It s running man (with Arnold Schwarzenegger) as a realistic pseudo doku, 17 years before running man .A TV show offers 1 million if you survive 1 week and make it to the studio checkpoint, while being hunted by 3 killers.It s basically a mix of a roman gladiator game and the seek of fame an wealth of TV shows.Often copied but never been made as good as the original.It s made like a TV show of that time, being so realistic for some pll. watching it phoned the broadcaster for joining the next show or "i hate it" calls. (greetings from "war of the worlds" radio broadcast.fun comment: one of the killers is a German comedian, who played the role of a killer really well if you see his other acting.

This is definitely a great made-for-TV film and much has been made how realistic it was. So realistic that it fooled some people into believing it was a real show as opposed to a movie. I think it is an excellent movie, there is just one problem: the style is very movie-like (the camera for most of the time is "invisible" for the actors). It is explained that many camera teams are filming/recording/transmitting all the time to cover the events. But there are many scenes like when the "victim" is in a house under fire, the camera operator would be in danger of being shot and the camera angles are "cinema" -like, not anything like documentary footage. the same when the "victim" decides to fool the taxi central station by changing his mind where he wants to go. Where is the car with the camera team and why does the "victim" behave as if he wasn't filmed even though we see close-ups of him all the time and a freeze-frame of this exact footage in the main studio of the program as if it was transmitted video footage? A lot of contradictions here. Might have been fine back in 1970 where people didn't ask that many questions..... Just my humble input. Still a German TV classic and I am glad it has been aired a few times again recently after decades.

The fiction seems to be perfect: Millions of TV-watchers experience the hunting of Bernhard Lotz, who as a candidate for a TV-Show is hunted seven days by a professional team of killers. Lotz is running to save his life - if he manages to survive the seven days he'll get one million DeutschMarks. What sounds like one of those cheap SciFi - Productions is produced in very realistic style. The airplay was 1970 - and some people could not decide whether it's fiction or reality. Some called the TV-Stations and complained about it, some asked to be the next candidate and some even asked if they could join the team of killers. The Author of this tv-drama has seen the future in a very realistic way: The breaks for tasteless advertising in the show, the boss of the private television station who does everything to boost the ratings, the talking about very intimate things with people on air etc. Nowadays people do the craziest things in those so called "reality shows" to get some money even do without their personal freedom and numerous human rights. Everything in this film which was fiction that time has become quite common today except of killing people - this makes the movie much more than one of those Hollywood stories, it's a document of time...

*** Contains spoilers ***This movie aired on the 8th of july for the first time after 32 years (license problems made it impossible for the tv-stations to broadcast it ). I wasn't born when the movie premiered in 1970, but I heard a lot good things about it in the past five years, so my expectations for this movie were high and I wasn't disappointed after watching it... the movie was bombastic. The movie caused a scandal in 1970, because many people took the happenings shown in the movie for real (a bit like "war of the worlds" without the mass-panic).The story:The fictional commercial TV-station (important: there was no commercial Television until the mid-80s in Germany) broadcasts the highly popular game show "Das Millionenspiel", in this show a contestant is left alone somewhere in the country and he has to arrive the studio in which the show is filmed in seven days, while he's trying to reach the studio, he is hunted by three killers, if he survives the seven days (and the showdown in the studio), he recieves one million in money.We see the last hours of the contestants run to the studio (great acting by Jörg Pleva), while he is hunted by the three killers and filmed on every ocassion. In the meanwhile the show is aired and the host (played by the real television host Dieter Thomas Heck) narrates the happenings. We also can catch glimpses from the backstage, but in the whole everything is made up to look like a real game show (the host has various chit chats with people from the audience, people that supported the contestant, musical numbers, a tv-ballet [something that was usual in german tv until the late 80s, may this never come back] and even commercials). With some help by kind people and some tricks from the directors of the show, the contestant reaches the studio where it comes to the showdown of the show. His last task is to run through "the spiral of death", the killers have their last chance to kill him at this moment. He survives and wins the money, but is injured and has a heavy shock. The show comes to an end, but the contestant for the next show is already introduced.What makes this movie so good?Well, its the great acting, the great script and the look and feel of the whole "show", as i mentioned earlier some people took this show serious, so that the WDR (the station that produced and broadcasted the movie) recieved a lot of hate-mail, many letters from people who actually wanted to be a contestant on that show, and also one letter from a guy who wanted to be one of the killers. The whole movie is very 70-ish in its style, but this helps to build up a creepy atmosphere.And yes, there are a lot of similiarities to "The running man", since both movies were inspired by the same book written by Robert Sheckley (well, "the running man" was actually based on a book by stephen king, but this book was inspired by Sheckley's book), and I personally like both movies, but "Das Millionenspiel" is far superior to "the running man" since it depicts a vision of the "future" of television, and if you look closer, the vision which is close to the reality of the present.I hope this movie will be released on video and DVD soon, and hopefully also outside Germany.Thanks for reading, and pardon my bad english.