Troll (1986)

I first saw Troll in the mid '80s, when we were shown it as a treat at school. Other treat videos that same teacher showed us included Maro Camus's spaghetti western The Revenge of Trinity, Rumble Fish, The Terminator, and the Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung/Yuen Biao kung fu comedy Wheels On Meals. In hindsight, that year was probably a big influence on my subsequent filmgoing habits.

Troll certainly made an impression on me. Although it was never actually scary, it had an unsettling vibe to the whole thing. Although it's clearly intended to be a kid's movie, it starts off by seemingly doing away with a little girl so that a hideous shape-changing troll can take her place. It then deals with most of the supporting cast in surreal but fairly ruthless manner, all the while maintaining a genuine weirdness. It's the movie where Sonny Bono mutates, swells and splits apart, finally exploding into a mess of fairy-land foliage and bizarre goblin creatures, all of whom start to sing.

The movie is told from the point of view of the Potter family (and yes, both the father and the son are called Harry). It's the daughter in this family, Wendy, who is replaced by a troll. Her parents, Harry Potter Sr. (Michael Moriarty) and Anne Potter (Shelley Hack), are only slightly bemused when their daughter starts foaming at the mouth, growling unnervingly, and packing away burger after burger before trying to take a bite out of her dad. "It's the stress of the mood," they shrug, and keep bumbling through their day. Only Harry Potter Jr. seems to notice that things have started to turn completely fucking nuts.

Fortunately for Harry Jr., one of the other tenants is a witch called Eunice St. Clair (June Lockhart) who is able to explain everything. The troll, it seems, used to be her boyfriend, a wizard called Torok. (Amusingly, in the portrait of the pair of them Eunice has hanging on the wall, Torok is painted to resemble director John Carl Buechler.) Torok had started a war in an attempt to unite the human world and the fairy world, and was turned into a troll as punishment; now he is trying to pick up where he left off. Eunice has been standing guard for centuries, waiting for him to make his move.

Meanwhile Wendy is going from apartment to apartment, turning all of the the tenants into mythical creatures and fairyland foliage. Interestingly, although all of the men turn into ugly little rubber creatures, the only woman (Julia Louis Dreyfus) is turned into a group of good looking and mostly naked young women. Hm. In the midst of all this, Harry Sr. plays air guitar while blaring his record collection and Anne just kind of wanders around obliviously.

Some parts of Troll are pretty hard to take. A scene towards the start, where most of the supporting cast is introduced during a fire alarm, is particularly offputting. On top of the squalling alarm, everybody's performances are turned up to 11 and there's a lt of frantic running around and screaming. The moment the alarm was turned off I literally breathed a sigh of relief and the movie instantly became a lot more likeable. By the time we got to the first transformation scene, I was completely sold.

The cast is a mixed bag. Moriarty, who at around this time was giving eccentric and nuanced method performances in Larry Cohen movies, plays Harry Sr. as a grinning dope, and Hack is at her most vacant. Little Jenny Beck looks like she's having a ball playing Torok-as-Wendy; she had recently played Elizabeth, the human/alien hybrid, in V. June Lockhart is funny as Eunice, and there's a cameo by her daughter Anne Lockhart. Noah Hathaway, as Harry Jr., is a bit wooden and is given a few too many reaction close-ups. By far the best actor in the movie is Phil Fondacaro as Malcolm, a university professor who Torok/Wendy befriends. Fondacaro also plays Torok the troll, whose voice is provided by prolific voice artist Frank Welker (Gremlins, Scooby Doo).

The special effects  are mostly pretty good, in a low-budget kind of way. Director John Carl Buechler was also the main makeup effects guy for Empire, and he showcases his own work extensively here. Torok is the besy creation here; he's quite convincing and his face is mobile and expressive. Most of the other creatures are simpler puppets, but they share a rather charning ugly cuteness. Sonny Bono's transformation scene is a real highlight; I remember that getting a lot of laughs, and other vocal noises, when we watched it at school about quarter of a century ago.

Troll was mostly filmed on a sound stage in Italy with a mostly Italian crew, including cinematographer Romano Albani, who had previously worked with Dario Argento on Inferno and Phenomena. It has some of that distinctive Italian horror flavour, and not just because the whole movie is looped in typical Italian tradition. This is because it is produced by the father & son team of Albert Band and Charles Band, for their notorious Empire Productions, who were always fond of filming in Europe if they could get it for cheap. I guess you could think of Troll as one of the Bands' pioneering efforts, along with the previous year's Ghoulies and the next year's Dolls (from Troll scribe Ed Naha). Charles Band's next company, Full Moon, would be notorious for its endless recycling of the "small things on the rampage" idea.

The apartment sets for Troll were reused almost immediately for another Empire picture, David Schmoeller's Crawlspace, which also shares a number of few members but otherwise has nothing in common with Troll except in being deeply weird. Another Empire reference is that there is are posters for Parasite 3D and Dungeonmaster poster on the son's wall. Dungeonmaster is a weird, disjointed movie in its own right, not helped by the fact that it has seven directors, including Buechler's debut.

Re-experiencing the weirdness of Troll was oddly satisfying. I am tempted to follow it up by revisiting another movie John Carl Buechler directed for Empire, the similarly bizarre but much gorier Cellar Dweller. Until next time...

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Baron von Frankenstein (Udo Kier) lives in isolation with his sister Baroness Katrina von Frankenstein (Monique van Vooren) and their children Monica (Nicoletta Elmi) and Erik (Marco Liofredi). The Baron has already completed a female creature (or zombie, as he calls her, played by gorgeous Italian model Dalila Di Lazzaro) and has nearly finished her male counterpart; he is now looking for a suitably virile head, and for some reason he is determined that it must have the perfect nose. Once the male is completed, he plans to mate them to breed a Serbian master race (presumably all with perfect noses) that he can rule over.

As the Baron's sexual energy is all poured into his creations (quite literally), the Baroness seeks sexual fulfilment with a horny young farmhand, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), who she has caught in flagrante delicto with several young women. By sheer coincidence, the Baron also has his eye on Nicholas, but in a case of mistaken identity he decides that Nicholas's friend Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic) is the one with the perfect head ("Look at that nasem!"), not realising that Sacha is a sexually repressed homosexual on the verge of entering a monastery. One enormous pair of shears later, the Baron's male creature has a new head, but the Baron's plans to mate him with the female creature do not go as planned. Indeed, the final act of the movie sees almost every character having their desires thwarted in extremely gruesome fashion.

The only exceptions are the Baron and Baroness's two young children. Through all of this, Monica and Erik have been watching their parents' activities closely. The movie opened with them imitating the Baron's experiments using a doll (which bled when decapitated); it ends with them taking up scalpels and closing in on sole survivor Nicholas, who is suspended helpless from the ceiling. It had been mentioned that the Baron and Baroness's parents are coming to visit. I wonder how they will react to what they find...

It's easy to see why Flesh for Frankenstein horrified many viewers on its first release in 1973. It was released with Andy Warhol's name attached to it, which drew in people who would normally not go anywhere near an exploitative horror movie. Even those who heeded Warhol's affinity for trash as art would have been troubled by what they saw here. The combination of hoary horror tropes with vivid gore and sex would be troubling enough, but the bloody and explicit scenes of necrophilia are still beyond the pale forty years later. Not content with the usual orifices, the Baron opens the stitching on his female creation and penetrates her internal organs, leading to the movie's most infamous line (parodying Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris): "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder!"

I first saw Flesh for Frankenstein on video in the '90s, and loved its pitch-black humour and outrageous combination of sex and gore. Watching it again now, it seems more extreme than ever and just as entertaining. It's a good looking, lushly produced movie with a beautiful score, which just makes all of the taboo-busting seem all the more ripe. I'd love to see it in its original 3D, just to see the various scenes where blood and guts were clearly supposed to jut out at the audience. I'd snap up a 3D blu-ray in a second, but I'd much rather see it on the big screen.

The blood and gore is played for laughs, with the camera often lingering on patently fake props of severed heads and limbs, and yet I still found much of it to be quite queasy. Part of this is doubtless because of the atmosphere of absolute depravity that permeates the entire movie. I doubt that many people get turned on watching it. In fact, most scenes featuring sex and nudity are immediately followed by scenes of extreme gore, as if the movie is deliberately cock-blocking the audience. Not that the sex is itself particularly titillating; one hilarious scene features full-on armpit sucking, complete with the wettest sound effects imaginable.

It's fun to look at the ways in which the filmmakers play with and invert ideas from earlier takes on Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley's novel and James Whale's movie Bride of Frankenstein, a male creature is made first, and then a mate is provided; here the female creature is the first to be completed, and a male is created specifically to mate with her (Husbandry of Frankenstein). In Whale's first Frankenstein movie, a "criminal brain" is accidentally substituted for the desired "normal brain"; here the desired "virile heterosexual" head is missed and a "repressed homosexual" head is substituted in error. In the novel, Frankenstein marries his adopted sister; here he has married his biological sister. And then there's the simple fact that Frankenstein's creature(s) are usually depicted as looking monstrous (a rare exception is the made-for-tv movie Frankenstein: the True Story, also from 1973 and co-written by Christopher Isherwood); here they are both depicted as attractive and desirable, despite their wetly fresh scars complete with heavy stitching.

German actor Udo Kier is perfect in the role of Baron von Frankenstein. His unique line delivery and distinctive good looks ensure that the Baron is a consistently funny and charismatic presence, even though he is never even remotely sympathetic. Kier had already been in several movies - most notably the notoriously gruesome Mark of the Devil, for which audiences were given sick bags - but Baron von Frankenstein was his breakthrough role and lead to a prolific career as a beloved cult actor in all manner of genre, mainstream and arthouse movies. Writer/director Paul Morrissey quite literally discovered Kier on his way to make the movie - they just happened to be sitting next to each other on the plane to Italy and struck up a friendship.

For me, the other most notable cast member is Nicoletta Elmi as Monica. A very distinctive-looking young girl with red hair and freckles, Elmi made memorable appearances in a number of Italian horror movies of the period. Many people remember her as the cruel child who impales a lizard (seemingly for real) in Dario Argento's Deep Red; she also had notable roles in two Mario Bava movies, Baron Blood and Twitch of the Death Nerve, Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints on the Moon, and as the main victim in Aldo Lado's chilling child-murder giallo Who Saw Her Die?

Elmi's biggest role was as the lead in Massimo Dallamano's possession movie The Cursed Medallion, at age 11. Her final film to date was as the beautiful, sinister usherette in Lamberto Bava's Demons. She subsequently retired from acting (aged 21!) and has since become either a doctor or a speech therapist, depending on which source you trust. I'd love for someone to track her down and interview her about her sterling Italian horror movie career.

The other actors acquit themselves well enough, although campy over-acting or wooden non-acting are the order of the day. Arno Juerging is particularly funny as Frankenstein's assistant Otto, though he would make a bigger mark in Blood for Dracula (more about that later). Monique van Vooren is effective as Baroness Katrina von Frankenstein, managing to create some sympathy for a self-centred character whose dialogue is largely savage invective.

Although it was written & directed by the American Paul Morrissey, best known for the films he made for Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein was made in Italy with a mostly European cast and a talented Italian crew. For example, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller had shot the classic Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and went on to such things as Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso and Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, while special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi worked on everything from Mario Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve to Alien and E.T.. Morrissey's only import was Joe Dallesandro, from his Warhol movies, whose New York accent sticks out like a sore thumb.

Prolific genre director Antonio Marghareti was credited as co-director on Italian prints for quota purposes, and in an interview in Fangoria he took credit for "saving" the movie, saying that he took over directing both this and its sister film Blood for Dracula at the producers' insistence because of Paul Morrissey's incompetence. Both Morrissey and Udo Kier have disputed this, with Kier saying that he was never directed by anyone other than Morrissey. It seems likely that Marghareti did some second-unit work, directing some special effects sequences (e.g. a bat attack on Monica & Eric).

Speaking of Blood for Dracula, that movie was made back-to-back with this one. The story goes that they wrapped this one in the morning, Udo Kier, Arno Juerging and Joe Dallesandro got their hair cut during the lunch break, and then they started filming Blood for Dracula that afternoon. We'll be looking at that one next. Until next time, then...

John Dies at the End (2012)

John Dies at the End is a rock 'n' roll good-time movie. It's like a stoner buddy comedy, but instead of smoking pot the characters inject a sentient hallucinogenic drug which can allow people to travel through time and to alternate dimensions. At times it seems like a non-stop montage of disgusting creatures and outrageous gore. I'd like to see it attain an Evil Dead 2 level of cult status.

The story is kind of double-narrated, in that it is framed as being told by David (Chase Williamson) to a journalist (Paul Giamatti), but David also has a near-constant inner monologue that Giamatti's character is not privvy to. The movie them throws us into the deep end with a sequence that it does not tell us actually takes place after the main story has finished, in which David and his buddy John (Rob Mayes) are called out to help a young woman who has a problem with her undead boyfriend. After encountering a bizarre creature that forms itself out of pieces of meat from a deep freezed, David and John realise that each of them see the girl who has called them as looking like a completely different person - the ramifications of which are only made clear towards the end of the movie.

We then flash back to their initial encounter with the sentient hallucinogenic drug, known colloquially as "Soy Sauce," and from there into a non-stop wild ride as they realise that they find themselves in the position of having to save the world, without yet knowing that they are saving it from.

Part of what makes John Dies at the End work so well is the obvious glee it takes in its own inventiveness. It's a frantic cavalcade of bizarre and twisted ideas piled precariously on top of each other, cackling madly as it goes, and yet even throwaway bits turn out to have purpose; for example, even a small bit of dialogue about phantom limb syndrome early in the movie turns out to be important. Once you get your head around the non-linear and flashback-heavy structure - the filmmakers expect the audience to put the sequence of events together in their heads - the story holds together more coherently than I expected from the setup. I wouldn't say that it's tightly plotted - it's far too convoluted than that and quite a few loose ends are left hanging - but it's certainly not just random weirdness for its own sake.

John Dies at the End also benefits from a strong cast. Newcomers Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are great fun as David and John, and they're backed by a supporting cast of strong character actors, including Glynn Turman as a confused cop, the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm,  as a priest, skinny creature actor Doug Jones, Clancy Brown cast against type as a slick and charismatic spiritualist, and Paul Giamatti as the sceptical journalist listening to David's story.

Unfortunately, as ths cast summary shows, there are no strong female characters in John Dies at the End. I gather that the role of Amy (Fabianne Therese) was reduced considerably for the movie, and others were left out of the film version. Even Molly the dog (as the was called in the original book by David Wong) was changed from female to male (and now called Bark Lee). This is a consistent problem in writer/director Don Coscarelli's career; the only strong female lead in any of his work is Ellen in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, a character carried over from Joe R. Lansdale's original story.

Despite this demerit, all in all this is a greatvehicle for Coscarelli's talents (he previously wrote & directed the Phantasm movies, Beastmaster, and Bubba Ho-Tep). Please make movies more frequently if you can, Mr. Coscarelli.

Deadly Blessing (1981)

Young farmers Martha (Maren Jensen, Athena in the original Battlestar Galactica) and Jim (Douglas Barr, Bill Stillfield in Designing Women) find it aggravating enough that Jim's father Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Harry Booth in The Black Hole), who leads a strict Amish-like sect called the Hittites, disapproves of their marriage enough to have cut Jim off from his family. But when Jim is unexpectedly run over and killed by his own tractor in the middle of the night, his simple cousin William (Michael Berryman, Pluto in The Hills Have Eyes) is stabbed while peeping through windows and then strung up in the barn, and someone puts a water moccasin in Martha's bath, it's time to buy a gun. Because this is a Wes Craven movie, and Craven has no time for protagonists who respond to threat with anything less than lethal force.

Soon, Martha's friends Vicky (Susan Buckner, Patty Simcox in Grease) and Lara (Sharon Stone, Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct) have ralied around so that they can tell her about their spider-nightmares and try to score Martha's Hittite brother-in-law John (Jeff East, Young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie). Meanwhile, Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Dutch in The Wild Bunch) keeps going on about how they are with the Incubus (undefined here but usually a male demon that seduces or rapes women), non-Hittite mother & daughter Louisa (Lois Nettleton, Sister Marion in Mirror Mirror 2) and Faith (Lisa Harman, Tabitha in Tabitha) act weird and vaguely threatening, Vicky maces a dog, John tries to rape his fiancée/cousin Melissa (Colleen Riley, Jane in The Hills Have Eyes Part II), Lara finds a milk carton filled with blood, Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Cabbie in Escape from New York) beats the shit out of a little kid, and a Wes Craven tv movie plays at a hard-top theatre.


Despite all of the weirdness and the trappings from other horror subgenres, Deadly Blessing is the closest Wes Craven came to directing an old-school slasher. A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker are supernatural stories with undead villains, Last House on the Left is a rape/revenge movie, The Hills Have Eyes is closer to the rural massacre subgenre, and the Scream movies are metafictional slasher parodies. Deadly Blessing, at the end of the day, is about someone putting on their black leather gloves and killing people, complete with one of the genre's oldest and most hackneyed pseudo-psychosexual rationales; everything else is just red herrings or window dressing.

Except for that goddamned ending. But more about that later.

The script may be all over the place, but Deadly Blessing looks lovely and has some good set-pieces, from the huge, empty spaces seen in the opening shots of Hittites working the fields to the claustrophobic scene of Sharon Stone being stalked through a spider-infested barn. James Horner's score may steal too bluntly from Jerry Goldsmith's for The Omen but it helps make the scope of the movie seem bigger than the usual mad slasher flick.

Sharon Stone features in the two best horror set-pieces in the movie. The most famous is a dream sequence, which made it onto the poster (see the bottom of this post for both a clip and the poster). The other, and my favourite part of the movie, is the aforementioned scene where she is locked in a barn filled with cobwebs and spiders and possibly the killer and definitely a corpse. Deadly Blessing was Stone's first speaking role, and although her lack of experience shows in other scenes, she really shines in this dialogue-free sequence.


(Incidentally, legend usually has it that Stone had the spider that was dropped in her mouth de-fanged, which lead to it starving to death. This is untrue: freeze-frame that sequence and you can tell that it's a fake spider. The large huntsman spider that crawls on her décolletage is the one that she had de-fanged.)

The bathtub scene in Deadly Blessing was apparently inspired by a dream Craven had the night before shooting; he later memorably reused it in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Fans of the auteur theory will be able to find a number of themes that also appear in other Craven movies: a stern father figure, a sense of isolation, visceral nightmare sequences, booby traps, protagonists who fight back as fiercely as they're attacked, and of course a silly producer-prescribed ending.




After everything has been wrapped up, rough justice has been served, and even Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine, Mermaid Man in SpongeBob SquarePants) has pronounced that "the messenger of the Incubus is dead!", Martha is left alone in the house. She's now widowed and pregnant and has to tend to the farm entirely on her own. Then the Incubus jumps out of a hole in the floor and drags Martha down to hell. The End! Then the audience says, "What?" Yes, it's one of those clichéd '80s horror shock endings that not only makes no sense, it makes a mockery of everything that's come before! The end of Deadly Blessing is particularly out of left field, but it's part of a long tradition that can be traced back through Friday the 13th and Carrie to Deliverance and beyond.

All in all, Deadly Blessing is a fairly good entry in Wes Craven's extremely uneven directorial career, and a slightly unconventional slasher movie with some utterly tacked-on pieces of a supernatural horror movie. Craven's main contribution to the script seems to be the horror set-pieces, which are the best parts of the movie even while working against the story. If you're looking for an entertaining and nostalgic piece of '80s horror nonsense with more class than sleaze, this is a good bet.

This post was originally written for Stacie Ponder's Film Club, but I got in too late. So it goes.

Prison (1987)

Because of an over-abundance of prisoners the old, dilapidated Creedmore Prison is being reopened after over thirty years. Warden Eaton Sharpe is overseeing the renovations, which are being carried out by the first wave of prisoners, but he still has nightmares about the innocent man he sent to the electric chair in 1956 in this very same prison. Could things go horribly wrong in a way that results in a series of inventively gruesome deaths?

The opening nightmare sequence of this movie is pure dynamite. Using a subjective camera, we are put in the place of a condemned prisoner on the final walk to the electric chair. A scene rather like this one is present in the opening of Orson Welles's fascinating unproduced script for Heart of Darkness, from way back in 1939, the primary difference being that this one breaks the subjective camera to show us the prisoner in the chair rather than continuing to the disturbing fade to red of Welles's version.



We then get back to more familiar ground with scenes of the prison board approving the reopening of the facility, over the objections of the sole female board member, and the prisoners arriving and being browbeaten by the ball-busting Warden. Prisoners are introduced as stock stereotypes: the wise old black guy (a few years before Morgan Freeman made this role his stock in trade); the hairy white biker rapist and his pretty-boy cellmate; the huge black guy; the scared black guy; the weasly white guy; the voodoo-worshipping black guy; the doofus Italian guy; some guy; some other guy; and, of course, the clean-cut white hero.



Things are ominous right from the start, but it's not until the execution chamber is broken open that the vengeful spirit is unleashed and the killings start. And wow, these really are some gruesomely inventive killings.









I thought that Prison was a highly entertaining movie. It's filmed in an actual abandoned prison, and it makes great use of this location both for its atmosphere and for its set-pieces. The story races along at a terrific pace, and it's all quite stylishly photographed and the cast is good, in a broad horror-movie kind of way. Some elements of the movie reminded me of earlier movies (especially A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Keep) but it's not derivative and emerges as very much its own beast. There are some glaring script issues that I really wish had been addressed, but for me the movie's virtues outstripped its flaws.



In a number of ways Prison is very much a horror movie of its time. It has a vengeful supernatural killer from beyond the grave, it's built around the aforementioned series of murder set-pieces, and the whole movie is covered in layers of smoke and grime and lit by shafts of blue light and an abundance of special-effects electrical sparks. It was the first American film for Finnish director Renny Harlin, whose next movie was A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Most ominously of all, it's produced by Charles Band's Empire Pictures, known for such schlockfests as Ghoulies and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.



On the other hand, Prison is the brainchild of producer Irwin Yablans, who first came to prominence when he proposed a story to fledgling filmmakers John Carpenter & Debra Hill called The Babysitter Murders, about a psycho who kills babysitters. Carpenter & Hill, of course, worked this up into Halloween. In this particular case, Yablans had an idea for a movie called Murder in the Big House, about a psycho killing people in prison. (Yablans does not have a knack for catchy titles.) Scriptwriter C. Courtney Joyner pointed out that there are always lots of killers with knives in prison and suggested that the story take a more supernatural spin. It's a shame that his good ideas ended there (Joyner's other uninspiring credits include the likes of Puppet Master 3 and Class of 1999) but Prison has enough style, action and (surprisingly enough) decent actors to make up for a rather shonky script.



After watching the movie, it occurred to me that the aforementioned opening scene is kind of a mirror image of the famous opening of Halloween, but instead of being from the point of view of a killer, we are shown the point of view of a victim. I had to wonder if this was deliberate on Yablans's part. I don't think it was intended to be Deep, but this scene made me really think about capital punishment (a subject I already have strong feelings about) and about the strange psychological space that prisoners find themselves in. If you were about to be executed for a crime you did not commit (or even one that you did), would you really placidly walk to the place of execution and just let it happen without a fight?



Our young hero, a car thief called Burke, is played by Viggo Mortensen in his first starring role (if you've heard of him, it's probably because he played the transvestite cannibal cowboy Tex in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III a few years later). The primary villain, Warden Sharpe, is played by Lane Smith in what seemed to me to be a spot-on impersonation of Richard Nixon; I was pleased to discover that Smith actually did play Nixon a few years later. Lazy-eyed basketball player, professional wrestler and future President of Earth "Tiny" Lister turns in a pretty decent performance as one of the many under-written prisoner roles.



The worst thing about the movie is Chelsea Field's character, the prison board representative who is attempting to push through penal reform initiatives. Field is a pretty decent actress who was too often relegated to useless wife/girlfriend roles (the main exception being her doom-haunted performance in Richard Stanley's unique Dust Devil), and her character here serves the dual mechanical purposes of getting a woman into an otherwise all-male picture, and providing background exposition. She does her best with what she's given, but her scenes are lazily written (when she eats in the main mess hall, the prisoners barely glance in her direction) and every time the movie cuts away to her, the claustrophobia of the prison setting is dissipated. This is doubly annoying because all the elements are present between the prison walls to tell the full back-story, but instead we get tension-draining scenes of Field talking to old guys about plot points.



Another serious debit is the way that the movie hints that Burke is somehow connected to or reincarnated from the prisoner executed in the opening scene, and then completely drops it. I'm all for portentous hints and unexplained mysteries, but this just felt half-finished, as if a subplot was only half-removed from the movie.



But why quibble? Prison is an unusually well-made little horror movie. It's a shame that Harlin went sharply downhill from here (via that Elm Street sequel through an Andrew Dice Clay comedy and on to bone-headed blockbuster action flicks) and that Viggo Mortensen's career went nowhere.



I've listed this as a 1987 movie because that's what it says on the copy I watched, even though the rest of the internet says 1988. This means that by my counting, next year is the 25th anniversary. So can we please have a special edition with a Renny Harlin commentary, and a featurette where Kane Hodder yet again tells that great story about how he stuffed worms into his mouth for the final scene? (Note to Kane: I looked hard, and I didn't see any worms.)