The Running Man is truly the weirdest Stephen King adaptation of them all. It has explosions, dune-buggy-riding villains, and is packed with Arnold Schwarzenegger quips. In other words, The Running Man is an action movie that celebrates its own cheesiness, which is a far departure from King’s considerably bleaker novel.
The Running Man came out in 1987, the same year Predator was released. Both films star Arnold Schwartzenegger in the wake of his rising success as an action star. The difference between the two is that while Predator is a serious film, The Running Man is campy and over-the-top. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, and it’s part of the cult appeal of the film today, it’s strange that director Paul Michael Glaser would make such a campy movie out of King’s serious and desolately dystopian source material, especially when Schwartzenegger is quite capable of playing a more somber role.
King’s novel, The Running Man, was originally published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman in 1982. At the time, Richard Bachman was an experiment of King’s to see if he could still find success with a different name, and the Bachman books are some of King’s darker and purposely un-cheesy stories. King saw Bachman as something of a nihilist and the story in The Running Man book fits this model perfectly. Nevertheless, when the movie was filmed in 1987, it was made to be flashy and almost cartoonish. Gone was the gritty realism and bleak world view, replaced instead with some very weird things.
Why Stephen King’s The Running Man Is So Weird
Even without Stephen King’s name attached to it, The Running Man is a weird movie. It features Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, an innocent man convicted of a crime who becomes a contestant in a futuristic gladiator-style game show. Richards can win his freedom by defeating a host of comic-book-like bad guys. It feels like a B-rate Mortal Kombat movie, rather than a bleak look at a dystopian future. In the book, Richards is a scrawny and desperate father who agrees to enter The Running Man contest as the last resort to get medicine for his sick daughter. In the movie, he is athletic, muscle-man Schwarzenegger, pretty much the polar opposite of the character from the book.
What makes The Running Man movie truly weird, however, is that the whole thing is televised like some sort of game show. The host of the show, Damon Killian, could just as well be hosting Family Feud. He smiles and reacts dramatically every time Richards is nearly incinerated or chopped in half. On top of that, the “stalkers” who are going after Richards are costumed and have names like Dynamo, Fireball, and Captain Freedom. In the book, the contestants are all regular citizens trying to make some money by killing each other, rather than characters out of a video game.
The Running Man’s Weird Love Interest
Another thing that makes The Running Man movie weird is the inclusion of a romantic element to the story. Since it is more of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie than anything else, Arnold needed a love interest. He finds her in the form of Amber Mendez (María Conchita Alonso), a woman who discovers that the games are often faked and the contestants are always killed. She is sent into the game zone to die, where she pairs up with Richards to take on all of the stalkers. Together, they defeat everyone who is thrown at them and then take on the game’s host, revealing the truth to the people. Amber, of course, does not exist in the book and was included in the movie to add a romantic element. Overall, it’s very 80s, and completely ignores the dark realism of the book.
Where Stephen King’s book emphasizes the mundanity of the games, the movie turns the entire affair into a gleefully cheesy action movie. Of all of the many Stephen King adaptations that have been made over the years, The Running Man is truly the weirdest.
