To help promote the upcoming Gerard Butler gaming action-thriller Gamer, we've put together a retrospective of the best Human Pawns movies, where man is used against his will for the motives and entertainment of others. There's no formula for survival in the game, but winning is the only chance they'll have of getting out alive.
Running Man
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, an ex-soldier wrongly imprisoned in 2019 for killing scores of innocent people at a food riot. He's given a choice: he can spend his life doing hard time, or be a competitor on "the most popular show in the whole, wide world" - The Running Man. Richards agrees to compete, and is subsequently thrown into a nightmarish game zone where he's hunted by Stalkers, an assortment of cartoonishly menacing adversaries Ben must survive to win the game. First there's Subzero, dressed as a hockey goalie, complete with a hockey stick-shaped sword.
Then there's Buzzsaw, a motorbike rider with, well, a buzzsaw; Dynamo, an opera singer with an electric shock blaster and electric car, and Fireball, a jetpack-wearing, flamethrower-sporting mercenary. The game is anything but for Richards, who faces a near-impossible challenge of survival - as well as proving his innocence.
Predator
This one-liner goldmine spawned a million catch phrases ("Get to the chopper!," "I aint got time to bleed," etc.), and introduced us to a new breed of alien. Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is dropped with an elite special forces team into the deep Latin American jungles on a covert mission to rescue another group of U.S. forces, but quickly find themselves hunted by an extra-terrestrial being far bigger and badder than any of the meathead military boys in the jungle. Everyone they were sent to rescue has been killed in gruesome, inexplicable fashion, and soon Dutch's classic team of brutes are picked off one by one by a perfectly camouflaged hunter in their midst. With everyone else dead, Dutch must use his wits and sheer willpower to keep from falling victim to the Predator, "get to the choppa" and become the governor of California.
