REALITY television is the new black, the new rock'n'roll, the new 24:7 viewing pleasure heaven, but what might happen when we decide that watching the sexual interplay of 15-minute celebrities is last year's thing. Where will 'reality' spread next: from lust to bloodlust?

That moment might not be too far away judging by Series 7: The Contenders, the outrageous Daniel Minahan satire that puts the surreality into reality TV and the bullets into Big Brother to lampoon dumb 21st century viewing tastes.

Writer-director Minahan comes up with the ultimate TV game show: The Contenders, in which six contestants are selected by lottery to compete till death do them part, each being given a gun and the permanent attention of a personal cameraman. This game of Kill or Be Killed is television with a shoot-to-kill, shoot-to-thrill policy, television with the highest viewing figures in America.

Reigning champion in series number seven is white-trash Dawn (Brooke Smith), heavily pregnant, seriously out of sorts with life: a grim but not dim reaper sent back to her hick home town. Her new opponents range from a yuppie teenage beauty with pushy parents to a God-fearing nurse and her former high-school sweetheart, pacifist Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), whose number is already up on account of testicular cancer.

Series 7: The Contenders has been called the Blair Witch Project of 2001, an easy and obvious selling tag brought about by its anarchic pretence to truth and its use of hand-held cameras (a filming technique also favoured by reality TV makers).

Yet unlike Blair Witch, it is not the film that is scary so much as its implications: given the loathing and revulsion that passes as entertainment on The Jerry Springer Show, finite fun with a gun is surely on its way to a screen near you.

Minahan's satirical tone is mocking; the six contenders are too cartoon in character for their deaths to be in any way tragic but that is all part of the director's game. Each final curtain, brutish and nasty as it might be, has the numbing effect of 'shoot'em up' computer games. His message? We are beyond redemption, frankly.