To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to this movie. At all. A young rapper from a drug-infested ghetto in Washington DC goes to jail. I’m not a fan of hip-hop, and I’m not a big fan of gangsta angst in prison movies. And then there’s the film’s tag: Slam – All in Line for a Slice of Devil Pie. What?! But it’s much better than all that. It’s a powerful story which refuses to accept that it should be the lot of so many young African Americans to finish up in jail, sending a message similar to the one American Me (1992) gave about gang life destroying the potential of young Hispanic kids in LA. (more…)
Posted on January 10th, 2010 at 10:02 pm. Updated on March 25th, 2016 at 6:56 pm.
This is a Women-in-Prison exploitation movie with a twist: the prison’s exploitation of the women is greater than the filmmakers’. That said, the filmmakers are not entirely innocent; they commit quite a few crimes of their own. (more…)
Posted on January 2nd, 2010 at 8:46 pm. Updated on January 10th, 2010 at 10:11 pm.
This has been referred to as India’s answer to The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and you can sort of see why. Both feature an innocent man in jail, denied justice, and both Andy Dufresne in Shawshank and Parag Dixit in this movie are detached outsiders in the prison environment. But that’s about where the similarity ends. While Andy calmly and patiently plays the game, Parag is intense, humourless, and in a perpetual seethe at the injustice of it all. (more…)
Posted on December 27th, 2009 at 8:03 pm. Updated on January 2nd, 2010 at 11:26 am.
Based on a true story, this follows Peter Madagin, an angry teenager who gets 5 years in an adult prison after a railway engineer dies in the train that he and his mates derail while mucking around, acting tough. It’s hard work empathising with him – so hard, in fact, that the film doesn’t work. Well, that’s just one of the reasons the film doesn’t work. (more…)
Posted on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm. Updated on December 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm.
If this is a satire of The Big House (1930), I’m afraid the satirical bits largely passed me by. Other than perhaps poking fun at an arsenal of weapons that suddenly appears in the hands of the prisoners in the final few scenes, I’m not sure that I saw much of a connection between these two prison-movie heavyweights. This was Laurel and Hardy’s first full length talking movie, and the first movie-length talkie prison comedy, by my reckoning. And better than their shorter silent prison films by quite a margin. (more…)
Posted on December 19th, 2009 at 9:50 pm. Updated on December 27th, 2009 at 8:38 pm.
This is a remake of The Criminal Code (1931) and Penitentiary (1938). Publicity at the time of its release proclaimed that it’s about ‘a convict’s love for a Warden’s daughter.’ It is that, but it’s much more about the criminal code and where a prisoner’s loyalties lie. And it does of pretty good job of it, too. (more…)
Posted on December 12th, 2009 at 7:46 pm. Updated on October 19th, 2013 at 6:06 pm.
There’s a lot to like about this film. It’s got a bit of a thriller element and has a some delightful, hard-bitten, scheming exchanges between the prisoners. But then it seems that the scriptwriters had a collective mental block and came up with an earthquake, of all things, as the means by which the main protagonists are able to effect an escape, even though one of them is already armed with a gun. Still, I suppose it’s more plausible than a meteorite landing on the prison, or invading martians whisking them away. (more…)
Posted on December 6th, 2009 at 4:37 pm. Updated on December 9th, 2009 at 10:29 pm.
Comedy duo Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey made more than 20 feature films together from 1929 to 1937. Like Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges (and the execrable Ernest in more recent times), it was inevitable, I suppose, that at some stage they would set one in a prison. But when one of the early critical scenes in Hold ‘Em Jail involves them being left completely alone in the Warden’s office for quite some time – until they are joined by the Warden’s daughter and sister for some serious flirting – you know that its heart is perhaps not in the prison at all. (more…)
Posted on November 28th, 2009 at 11:12 pm. Updated on December 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm.
Also known as ‘You Can’t Beat the Law‘. This is the point at which the treatment of prison reform issues in movies starts to get a bit out of hand. So progressive is the new reformist Warden in this flick that he makes a job offer to an exonerated prisoner even before he’s been released. Prisoner one day, prison guard the next. You may not be able to beat the law, but this shows you can certainly defeat prison logic. (more…)
Posted on November 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm. Updated on November 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm.
Fascinating prison, this. There’s this solid, imposing wall surrounding a maximum-security prison, around which – if I’ve got this right – there are acres and acres of Toronto forest and a scalable, razor-ribbon-topped fence. It’s a prison where prisoners escape over the 7 metre wall with ease, only to routinely get run down by highly trained attack dogs in the foresty bit. No wonder people start asking questions. (more…)
Posted on November 16th, 2009 at 9:49 pm. Updated on December 28th, 2010 at 6:59 pm.