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Prison is set in Wyoming where work on a new prison has hit a problem so the state board decide to re-open an old state penitentiary that has been closed for 20 years, Warden Eaton Sharpe (Lane Smith) is put in charge. 200 odd prisoners are shipped in & they are put to work fixing the rundown prison up including Burke (Viggo Mortensen) who is ordered to break into the old execution chamber, he duly obliges but when he penetrates the bricked up door an intense beam of light shoots out & all the electrics, gas & fire around the prison goes crazy for a few minutes. Burke has unwittingly unleashed a deadly evil force which is in the mood for some killing & no-one is safe...
Directed by Renny Harlin I thought Prison was a poor late 80's horror flick that seemed to forget about the small point of having a story. The script was by Empire Pictures regular C. Courtney Joyner who was responsible for writing such 'classics' as Class of 1999 (1990), Puppet Master III: Toulon's Revenge (1991) & Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys (2004) amongst other low budget horror crap that even I haven't heard of & seems to take itself very seriously. The biggest problems I have with Prison are that it's far too slow, it's over 30 minutes into the film before the 'evil force' is even released although the pace does pick up towards the end but by then it was too little too late as far as I was concerned, then there's the fact there's no discernible storyline here at all. For a start it never tries to explain why there's an 'evil force' bricked up in the old execution chamber, it never explains why this force decides to kill random inmates when it's supposed to be out on a revenge mission or why it just doesn't kill Warden Sharpe straight away, no explanation is given to where Burke fits into it even though he looks exactly the same as the prisoner who was electrocuted & has come back, there's no real explanation as to how the Warden is connected to everything that's going on apart from two early nightmare sequences in which he seems to be remembering something although it's never revealed what it is or why. To be honest I couldn't really give you a plot synopsis as the film doesn't have a rigid story which it follows all the way through. The character's are dull & forgettable, the murders are few & far between, the pacing is way off, the whole film is a mess & even ghosts can't shoot straight when it comes to trying to shoot the hero. A less than satisfactory way to spend 100 odd minutes, there really are better things you could be doing.
Director Harlin's full American flick debut he does a good job & there's a decent atmosphere but after over an hour of constant drab, dull, dark prison cells & corridors I started to get bored. I just think the look of the film is far too repetitive, bland & frankly lifeless. I didn't think it was scary & the gore is pretty tame apart from the best moment in the entire film when a police guard gets killed when a load of barb wire wraps itself around his body & face with a nice close up of his throat being torn open. Other than that there's a burnt corpse & a mangled body which falls from the ceiling & very little else. There is a scene when the Warden burns all the prisoner mattresses in front of them & then makes them stand all night in their underwear in the yard, I was watching this scene & thought that you'd never get away with doing something like that. Over here prisoners have rights & if the Warden did something like that there would be a national outcry from all those humanitarians & every prisoner would sue the Warden, the prison service & the Government for everything they had & they'd win!
With a supposed budget of about $4,000,000 Prison actually had a pretty healthy budget although it doesn't really look like it on screen, sure there's a decent cast & the few special effects that are included are good but overall it's set in the same location with limited ambition. Prison was actually shot in a real Wyoming state prison so it certainly looks the business. The acting is alright, Prison proves that sometimes Hollywood stars not only have one crap horror film skeleton in their closets but in the case of Mortensen he has two with this & the awful The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994) both of which I'm sure he'd like to forget about...
Prison is a dull, lifeless, colourless & humourless waste of 100 minutes, despite one good gore scene I didn't like it at all as I actually prefer my films to have a story rather than seemingly random events & incidents cobbled together with no narrative sense.


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