While one of the dramatic turning points occurs in a prison, most of this movie occurs outside. Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) becomes a white supremacist pin-up boy after his father is murdered by black youths, and when his car is broken into by some young blacks who he kicked off the local basketball court (in a winner-owns-the-court game), he kills two of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm. Updated on August 27th, 2009 at 10:10 pm.
Fine drama, directed by and starring Edward James Olmos, which charts the life of Santana, an East Los Angeles Hispanic crime boss from – well, before he was born, really – through his teenage years, his time in juvenile detention and later Folsom Prison, then back out on the streets and back in jail. It follows a very similar path to Bound by Honour (even sharing features like the main character having a blonde, white-skinned right hand man and a young teenager dying from a drug overdose) but does everything better, including selling the message that gang life is destroying the potential of young Hispanic kids. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 18th, 2009 at 8:37 pm. Updated on August 27th, 2009 at 10:10 pm.
I had a bit of trouble with this film. I don’t know whether it was that I’d read somewhere that it was the Indian Shawshank Redemption (not that I entirely understood what that meant), or that I kept thinking that the charismatic leading man was Leonard Cohen. Maybe it was the plot. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 17th, 2009 at 1:29 pm. Updated on April 19th, 2020 at 10:04 pm.
Literally ‘The Hot Death’, and an absolute shocker. Made by a director who apparently went on to make some ‘legendary’ exploitation movies, this is a boring, limp-scripted, horribly acted, and uninspired effort. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:57 pm. Updated on August 11th, 2013 at 12:02 pm.
Perhaps it’s just that I don’t like westerns, or comedy-drama-westerns, but this is a genuine 70s shocker. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:55 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2020 at 6:00 pm.
It sadly says much about the world that there could be ten Ernest P Worrell movies. This is the third or fourth, and I’m pleased to say that I haven’t seen any of the other nine. It seems that the character was created for a series of TV ads and just grew from there; how remains a mystery. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:52 pm. Updated on August 23rd, 2009 at 8:52 pm.
Laurel & Hardy find themselves in the hoose-gow (ie jail, or work camp in this instance, the word derived from the Mexican Spanish juzgado meaning tribunal more than jail, apparently). Anyway, they are your innocent bystander-type prisoners, very much out of their depth. Luckily, it is an extraordinarily benign prison; in just 18 minutes they manage to kick a warder in the behind, escape (only to return after being shot in their respective backsides), and eat the warder’s lunch – all with no particular consequence. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:49 pm. Updated on February 26th, 2010 at 8:48 pm.
Also known as ‘Truth or Die.’ A mediocre made-for-TV film based on the true story of Jerome (Jerry) Rosenberg, a small-time Brooklyn criminal who hit the big time in 1962 when he and an associate were charged and convicted of the murder of two policemen during a robbery. Sentenced to die by electric chair, he was saved after New York first abolished the death penalty (with killing Police one exception), after which he mounted a successful legal challenge to his own death sentence. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:46 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 9:27 pm.
One of comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s last movies. Thankfully. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:43 pm. Updated on August 21st, 2009 at 8:30 pm.
There’s so much to like about this film – its authenticity, its subject matter, compelling performances, beautifully filmed… and yet, for some reason, it doesn’t hit you quite like it should. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on May 16th, 2009 at 11:39 pm. Updated on March 6th, 2016 at 4:26 pm.