Robert Sheckley is a great sci-fi writer whose short stories are witty and absorbing.Yves Boisset was definitely not the kind of director who could do him justice.

Yves Boisset could succeed in treating committed subjects (the Algeria war in "RAS" or racism in "Dupont -Lajoie".But in "le Prix du Danger" ,he's shooting us a line!The lead is an unambitious actor,Gérard Lanvin,who has made turkeys by the dozen (only "une Semaine de Vacances" and "Une étrange Affaire" are above average in his filmography)He is here no more than Van Damme and co.Michel Piccoli and Marie-France Pisier are supposed to provide the movie with an intellectual alibi,but their cardboard characters and their underwritten parts do not help.

A faux pas: there were many of them in Boisset's eighties' career.

This unjustly forgotten film combines sharp social satire, very black comedy, and some terrific action footage; it's a lot like a French version of Arnie's "The Running Man" - an earlier, better version. Michel Piccoli has a ball with an atypical (for him) comedic role that allows him to explore his showmanship and parody that mix of charisma and vacuity that characterizes most TV-show presenters. Will what this movie portrays as a fictional scenario (a TV game show where people get hunted and killed for real, with their own consent, for a huge money prize) ever happen in reality? I firmly believe that the question is not "if" but "when". *** out of 4.

Prize of Peril (1983) is a real good movie. It's about a unemployed family man who's tired of being poor and wants to give his family a taste of the good life. So he signs up to become a contestant on the hottest show on television,"The Prize of Peril". After the board of directors on the television show decide that he's the one for the job and is slated to run the gauntlet live on T.V. He has to survive for a few hours running a specially designated route from an unknown location in the middle of the city back to the television studio. All the while he's being filmed and followed by a television camera crew. Five hunters are chosen out of thousands of applicants to chase and terminate the runner. Will he win the "Prize of Peril"? Watch it and find out!

A few years later Hollywood decided to remake it as the Running Man. The producers of that film decided not to read the Stephen King book and took only a couple of the characters names from that novel and mixed it with this film. It's a real hoot to see how much the Producers of the Running Man took from this French film. Their are scenes from this movie that are exactly the same as in the Running Man. They even have a final confrontation between contestant and host as in said picture. I encourage you as a movie buff to go out and seek a copy of this film on video.

It may be dubbed and the picture quality is not that great but it's a fun and exciting film. I highly recommend it.