The Experiment opens with scenes of various animals engaged in alpha male battles for superiority, some other animals killing others that are less strong, and humans engaged in acts of degradation and abuse of others. The message seems clear: men are no different to animals, and it is the natural order of things for prison guards to brutally assert their power over prisoners. We soon learn that this natural order involves things such as guards urinating on prisoners, demanding sex from them, and finding justification to deny an ill prisoner access to life-preserving medication. (more…)
Posted on February 25th, 2012 at 10:03 pm. Updated on February 25th, 2012 at 10:03 pm.
It’s forty-odd years since I’m Going to Get You… was released. Maybe it was brave and ground-breaking in its day by virtue of its depiction of homosexuality and corruption in prisons. But my guess is that it was a tawdry, poorly-made film back in the 70s… and it remains so today. (more…)
Posted on December 28th, 2011 at 10:20 pm. Updated on December 28th, 2011 at 10:20 pm.
OK. So it’s a tad unlikely (even if, in a case of life almost imitating art, a similar rehab program was introduced in a Canadian prison not so long after Chaindance was released). But perhaps its implausibility shouldn’t matter. Trouble is, it does. (more…)
Posted on October 27th, 2011 at 9:31 pm. Updated on August 4th, 2013 at 10:54 pm.
If you think you could have seen this movie before, you’re probably right. Even if you haven’t. (more…)
Posted on September 28th, 2011 at 7:24 pm. Updated on September 28th, 2011 at 9:52 pm.
One presumes that potboiler title was designed to drag scandal-seeking customers through the theatre doors. My guess is that the story’s creator, Joan Henry, would have seen only irony in it. (more…)
Posted on August 16th, 2011 at 10:13 pm. Updated on August 16th, 2011 at 10:20 pm.
“They exploded the ugliest riot in prison history to cover their dangerous, desperate break for freedom.” So says the film’s tag-line. But it’s nonsense. This is the prison riot you have when you’re not having a prison riot. (more…)
Posted on August 3rd, 2011 at 9:30 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2011 at 9:30 pm.
This bears about as much connection to Chinese Midnight Express (1997) as that movie bears to the original Midnight Express (1978). Like CME I, however, it is supposed to be set in the 1960s. Not that there is anything really of the sixties about it (other than one prisoner with a short-lived Beatle haircut), but it does allow the filmmakers to pretend that this depicts the treatment of prisoners in the bad old days, rather than risk incurring the Government’s wrath by suggesting that any nastiness could still occur in the more enlightened nineties. (more…)
Posted on June 16th, 2011 at 10:27 pm. Updated on March 9th, 2016 at 3:07 pm.
When a movie about a brutal juvenile detention camp is made by Walt Disney Pictures, you know two things: it’s not going to be too brutal, and it’s probably going to end happily. (more…)
Posted on June 12th, 2011 at 8:30 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2011 at 8:30 pm.
Whoever decided to give this film the English-audience title of Chinese Midnight Express would seem not to have seen the original Midnight Express (1978). For starters, this flick features a Chinese national – bunged up not in some awful foreign jail, but in a Chinese prison. What’s more, he’s an innocent Chinese national in a Chinese prison, and an innocent Chinese national who doesn’t catch the Midnight Express (that is, escape). In fact, no-one escapes, or even tries. It’s a bit bewildering. (more…)
Posted on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:02 pm. Updated on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:18 pm.
Burke Wyatt (Johnny Messner) used to be a cop before he got a little rough with a child abuser. Now driving trucks and no longer living with his wife, he is recruited by his ex-partner, now with the FBI, to go undercover at California’s Cainesville State Prison, where there have been a lot of unexplained deaths. In prison he is soon drafted into no-holds-barred fights (shown live on the internet) where the prisoners are sometimes so badly beaten they die. He gets badly hurt himself. That could explain the deaths, then. “Got some leads,” he says in a smuggled message back to the FBI. “Need more time.” No doubt he was a good cop, just not the sharpest. (more…)
Posted on March 28th, 2011 at 8:41 pm. Updated on March 28th, 2011 at 8:41 pm.