I think nearly everyone has seen the YouTube clips of the dancers from the Philippines’ Cebu Provincial Detention & Rehabilitation Center. Because of those clips I expected this film – which I knew had been based around the prison’s stunning dance-based reforms – to be essentially a dance film… with a few dramatic threads attempting to hold it together. I couldn’t have been more wrong; to its credit (and no doubt its commercial disadvantage), it’s a prison drama with just a few dance routines woven into it. (more…)
Posted on November 15th, 2015 at 5:11 pm. Updated on November 15th, 2015 at 5:11 pm.
Roundwood Prison’s Warden, Samantha Brandtt (Diane Neal) has a lot going for her. She is smart, attractive, compassionate, forthright, tough, an exceptional prison administrator and a highly skilled hand-to-hand combatant. But her 16-year-old daughter Kit (Jodelle Ferland) resents her success and blames her job for the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Oh, and her staff are almost uniformly corruptible and cognitively deficient. (more…)
Posted on November 8th, 2015 at 3:34 pm. Updated on November 8th, 2015 at 3:36 pm.
I haven’t previously had much luck with Nollywood or Ghallywood offerings; their prison-themed films seem to me to be shot almost entirely in people’s living rooms. But this is a bona fide prison movie, set in Sierra Leone, accessible on YouTube, and is one that ensures you get your money’s worth: it is a traditional new fish in prison movie which morphs into a Fight Club movie and ends up as an escape movie. And even pauses at one point for a sweet song which includes the lyric, “When I kill is bad but I found pleasure doing it” before urging the listener to stay out of trouble. (more…)
Posted on October 31st, 2015 at 8:11 pm. Updated on May 7th, 2023 at 1:06 pm.
Not the TV series, exactly, but what was (until they announced a new season to run in 2016) the final feature-length Prison Break episode, which is supposed to stand on its own and be like a condensed fifth season. It’s a little tricky for me; I watched the first series, enjoyed it, but immediately lost interest once it went into a second, third and fourth season. There are consequently a few gaps in my understanding of what happened in-between, which Mr Google has since been kind enough to attempt to fill. (more…)
Posted on October 18th, 2015 at 3:41 pm. Updated on October 18th, 2015 at 3:48 pm.
I feel for Dean Cain. I’m sure he wants to play serious prison roles, but in Dogboys (1998) he got to play an ex-Marine fighting killer prison dogs, and in New Alcatraz (2001) he had to play a palaeontologist fighting a giant prehistoric prison snake. Here he gets to play an ex-cop fighting a killer prison giant. (more…)
Posted on September 28th, 2015 at 9:47 pm. Updated on September 28th, 2015 at 9:49 pm.
How different can an American Spanish-language film be from its near-identical English-language counterpart, when essentially the only difference is that Spanish-speaking actors are substituted for English ones? Quite a bit, really. (more…)
Posted on September 23rd, 2015 at 9:56 pm. Updated on September 23rd, 2015 at 9:56 pm.
Some films are remakes of originals. But from the pre-subtitles era, this French-language version of the classic The Big House (1930) is not just a remake, but the same film, shot-for-shot, with French actors substituted for American. Well, not exactly shot-for-shot; in one of the last scenes, John Morgan (Charles Boyer) has his right arm in a sling, while in the American version (and, for that matter, the Spanish-language version, El Presidio), it’s on his left. Mind you, in the very final scene (taken straight from the original US version) Morgan’s sling has dramatically switched sides. I’m not sure which side is preferred in the German version, Menschen hinter Gittern.
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Posted on September 19th, 2015 at 10:07 pm. Updated on September 23rd, 2015 at 10:07 pm.
Translating as ‘Let’s blame it on Judas’, or simply ‘Blame Judas’, and also shown in the US as ‘Freedom’, this is a surprising musical comedy. Not that it’s a traditional ‘musical comedy’ – it simply has lots of music and is gently comedic – but its real distinctiveness lies in its grappling with issues of religion and salvation and the character of Jesus… hardly traditional prison movie themes. (more…)
Posted on September 14th, 2015 at 9:17 pm. Updated on September 14th, 2015 at 9:40 pm.
“You haven’t grown up on our streets and dealt with our pain,” sneers one prisoner when the prison counsellor challenges his class about dealing with conflict other than by violence. “You just don’t get it,” says another. “Who really just doesn’t get it?” snaps the counsellor, and storms out of the class. It’s the sort of low budget movie where you brace yourself for the whole wall wobbling when he slams the door on the way out. (more…)
Posted on August 28th, 2015 at 10:34 pm. Updated on August 28th, 2015 at 10:34 pm.
The murder of 19-year-old Zahid Mubarek at London’s Feltham Young Offender Institution on 21 March 2000 posed some large, uncomfortable questions. The first-time offender from a Pakistani family was bludgeoned with a table leg wielded by 20-year-old Robert Stewart, a violent racist who had been placed in his cell some six weeks earlier. Whether it was deliberate, malicious act to place the two young men together, and why the prison failed to separate them despite many warning signs and as many as 15 opportunities to do so, became the focus of a belated official inquiry. Mubarek had been serving a 90-day sentence for the theft of £6 worth of razor blades, and had been due to be released just hours after he was attacked. He died in hospital a week later. We are Monster retells that story, largely from the perspective of the disturbed Stewart.
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Posted on August 9th, 2015 at 8:32 pm. Updated on August 9th, 2015 at 8:32 pm.