Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Chattahoochee. Is it a prison for mentally ill prisoners, or psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane? It’s a fine line, but if you’re looking for a prison movie, it’s the latter, I’m afraid. (more…)
Posted on April 25th, 2017 at 5:32 pm. Updated on April 25th, 2017 at 5:32 pm.
Throughout this quintessentially English television play my mind kept oddly wandering back to that string of South Korean anti-capital punishment movies – like The Executioner (2009) and Harmony (2010) – often featuring kind, reformed, elderly prisoners who present no risk to the community, but who are still destined to be executed. Danny Lee (Tony Selby) is none of those things, but more like Lee Yong-gu in Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2013); an honest, loving and devoted family man, and also a gullible simpleton, around whom this appeal to the emotions in support of the abolition of capital punishment is wrapped after he too is sentenced to death. (more…)
Posted on April 16th, 2017 at 11:14 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2017 at 8:36 pm.
We know that this is a great, real-life story. But why the need to retell it? (more…)
Posted on March 11th, 2017 at 3:49 pm. Updated on March 11th, 2017 at 3:49 pm.
You might expect a range of helpful tips in a prison survival guide. In this slightly offbeat comedy-drama, it seems that there’s just one: buy your way out of trouble. (more…)
Posted on March 6th, 2017 at 4:40 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2017 at 4:40 pm.
That this follows on from my review of Strange Cargo (1940) is pure coincidence, I can assure you, but the two films’ themes are eerily similar. (more…)
Posted on February 28th, 2017 at 8:59 pm. Updated on February 28th, 2017 at 8:59 pm.
I’ve been dudded, I’m afraid. Nearly all the internet synopses of this film say things like, “a paroled ex-con tries to go straight and reform a brutal reform school, only to face a frame-up courtesy of the school’s corrupt warden.” But it’s not a reform school at all, but a place to which boys from reform school are paroled (and the ‘paroled ex-con’ is not on parole, and the frame-up is not chiefly the warden’s doing). Anyway, this has the dubious honour of having absolutely no prison in it at all, although when the uniformed guards use their batons against the residents, it does seem a little like a juvenile jail. Oh well.
Posted on February 4th, 2017 at 3:43 pm. Updated on February 4th, 2017 at 3:43 pm.
Also known as Dark Holiday, this film about an American woman in a Turkish prison invites inevitable comparisons with Midnight Express (1978). But it being about an American held in a Turkish prison is where the similarities begin and end. (more…)
Posted on January 22nd, 2017 at 2:41 pm. Updated on January 22nd, 2017 at 2:41 pm.
How many TV shows and movies have featured unorthodox police investigators being told to drop a case, yet the detective obstinately stays involved in spite of their superior’s instructions? That’s what happens here… but the investigator finishes up getting framed for the suspect’s murder. Which is perhaps not quite so orthodox. (more…)
Posted on January 1st, 2017 at 9:52 am. Updated on January 1st, 2017 at 9:52 am.
Who could forget the original Fortress (1992) and its magnificent intestinator? There’s nothing in this sequel to match it, sadly, although each prisoner does receive a new behaviour-modifying neural implant that also expropriates the optic nerve and allows ZED, the prison’s all-knowing computer, to relay each prisoner’s vision onto staff-monitored screens. Which is sort of handy. (more…)
Posted on December 27th, 2016 at 7:31 pm. Updated on January 1st, 2017 at 9:01 am.
This is a short (49-minute) but poignant portrait of a 16-year-old girl in a juvenile detention centre. Perhaps the first thing to note is that ‘vast’ in Dutch does not mean expansive, but rather ‘fixed’ or ‘set’; the film deals with her inability to break away from the things that have formed her – to deal with them and attempt to move on. (more…)
Posted on December 16th, 2016 at 8:12 pm. Updated on December 16th, 2016 at 8:12 pm.