read the whole you read the whole thing all the
JVL00:37:22way to the end yeah he's gonna do the ending i do not think he's gonna do the ending i was gonna say that i think that there is no way in hell edgar wright is gonna end he's gonna end it uh sort of kiss kiss bang bang style is my guess yeah i mean should we should
Mike00:37:37we should clarify right i mean without do it do we
Sonny00:37:39want to tell people i i'm no we shouldn't we shouldn't actually i don't want to spoil
JVL00:37:42the ending of the book okay all right well let me just let me just set up the premise though so in the difference is in the movie the arnold schwarzenegger movie the running man is a tv show in which convicts are sent into an enclosed arena to be hunted down by superheroes and these superheroes are essentially american gladiators two years before american gladiators comes to television they are giant muscle men with cool names like nitro and sub-zero and electro and laser blazer taser right balmy blazer and uh and buzzsaw buzzsaw not chainsaw buzzsaw right and uh and and so they they have to hunt to get out and this is richards benjamin richards in the movie is an military officer who refuses to do uh a massacre and so is arrested and sent into it to be killed um the book wildly different in the book the running man is a game in which people volunteer to go on because the world is in a sort of post-apocalyptic meltdown for reasons we aren't told most people are kept incredibly poor and desperate and when you go on the running man you are there's no game floor there's no you just you leave the studio you get a 12 hour head start and your job is to just stay alive and you get $100 for every hour you stay alive and if you can stay alive for 30 days you get $1,000,000,000 and it follows a character who shares the same name but he is why he is married happily he is basically Holden Caulfield meets MacGyver so he is a a guy who is antisocial and he hates phonies but is like good with his hands and knows a little bit about how to build stuff he volunteers to go on the show because he wants to get enough money to buy medicine for his sick kid and the there are no superhero there's no electro hunting him instead the novel the running man is basically him doing a lot of cloak and dagger disguises trying to stay hidden and stay secret stay off the grid etcetera etcetera while he also is slowly uncovering the reality about how that society is being run and why and what not and it is two action movies as did either of you ever read day of the jackal no no so day the jackal which is a a seventies fascination thriller right the idea is it's about a guy who is going to kill the president of france he's hired to kill the president of france and uh in the movie version is an action movie and the book has about two minutes of action in the last fifty pages and everything else is about uh getting false identification and figuring out how to slip through i mean the spy stuff it's all spy craft and that's kind of what the running man the book is it's a lot of spy craft and it's really good and it's really interesting and of course it's written unbelievably well because stephen king is a brilliant writer like i mean just there are just phrases on every page that you're like man that's really good well it's
Sonny00:41:29also it's also the absolute peak of his powers from like that like you know late late seventies early eighties stretch where he is just banging things out.
JVL00:41:38so good anyway but but this is the movie that i believe edgar wright has made yeah yeah
Sonny00:41:43totally no one hundred percent that's what that's what all the trailers are yeah it is
JVL00:41:46fascinating to me to have two very successful versions of a story which are kind of tied together but really owe very little to each other and uh i don't know i i was tickled by all that i love the schwarzenegger one i love everything about it i love the fact that jessie ventura's character is kind of sad in the way that like listening to phil sims doing color commentary on fox was always sad you know it's just this mook who's kind of there by accident who's just trying to you know trying to eke out a few more dollars and uh you know is constantly kind of being humiliated by the real the real stars and uh you know the richard dawson performance in this is one of the great villain performances ever and again the verisimilitude here of what he's doing is just stunning yeah like it it's an amazing performance because he's kind of playing himself but he's really playing the the family feud version of himself but he's playing the family feud version of himself if the family feud version of himself was a psychopath and his whole richard dawson story is fantastic he's british british yep he runs off and joins the merchant marine at like age 14 you know like he just he just has one of those lives he contains multitudes yeah and you know when he musters out of the merchant marine after the war he becomes a comedian and he's doing like vaudeville and stand-up and stuff like that and then he finds himself yeah but he's on the jack benny show he's on the jack benny show and uh and then he winds up on hogan's heroes and hogan's heroes sort of makes him more in the mainstream way but he never does a ton of acting and then just winds up as part of america's cultural furniture because he hosts this fourth-rate game show family feud and it i don't like i don't even know what to say like it's it's amazing and i think of killian damon killian as a genre-defining villain and that he he is an archetype yeah which is so fully fleshed out. and so completely realized on screen that i find it hard to look at real-life game show hosts and not suspect that they are all secretly damon killian's with the exception of ken
Mike00:44:20jennings well you know and it's also it sets up as you say an archetype like there is no hunger games without oh yeah this without this performance right like this is all comes i think from from that and um no it's it's terrific uh it's amazing.
JVL00:44:37Michael do you do you did you love this going in was this your first time uh it's like it's
Mike00:44:43like one of these movies that i think i've seen bits and pieces of on cable but had never watched the whole thing sat through the whole thing so um i was i was game for it like you know i know this the source material and and so i was i was eager you know and again it's like predator there are so many great things to appreciate it for on an arnold movie level right like this is like sort of if you separate out everything else like arnold is is being is is that his most arnold um at this time because that's what he that's what he was
JVL00:45:16i'll be back was this his first i'll be back no no because the first one was in terminator
Mike00:45:20terminator oh yeah so that was in fact that was the one arnold line that kind of rang hollow for i was like oh i kind of rolled my eyes like oh they're they're trying to make fetch happen you know they're trying to make that uh but they did they did make it happen uh yeah i mean i much prefer the one right where he's like you know because i'm going to grab this camera and and you better prepare you i can't remember the the line you know because i'm going to uh prepare yourself for my fist because i'm going to wrap it into your stomach you know sort of thing where he's like screaming at the camera and richard dawson it's like so over the top and terrific i love it um but yeah arnold is kind of that he has those moments but there is so it is not the i agree with sonny that predator is a uh it's like a better movie for all kinds of reasons and it uses arnold better than this movie does um this is a little cartoonish uh use of yeah even though i love it yeah this is closer
Sonny00:46:22so i i've always been a little colder on commando than most and this is a little this is a little closer to commando for me but it's also but it's also not as good as commando i like i honestly as i was watching the movie the other night i i kept thinking to myself do i just not like the clothes he's wearing in this movie constantly constantly i was thinking this like it was you know in the leotard thing or whatever there's like there's like the gag where he's dressed up in the you know hawaiian outfit whatever yeah and like he looks ridiculous there but then like the leotard and and even his even his um even his like military uniform early on i was just like there was something about him was just off in this movie and i couldn't i could not put my finger on what it was and i settled on eventually like i just don't like his clothes i don't like his clothes in this movie he's dressed all wrong for arnold wardrobe and i think that might be it could be i will say there is a
JVL00:47:14funny thing having now knowing what we know about his romantic predilections oh yeah i had this having in the same year his leading ladies both be young nubile mexican ladies
Mike00:47:29i think dude's got a type i think i by the way i think i think maria conchita alonso
JVL00:47:36is uh venezuelan but um oh i didn't realize that so um i take it back then but she's is
Mike00:47:42this her no no i think there's something to it uh is this her first movie or kind of her first break i mean i don't know if she had much more but it just um she's she's still
Sonny00:47:53in movies right like she's had a good career but in terms of like this is like a i don't know anyway this is definitely i think this is her breakout a long career as well breakout
Mike00:48:02yeah yeah um she looks great in this movie um i love i love crazy afficato like he is so yeah he's so good he's so good and um but brown is so good jim brown honestly i want a more jim brown frankly i i was i was hoping for more and he
Sonny00:48:19kind of that whole thing is kind of disappointing once again not to not to be too shallow and and but like when i saw jim brown i'd forgotten i i remembered that jim brown was in it but i forgot that he looks nothing like jim brown with the like with the afro with like the white yes hair and like again the the outfit which again is the kind of american gladiator thing that they have going on there it's supposed to look kind of ridiculous i just like didn't like how he looked he didn't look like jim brown like i was like i i was i was i don't know i that something about it just
Mike00:48:50rubbed me the wrong way you don't like the clothes in this movie i think really don't like the clothes in this movie so i wonder what i've settled on it does feel and and maybe i'm giving it too much credit to suggest that it could be intentional but like it looks like tv um more than a movie does and that's for sure and that's like a tv movie yeah and so that could be
Sonny00:49:12what's going on it looks like it was made for 12 and it was not made it looks like it was made for it looks like it was made for 25 million dollars and 18 of that went directly into arnold schwarzenegger's
Mike00:49:22pocket yeah is what is what it looks like maybe that's what happened um okay so a couple of other random thoughts um so the satire of this is pretty fun i mean it's so ridiculous and over the top but it'll like oh yeah yeah this is there's something there's something very flash yes yes flash was
JVL00:49:43flash was just like holy shit this is our world yeah yeah pretty much but like yeah especially
Mike00:49:48the because uh uh melissa and i were watching it together and it was like the um the the fact that it's like all old ladies you know in in it's like all old people like in the audience in the studio audience who are just like there's something so funny about having these like you know these being like cheering on uh you know the death of these people and um and and sort of in being so in love with richard dawson's character but and also like when they when when they kind of turns right when what when what's her name's like uh you know uh ben richards as one uh impressive motherfucker or whatever she says like that is just it's all great it's so impression and spot on and i loved it um one question i had is is this the first instance of a of having a future post-apocalyptic or or sort of futuristic uh you know dystopian movie where a rock star plays a plays an unknown it's mick fleetwood right it's mick fleetwood playing mick right like he's playing himself which i always when i saw it and like saw him and like they they call him mick i'm like oh it reminded me of the the tom petty character in in the postman remember where it's like where like they come across him and it's like tom petty and he's like i was a singer once a long time ago and you're like oh i guess that's really tom petty he's playing himself uh like i don't know maybe that's never happened i i did not even
Sonny00:51:23know this was a trope i didn't you maybe it's not a trope i didn't i didn't realize that was mick fleetwood i didn't i didn't actually have any idea that was mick fleetwood yeah and then
Mike00:51:30the other guy is dweezil zappa the who's like the little like mousy you know guy running around um read the credits sonny i know you're probably scrolling on your phone as you were watching this
Sonny00:51:39but it's in the credits i'm watching on my tv the credits are the size of a of a you know postage
Mike00:51:45stamp no it's the beginning the opening credits it says also mick fleetwood and dweezil zappa
JVL00:51:49did you like the uh like the very eight bit like aesthetic of the logo like the opening
Sonny00:51:58yes title what it looks like it looks like the terminator
Mike00:52:01font correct i had the same thought it looks like turning oh the other thing i was and this is not about the movie specifically but i was kind of curious when at what point did schwarzenegger across the top of the one sheet like when did that become uh when did that become a thing because predator's poster is like that and the running man's poster is like that and i think the running man might be the first one i don't think it's like that in commando but i could be wrong um but it's just it just it's it it's such a i mean it's we could talk we've talked about like why schwarzenegger is such a movie star but like the name itself and like the just the power of that name in giant capital letters over his face
Sonny00:52:45and at the top of the poster was it on the was it the same way on the terminator post i don't think so i do not think it was maybe they added that later i think that's i think that's a later and
Mike00:52:55it's it's definitely there in t2 right t2 yeah yeah but i think in the terminator if i'm looking oh yeah that might be a oh it says it's on there but
Sonny00:53:05yeah i think it is i think i i want to say but he was not a big star when terminator came out he was not he was not a huge star but he like is that poster he is the totally anyway so um i'm trying
Mike00:53:21to think that i had any other thoughts on this i i just enjoyed it oh favorite stalker um my favorite stalker might be well it's definitely not uh dynamo um the one who tries to rape the opera yeah it's i hate that i did not like that he grossed me out here's the one thing isn't dynamo okay
Sonny00:53:42why is he trying to rape a woman it's uh rape is about power not sex um the uh the the uh can i just say just on a on a on a on a nitpicking level if i can please let's pick some nits so they they go into the arena right the the they go into the arena and they go down in the arena and they're and after they're in the arena the audience picks the first stalker to come for them and it's it's the skating man sub-zero sub-zero but the professor toru tanaka but but how what what if but they're in i guess my i guess my question is what if they had picked a non-ice skating uh person to come stalk the the people wouldn't they just be slipping around on the ice
JVL00:54:34or was this all rigged they go rigged well i think the ice is a very very small section
Mike00:54:42so they're sort of they're they're sort of guided into that part once the that's what i have the bigger okay so but this does raise a bigger issue which is the geography of this movie is so this is like i could not wrap my head around it like i it was it jumped out to me as i was watching i was like where where are they and why is like l.a.
Sonny00:55:04like the ruins of los angeles but i mean i mean the geography but the geography uh and the
Mike00:55:11geographic logic of the movie itself is confusing right it's like it's like there's this arena but they're also outside because the slide like sends them right that sends them into the into the arena area but they got to go inside the arena but then they're outside of it when they're being chased by the two and then and then like when when they are when they're sort of like stumbling around and then he realizes he gets pulled in by the resistance fighters which is like connected to the arena so it's like it makes no sense no no that that is always that has always confused me
JVL00:55:46400 square blocks underground only part of the 400 square blocks are underground okay all right
Mike00:55:52well it's just in the movie it doesn't make sense um all right final thought real quick uh love seeing kurt fuller as like the unctuous uh producer guy um he's terrific um any other final
JVL00:56:04thoughts on the running man jesse ventura is fantastic i don't know we said another short today but it's another jesse ventura yeah and such a he's got such an interesting voice like jesse's voice is just really good and this is why actually i his biggest impact in wrestling was as a commentator like his his career in in the ring was reasonably short because he got hurt but uh
Mike00:56:30but that's sort of that's sort of like voice where he's sort of talking uh authoritatively and and he he enunciates like very well and it's yeah and it's got like a
JVL00:56:40there's a there's like an echo in like it it's just interesting sounds to listen to so i would say this um one thing that i found interesting about the politics of the novel is that the real bad guys aren't even really the elites the real bad guys are the middle class the the runners right so in in in the book you have the the world is divided into basically the waste which are all the people you know living in shanties the proles the the proles and that's like 70 percent of the country and maybe 75 percent of the country and then you've got these elites at the very very tippy top like the top five percent who are running the corporations and everything you've got like 20 percent of the country who is just like they have real jobs you know they're policemen and doctors and uh they don't live super luxury but they live very well and they are the ones who have the the biggest bloodlust they're the ones who are watching the show and who are informing because part of the the part of the the trick is that the running man in the book the they give bounties to anybody who who cites him and calls him in gets a hundred dollars and uh the the people who are always turning him in are the middle are middle class people those are the ones who really are desperate
Mike00:58:17for to watch people die which is which is really the most we may disagree on this the most unrealistic part of that story it's like that it would just be this like small 20 like america's too big we got our middle class is way too big like it makes no sense that that would be
JVL00:58:33where we end up but well i mean the our middle class is too big as it as it is the the future they're imagining that's what i mean one of which the middle class has been destroyed right that's
Mike00:58:46it but it's just to get from there to there okay anyway but um all right well uh that is very interesting the the bloodlust of the of the regular folks um richard dawson a little bit
JVL00:58:56of a radical by the way oh that's funny yeah he uh like marched in selma he i think volunteered
Mike00:59:03for the mcgovern campaign in 72 oh by the way by the way like i said contains multitudes i don't remember if he ever did this on family feud but the thing he does where he sticks the two he does like the poly walnuts he sticks his index and pinky finger out and and and keeps his middle and ring finger kind of and then he like uh tucked into his palm and he points with that it's like such a small detail but i freaking love it's like it's an amazing it's such a great performance yeah so good so um all right well i think that is all the time we're going to give to this episode join us over at sub beacon tell your friends and family if they want to listen to this show they got to do it at sub beacon.com once again say hello to us on instagram and we will talk to you next time
Sonny00:59:51no time for outtakes sorry sure it's fine
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