Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Also known as ‘The Other Side of Love‘, this starts like so many uninspired B-grade films about innocent men or women in prison, but it rallies to say a few fresh things about the toll that imprisonment takes on prisoners’ families left on the outside. (more…)
Posted on June 12th, 2010 at 10:25 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2010 at 10:25 pm.
“It was a dreary day when Roger Manners saw the gates of the prison open. Gates that were to close and deprive him of a world of free men. And here he was to become familiar with the clang of pails against steel doors, the smell of disinfectant in the cell blocks, and mark the time of night by the cries of the watchmen calling the hours.” So narrates the actor Warden of the Nevada State Penitentiary in Carson City, where the film was shot. Sententious rubbish, really. (more…)
Posted on June 12th, 2010 at 3:57 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2010 at 3:57 pm.
I was ready for this movie to be a bit dorky, a bit ’80s, a bit made-for-TV. What I wasn’t prepared for, having watched it and wondered why so many of the plot lines just seemed to evaporate, was to find that it wasn’t made as a film at all. It turns out to be bits of a 1984 TV series (of which there were only two or three episodes), cobbled together in 2002 into a single, slightly dorky, ’80s, made-for-DVD movie. (more…)
Posted on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm. Updated on June 6th, 2010 at 4:57 pm.
Comparisons with the powerful Scum are both inevitable and justified, with the writers of that bleak 1979 movie following up here with a companion piece on a female borstal. It’s a little less critical of the system; the staff, for a start, are much less brutal and much less complicit in perpetuating the rule of brutality within the detainee group. But it’s still an uncomfortable viewing experience. (more…)
Posted on May 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm. Updated on May 30th, 2010 at 8:15 pm.
This is an exploitation movie, of a different kind. 1930s-style. (more…)
Posted on May 30th, 2010 at 8:06 pm. Updated on May 30th, 2010 at 8:06 pm.
This is a pretty faithful remake of the 1932 film of the same name. It is better, but you wonder a bit why they bothered to do it all again. (more…)
Posted on May 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 pm. Updated on May 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 pm.
Up the River is a low-key comedy drama starring Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy very early in their careers. An early talkie directed by John Ford, it was apparently going to be a drama until The Big House (1930) beat it to the punch.. so it was rewritten as a comedy. (more…)
Posted on May 22nd, 2010 at 5:24 pm. Updated on June 21st, 2012 at 8:52 pm.
Also known as ‘Maximum Revenge‘. Now, I’m not fond of action movies, as you may have noticed, but it’s hard to imagine that an action movie could get any worse than this. The best that can be said for it is that it is so awful and so absurd that it is mildly amusing. (more…)
Posted on May 15th, 2010 at 9:58 pm. Updated on August 11th, 2013 at 11:59 am.
I’d like to say that this provides some rare insight into prison life. I’d also like to be able to run 10km. (more…)
Posted on May 15th, 2010 at 9:58 pm. Updated on May 15th, 2010 at 9:58 pm.
Unspeakable necessarily invites comparison with Silence of the Lambs (1991) given that both involve a psychopathic serial killer playing mind games with a pretty woman who wants to get inside his head. None of the comparisons are flattering to this one – which has a speakable mediocrity. (more…)
Posted on May 8th, 2010 at 11:21 pm. Updated on May 9th, 2010 at 11:02 pm.