Box Art Review #7
Prison (1988 )
Directed by Renny
Harlin
Starring Viggo
Mortensen
I’m honestly surprised this movie isn’t more well known. It’s
got Viggo Mortensen, which you would think would be enough to sell DVDs in the
five dollar bin at Wal-Mart, and it’s a horror movie set in a prison, which is
a flawless idea that somehow hasn’t been exhausted yet. The director, Renny
Harlin, went on to direct the 4th Nightmare on Elm Street – one of
the lesser offerings in my opinion – as well as Die Hard 2 – again, one of the
lesser sequels – and the major box office failure, Cutthroat Island, the
stupid-but-fun Deep Blue Sea, and The Long Kiss Good Night, which I’ve never
seen, but my dad use to watch on HBO all the time.
The movie is a slow burn for sure; you could almost throw it
in with From Dusk ‘til Dawn, as it starts off as one movie before it’s derailed
by a major tonal shift and becomes a horror flick. The film opens with a wide
selection of prisoners with varying degrees of likability, and right away you
notice that the writing is this movie’s strong point. Likewise, the movie excels
on the acting front too; Viggo Mortensen checks in with a Clint Eastwood style
Man From Nowhere performance and is just impossibly cool (even while cupping
another man’s balls), Chelsea Field is great and, most importantly, believable,
as the naïve youngster who’s just trying to do what’s right, and best of all is
Lane Smith who totally kills it as the prison’s warden who always seems to be
in control of the situation. I can’t say much for the director’s other work,
but this movie is so good that it almost feels like a John Carpenter film.
The plot really starts to kick into gear when the prisoners
start to get attacked by a glowing blue light that microwaves a guy to death
after melting his shoes. Viggo saves another guy from the same melting fate and
becomes sort of a hero to other inmates. Then another guy tries to escape and
gets all tangled an’ mangled in a knot of steel tubes, wire, and rebar; the
reveal of his mutilated body is pretty cool as he falls from the ceiling and
lands on the table where prisoners are chowing down. The power goes out, and in
one really creative scene, a TV, a radio, and a fax machine all start to go
haywire playing commercials and songs from 1964 and printing out a fax with
1964 repeated over and over a la The Shining.
Prison is certainly an overlooked gem for horror fans, but
casual movie-goers probably aren’t missing much. It’s a little too long, and it
would have been a million times better if the main prisoner characters were
given a chance to grow, but the worst problem is the ending. You get all this
buildup, a lot of it seemingly pointing to Viggo’s character as the
reincarnation of this wrongly executed guy from ’64, and then the power goes
out and the prisoners are rioting and trying to escape while all this unexplained
supernatural shit is going down and then nothing really happens. Seriously,
this movie had some great momentum building and then nothing really comes of
it. You do get to see the zombie version of the executed prisoner strapped to
an electric chair with newly granted lightning powers zap the shit out of the
warden before he can escape, which is admittedly pretty rad, but I think they
really missed an opportunity here. I’m just throwing this out there, but here’s
how I would’ve ended the movie: Once the power goes out and the prisoners start
rioting, make the ghost/zombie possess Viggo and give him lightning powers and
super strength and just start going apeshit on all the prisoners. So he’s
killing people right and left and everybody’s trying to hide in their cells and
whatever, while the girl, the warden, and some other prisoners search for the
ghost/zombies body. The ghost/zombie reawakens at the sight of the warden and
goes in for the kill, but just before he can kill the girl and the prisoners,
Viggo comes up from behind and electrocutes him (back) to death and the two of
them die (or re-die).
The Cover
This cover rules. I can imagine a lot of people got suckered
into renting this based on the box art and then were disappointed when it
turned out to be a supernatural thriller instead of a gory slasher. Everything
about it is cool, that Goonies looking school up top with iron bars in its
eyes, the guy strapped into the electric chair, even the tagline is suitably
ominous. The best part though, is the font; it looks like a cheesy 80s black
metal band, like the kind that would wear corpse paint and take photos of themselves
in the woods or next to burning churches. I really don’t have a whole lot to
say on this one, there’s really nothing to criticize, it’s just a cool horror
movie cover, the kind that got me interested in blogging about them in the
first place. This is the kind of box art I would have grabbed off the shelf and
stared at when I was a kid, trying to imagine the movie in my mind and all the
gruesome ways people would die, it’s just too bad that the movie doesn’t live
up to the cover.
Movie:3/5
Cover: 5/5
Scream Factory just released Prison in Febrauary on Blu Ray making it available for the first time since VHS
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