Watchlist Warrior: Prison

At the time of writing this, my watchlist on Letterboxd has 2,346 movies on it. The majority of these movies I do not recognize or remember adding. In a two-pronged assault on watcher’s indecision and writer’s block, I will be shuffling my watchlist and selecting a movie to watch and write about from the first row. The less popular, the better. Let’s plumb the depths. I will not cheat, and if I do cheat, I will not tell you. I am the Watchlist Warrior.

Hello movie nation. Barely a week later I am continuing my journey along the Warrior’s Path. I will not falter.

Looks like today’s movie is going to be 1987’s Prison, directed by Renny Harlin. I invite you to watch along with me, if that’s the type of thing you might do. I would have said it last week but I don’t think you can reasonably ask a stranger to watch the movie Water Monster 2 for no reason. Even if you don’t watch along, I hope you’ll read on anyway. I’m writing these for the sake of writing things that can be read for the sake of reading them. I will keep gradually unveiling more of my motivations and inspirations for doing so like a Resident Evil journal entry.

Renny Harlin is a name that, to me, conjures only the delights of Deep Blue Sea and what I’m sure is a painful re-imagining of The Strangers into a trilogy. To others, he seems a known quantity. I assume Prison will help me index this man and learn his attributes.

Prison is fairly straightforward: an abandoned penitentiary is reopened due to budget cuts, and a former bad-news prison guard, Sharpe, is made its warden. Warden Sharpe is suffering the nightmarish guilt of knowingly standing by while an innocent prisoner was executed in that facility years prior. Punishment for his heinous act is meted out indiscriminately to all who occupy the prison by the vengeful spirit of the late inmate. This is a movie that unrolls in front of you like a carpet. The friezes around the fringe extrapolate cleanly into the full pattern. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to complain about having to walk from one side of the carpet to the other. Imagine whining about crossing a carpet!

Prison is sprinkled with kills best compared to those of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise: inanimate objects spring to life and bloodily strangle hapless victims, hot sparking light bakes inmates alive in solitary cells, and mounted machine guns fire of their own accord. If this is the comparison point, though, I think it’s important to note that this Elm Street is Kruegerless. No visible figure is responsible for the carnage. Though we can infer the killer is striking from beyond the grave, our only visual representation is an almost alien ray of light that penetrates through walls to enact its retribution.

With the absence of a villain character, this supernatural “slasher” must instead lean on its environment. Luckily, the atmosphere in Prison’s prison is top-notch. Rooms are wreathed in fog, presumably to lend body to the shafts of numinous light. Guards and inmates slosh through the murk of the waterlogged basement hallway. The movie was filmed in an actual abandoned prison, and the sinister architecture really punches through the music-video 80’s cinematography to create a uniquely dismal and otherworldly mood.

The people that populate Prison are not quite as exceptional. You’ve likely seen everything this movie has to offer in terms of characters. The classic exploitation movie convict crew is all here. Viggo Mortensen, in the role of the taciturn badass, is holding it down and serving time. He’s giving a new meaning to serving time. I’ve heard of serving time, but this is ridiculous! Viggo Mortensen is serving, and not just time. It gives a whole new meaning to “serving time”. He’s supported by a cast of archetypes: the persistent escapist, the bulky pederast, the annoying Italian, the aging alcoholic, and Tommy Lister Jr. The prison staff are nondescript, gruff, racist– uninspired, except for the warden.

Lane Smith holds the whole movie together as the spittle-drenched scenery-chewing Warden Sharpe. His performance is so vascular and un-nuanced that all the other elements of Prison seem to bend in toward him. Tropes or scenes that test the boundaries of cliché are a little easier to stomach when they roll downhill toward the gravity well that is Warden Sharpe, waking up literally choking from a scary dream and pulling a gun on his colleague, or burning every mattress in the facility on a huge pyre.

Prisoners bemoan their worsening conditions as the warden further curbs their freedoms. They swing pickaxes in the yard and get in squabbles. Everybody thinks Viggo is cool and wants to be his friend. Every once in a while, a character is brutally impaled by sentient metal pipes or throttled by barbed wire. A woman working for the Department of Corrections keeps trying to write the warden up for the bloody mutilated bodies collapsing out of gore-soaked ceilings but he stays one step ahead of her by taking away her printed reports. Damn that crafty warden!

With little actual plot to speak of, this ends up being more of a mood piece than I’d imagine it was conceived as. Even though the warden is ostensibly the one being punished for his sins, that gruesome punishment is inflicted on inmate and jailer alike. It’s hard to ascribe motivation to many of the deaths in this movie, which pushes the logline away from “Wronged spirit craves transgressor’s comeuppance” and closer to the territory of “What if there was a haunted ass prison?” That’s not an issue for me because this prison is clearly haunted as fuck. The movie is called Prison. It’s not about the characters or what they do. It’s about, isn’t this prison crazy. If that’s not doing it for you, Shocker is down the hall.

One of the myriad pleasures of movie watching is building your schema. And you can print that in Geek Weekly. As mentioned above, I’d hoped that watching Prison might help me understand what it means for something to be a “Renny Harlin movie”. The picture painted by a filmography containing this and Nightmare on Elm Street 4 seems clear enough– but I haven’t seen Die Hard 2 or Cliffhanger which appear to maybe challenge that conclusion. The gestalt of Renny will continue to elude me, at least for today.

Three stars.