Prison stuff. In prison movies.
The Koreans seem to specialise in tear-jerking prison films featuring children and executions. Well, this one and Harmony (2010); it’s not a big field, admittedly. (more…)
Posted on August 13th, 2013 at 10:47 pm. Updated on August 13th, 2013 at 10:47 pm.
If you were a reporter who had gone undercover to expose brutality on in a chain gang, do you think that you’d be at all keen for your editor to publish stories and photos – that can only have come from you – while you’re still working in the prison? Not hugely keen, one suspects. (more…)
Posted on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:01 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:23 pm.
Back in 2006 this was released as a movie on DVD. It had been Hugh Jackman’s first major screen role a decade or more earlier, and the marketers were no doubt looking to cash in on his X-Men fame. Yet it’s not a movie at all, but rather the unedited (and conveniently feature-length) first episode of the Correlli TV series, masquerading as something else. (more…)
Posted on July 29th, 2013 at 11:03 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2013 at 8:47 pm.
I know I’ve said that I’m not interested in sci-fi prison movies… yet here is another one. My excuse? I was on holidays and it came up on my TV. I didn’t seek it out; it came to me. And when it did, it came as a kind of updated remake of Escape from New York (1981), which I hadn’t been expecting. (more…)
Posted on July 21st, 2013 at 10:48 pm. Updated on July 21st, 2013 at 10:52 pm.
Also known by the unfortunately dumbed-down title of ‘Concrete Hell‘, this is a nicely-crafted movie that traces the inexorable corruption of a newcomer to prison. It suggests that for her, and for others, there is no escaping being dragged into the brutality of prison life. And that to the uninitiated, prison is a vastly different world, operating under its own rules. At the film’s close, as the newcomer, Allison Campbell (Nicky Guadagni), finally elects to go into 23-hour lockdown in protective custody – the only way she can avoid either becoming inextricably entrenched in the queen bee’s criminal network, or being bashed or stabbed – she wryly reflects on the life ‘in a bubble’ that will be hers for the remainder of her sentence. “Listen, what are you complaining about?” a guard reproves. “It was your choice.” “Was it?” says Allison. And that’s clearly the question that we are ultimately asked to answer ourselves. (more…)
Posted on July 16th, 2013 at 9:38 pm. Updated on July 16th, 2013 at 9:38 pm.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is just another exploitative Women-in-Prison movie. And it probably is. But it duped me, somehow, into thinking it might be something more. (more…)
Posted on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm. Updated on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm.
The Korean title for this movie translates literally, and somewhat ironically, as ‘Our Happy Time’. While it is principally about two hurting people healing each other, it also serves – with South Korea in the midst of a moratorium on the execution of prisoners on death row – as a powerful argument against capital punishment: a common theme in South Korean movies at around this time. (more…)
Posted on June 30th, 2013 at 10:38 pm. Updated on June 30th, 2013 at 10:38 pm.
It’s one thing to make a film with a few of your mates on a budget of a couple of hundred dollars. It’s another thing entirely to inflict it upon the broader public. (more…)
Posted on June 16th, 2013 at 2:36 pm. Updated on August 11th, 2013 at 12:07 pm.
There have been prisoners in unwelcoming foreign jails before – in Russia (In Hell, 2003), Thailand (Brokedown Palace, 1999), Mexico (Get the Gringo, 2012), Morocco (Hell in Tangier, 2006), and of course Turkey (Midnight Express, 1978), amongst others. And now we have a well-to-do young American battling a corrupt justice system while languishing in the El Sexto Prison in Lima, Peru – the site of several real-life riots in the early ’80s (including one in 1981 in which 27 prisoners died in a gang-related fight, and one in 1984 in which 24 prisoners died) before it was closed in 1986. It’s based on the true story of Monty Fisher, who wrote the script. (more…)
Posted on June 9th, 2013 at 9:48 pm. Updated on June 16th, 2013 at 2:39 pm.
The film’s title translates as ‘God bless you my son – St Martha Acatitla Prison’. It ought not be confused with Bless You, Prison (2002); though both are bleak and revel in the harshness of prison life, this one doesn’t offer much hope of a way out. (more…)
Posted on May 26th, 2013 at 7:27 pm. Updated on June 2nd, 2013 at 12:23 pm.