Prison stuff. In prison movies.
There’s a slight edginess to Stefania’s story which sets it apart, but not very far apart, from your traditional 1930s prison melodrama. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 25th, 2009 at 10:29 pm. Updated on September 25th, 2009 at 10:44 pm.
Correctional Officer Dan Cappelli (James Russo) embarks on a sexual relationship with a prisoner, then helps her escape, and is later involved in a gun fight in which she dies. “It’s strange, ” he says. “I never got to know her. Still, I will never forget her.” But then, Dan, you’ve got a memory like an elephant! Most of us struggle to remember our own names, let alone women who’ve seduced us, dragged us into lives of crime and forced us to live as fugitives! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 19th, 2009 at 7:10 pm. Updated on September 27th, 2009 at 7:07 pm.
A remake of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing just eight years after that film’s release. Why? You might well ask. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 13th, 2009 at 8:11 pm. Updated on September 14th, 2009 at 8:35 pm.
It’s Québec, 1952. A Bishop is called to a prison to hear the confession of a dying prisoner, Simon. It’s someone the Bishop knew way back in 1912, when they were both teenagers. Once in the confessional, he gets locked in and forced to watch a re-enactment of the events leading up to Simon’s imprisonment forty years earlier. We realise then that Simon (it helps if you pronounce it in the French manner, See-mon), is less interested in making his confession than in hearing one. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 13th, 2009 at 12:31 am. Updated on October 12th, 2009 at 8:38 pm.
Convicts 4 what, exactly? Better scripts, perhaps. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 12th, 2009 at 1:06 am. Updated on September 12th, 2009 at 2:09 pm.
A film with a very strange moral centre. A young entrepreneur, Breckel, bribes prison bosses from around the world to give up their toughest Death Row inmates so that he can put ten of them (including two women) on an island and have them fight to the death, live in front of a paying internet audience. Well.. they were going to die anyway. When one of the women is raped on camera and another bloke is tortured before being killed, Breckel’s girlfriend and his chief technician start having misgivings and want to pull the plug on the more graphic bits. Like, they had no qualms about the concept of making a huge profit out of men and women killing each other on film, but this graphic violence is just plain wrong! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on September 5th, 2009 at 11:17 pm. Updated on February 11th, 2010 at 9:00 pm.
Crime lord Yves Perret (Jack Palance) is aggrieved at the success that unorthodox cops Ray Tango (Sylvester Stallone) and Gabriel Cash (Kurt Russell) have had in busting his drugs and arms dealing operations. He hatches an evil plan. Rather than have them knocked (which would clearly be the easiest option), he wants them framed, tried, jailed, and then killed in jail. Make sense? As much as the rest of the movie… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 30th, 2009 at 9:24 am. Updated on April 18th, 2020 at 1:21 pm.
I wonder if audiences in 1938 felt at all cheated, expecting to see a dramatic prison break and getting nothing of the sort. Well, that’s not entirely true; we do see an attempted escape, which our hero thwarts, and we learn much later that there has been a successful break. But those incidents are far from the main game. Perhaps Break is used here in the sense of an ‘interruption’ to or a ‘brief rest’ from civilian life. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm. Updated on March 11th, 2017 at 8:24 pm.
The blurb on the back of my DVD reads, “When a man is falsely convicted of the murder of his wife’s lover and ends up on death row, he develops intense relationships with three women.” It’s not a great movie, admittedly, and there is some detail in the plot to which you have to pay attention, but you’d hope that enough of the movie’s publicists would have stayed awake long enough to know that he was accused of killing his wife and then strung along four women romantically. His wife. Four women. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 27th, 2009 at 6:37 pm. Updated on March 7th, 2016 at 10:44 pm.
James Cagney as the ruthless, psychopathic gangster ‘Cody’ Jarrett holds this film noir classic together. He’s not your everyday, two-dimensional gangster. His third dimension comes principally in the shape of his pathological relationship with his fiercely protective Ma (Margaret Wycherly), whom Cody loves more than his vapid wife Verna (Virginia Mayo). More than anything, in fact. He’s also prone to crippling headaches and a deteriorating mental state which render him temporarily vunerable, but when his Ma is around she makes sure that his position as gang leader is never compromised. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on August 25th, 2009 at 10:16 pm. Updated on August 25th, 2009 at 10:29 pm.