prison

Kiss of Death (1947)

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Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget.  1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities.  After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark.  This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away.  At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame.  Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs.  It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.

Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium.  Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute.  Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture.  Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker.  When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.”  He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.”  He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way.  He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.

Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing.  Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty.  It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies.  Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template.  Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show.  He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Vendetta (1986)

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There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“.  That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road.  Honestly, I thought there’d be more.  Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen.  Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986.  A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction.  Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy.  Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania.  As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.

Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy.  After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement.  This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down.  She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister.  Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location.  After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble.  He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense.  Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin).  It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.

Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details.  The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized.  Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre.  Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence.  The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn.  All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture.  It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios.  It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor.  It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron.  It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.

*free with ads

-Brandon Ledet

Down By Law (1986)

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Big changes are afoot at Wildwood, the weekly series that has recently brought classics as varied as John Waters’s Desperate Living and Barbara Loden’s Wanda to local cinemas for packed-room repertory screenings.  Firstly, the series doesn’t officially appear to be called Wildwood anymore; all social media presence has been temporarily rebranded to “WWCinema” while the programmers soul-search for a new name.  More importantly, it has switched times & locations to Wednesday nights at The Broad, which is much more easily accessible to me by bus than their previous slot on Thursdays at Canal Place.  So, it was my solemn duty to attend WWCinema’s “debut” at The Broad this month, despite the fact that I don’t particularly care for the films of notorious No Wave slacker Jim Jarmusch.  Programming Jarmusch’s 1986 prison escape comedy Down By Law in any local screening series is kind of a no-brainer, since it’s the exact kind of high-style, low-ambition filmmaking that convinces college-age hipsters from around the world to move to New Orleans and inspires lifelong New Orleanians to pick up cameras to capture the local mise-en-scène.  It’s often cited by cineastes as the best movie ever set here (an honor that actually belongs to Paul Schrader’s Cat People, also a former Wildwood selection), which always sets my teeth on edge even though it is, from what I can recall, the only Jarmusch movie I’ve ever fully enjoyed.  Thankfully, rewatching it with an enthusiastic crowd did remind me exactly why I have vaguely fond feelings for Down By Law despite all of its minimal-effort hipster posturing & N’awlins Y’all cultural cachet, which already makes me grateful that Wildwood is moving closer to home.

My knee-jerk resistance to Down By Law comes from two separate places of distrust.  The major issue is my longstanding bias against Jarmusch as a filmmaker with an incredible wealth of resources who often deliberately chooses to do nothing with them, because doing nothing is the Gen-X ideal of cool.  Speaking more personally, this is the project that brought that performative Gen-X slackerdom to my home turf, making hip-cred outsider musicians Tom Waits & John Lurie the poster boys for laidback New Orleans cool.  When I hear someone declare Down By Law their favorite film set in New Orleans, I automatically assume they idolize the kind of dirtbag alpha male behavior exemplified by those two leads, who are both role models for a specific kind of French Quarter hipster that’s been around as long as I can remember (likely because this movie was released the year I was born).  Waits stars as a WWOZ radio DJ with a dumb little porkpie hat & goatee combo to match his dumb Cool Guy™ personality.  Lurie co-leads as a suave street hustler out of a classic shot-on-location noir starring a Sal Mineo or a James Dean (or, in the case of King Creole, Elvis doing his best impersonation of Dean).  They’re both framed for crimes they didn’t commit and are locked up in a small cell at OPP, spending the rest of the picture trying to out-alpha each other as top dog of their block.  For the first twenty minutes or so, Down By Law is the exact ambitionless, inert slacker drama Jarmusch always delivers, more concerned with cool cred than artistic ambition.  Then, the film’s third lead arrives in the form of Roberto Benigni as an Italian tourist who was arrested for manslaughter – the only one of the cellmates who wasn’t framed for his crime, and the movie’s saving grace.

I have whatever rare brain disorder causes people to find Robert Benigni funny; in my worst moments, I’m convinced he’s the funniest man who ever lived.  If nothing else, he’s the only comedic performer who’s ever dared to ask the question “What if Harpo Marx was obnoxiously loud?”, a true visionary.  Setting his chaotic cornball energy loose on an otherwise typically laidback Jarmusch set is the genius of Down By Law, a magic trick the director only ever came close to repeating with Mia Wasikowska’s vampire-brat in Only Lovers Left Alive.  Jarmusch clearly understands the value of what he has in Benigni, and he allows that vaudevillian presence to reshape the entire movie to great effect.  While Lurie & Waits are participating in an imaginary Cool Guy™ contest, pretending to heroically care the least about what’s going on around them, Benigni strives with every atom in his body to be classically entertaining.  He wills the movie into becoming more exciting, citing The Great Escape as an example of great American cinema because it has “lots of action.”  His cellmates put on stoic Tough Guy personae, but he’s the only character in the movie who hunts, who kills, who fucks.  By the final scenes the difference between him and the other boys verges on the philosophical; Lurie & Waits split into arbitrary, opposing directions just to spite each other while Benigni finds happiness staying in place, a fully content man.  In short, the problem with New Orleans these days is that too many young, impressionable dudes watch Down By Law and move here with ambitions to become suave street hustlers and hipster radio DJs, when what we really need is more classical Italian clowns.

The funny thing about Down By Law‘s reputation as New Orleans’s finest moment onscreen is that very little of the film’s runtime actually showcases the city.  Sure, it opens with sideways pans of shotgun homes & cemetery tombs set to one of Tom Waits’s greatest hits, but just as much of the third act features forward-facing boat trips into mysterious channels of the swamps outside the city.  The story opens with Waits & Lurie committing petty crimes as French Quarter gutter rats, but after they’re pinched by the NOPD we never return to the city streets.  Shot on cheap black & white film stock and deliberately ignoring the basic facts of New Orleans geography, the film often recalls the Poverty Row noir aesthetics of schlock like the 1956 Roger Corman cheapie Swamp Women.  The OPP cell block looks like it could’ve been filmed in a hastily decorated warehouse or apartment.  The prisoners’ escape from OPP directly leads into swamp water instead of the intersection of Tulane & Broad.  The cops-and-hounds hunt for the escaped prisoners is represented entirely as distant sounds to keep the costs of casting down.  This is scrappy, D.I.Y. filmmaking from the height of the Indie Boom that made festival darlings like Jarmusch moderately famous instead of desperately auditioning them for career-crushing deals with Marvel or Netflix.  WWCinema is pitched to its audience as a series programmed by and for legitimate working filmmakers, so it’s not surprising Jarmusch’s current go-to editor Affonso Gonçalves selected Down Bay Law for the series, given its local connections and its inspirational model for high-style, low-budget filmmaking.  Let’s just hope most of the impressionable young men in the audience latched onto the right role model at that screening; the city already has more than enough Tom Waits wannabes hanging around, doing nothing especially worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Jawan (2023)

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There was some mild online controversy earlier this year when American film critic Scott Mendleson referred to Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as “India’s Tom Cruise” in headline shorthand, as if SRK’s legendary career was secondary to its closest Hollywood equivalent. I’m going to risk doubling down on that accidental insult here by comparing those two stars’ current run of action blockbusters, hopefully in a more specific way. The cultural & industrial contexts of Cruise & SRK’s respective careers might be incomparable, but right now they happen to be the only world-famous movie stars keeping the lone-wolf action genre alive, and they’re both doing so decades past the point where they could reasonably play the archetype.  While Cruise has put in two old school star-power performances in the past year with M:I Dead Reckoning (yay!) and Top Gun: Maverick (booo!), SRK has done the same, if not better, in Pathaan and now Jawan.  Both stars have long enjoyed a kind of ageless, plastic handsomeness that they’ve tirelessly applied to nationalistic action spectacles in recent years, often to deliriously entertaining results.  And as outdated as that muscles-and-explosions version of action cinema feels this long after Stallone & Schwarzenegger’s heyday in the Reagan Era, Cruise & SRK both managed to surprise me this year in the exact same way.  There was a moment in the ludicrously overstuffed Dead Reckoning: Part 1 when it suddenly occurred to me just how many badass women Cruise had managed to gather around him as Ethan Hunt over seven entries in the ongoing Mission: Impossible series.  No longer relegated to minor roles as arm candy, distressed damsels, and refrigerated wives, Cruise had slowly built a small crew of fierce femme fighters in actors Rebecca Fergusson, Venessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and Hayley Atwell.  While most lone-wolf action blockbusters provoke you to think “Dudes rock!” (including Maverick & Pathaan), there was a brief moment of Dead Reckoning that left me thinking “I love women so much!,” a much rarer feat.  So, I was delighted that SRK’s latest, Jawan, wholly dedicates itself to that same novel cause, at least once it gets the requisite hero worship of its macho lead out of the way.

Jawan stars Shah Rukh Khan as a renegade prison warden who routinely sneaks a small girl gang of select prisoners out of jail to help him commit wholesome acts of political terrorism.  In a plot similar to this year’s Ajith Kumar bank-heist actioner Thunivu, SRK’s populist terrorist only takes hostages for media attention, deliberately going viral so he can expose corporate & governmental greed directly to The People.  He never actually threatens the lives of the Mumbai citizens at the business end of his guns & explosives, but he uses their terror to amplify his political messages on social media & traditional newscasts.  It’s an extremist cause but a righteous one, ultimately re-routing corporate & governmental bribe money to heal societal ills like high suicide rates among farmers who owe predatory banks unreasonable sums, underfunded government hospitals left to rot without proper subsidies and, the issue closest to his heart, long-overdue prison reform.  It’s initially jarring to watch hundreds of women prisoners applaud their warden in universal celebration, not to mention the adulation of the hostages he takes at gunpoint while masking his identity in public.  He’s always on the right side of the Us vs Them political divide, though, a righteousness backed up by his wholly dedicated girl-gang prisoner crew.  It’s like watching SRK arm the cast of Gangubai Kathiawadi with rifles & grenades to aim at the politicians & bankers who damned them to poverty in the first place.  Of course, since law enforcement only exists to protect property, not serve the people, armed forces are sent to swiftly, violently shut down his one-man Joker/Anonymous movement ASAP.  And of course, since SRK is SRK, he escapes a fatal fate at the government’s hands by simply wooing the woman in charge, romancing her to his side of the fight as part of the gang.

I’ve maybe revealed a couple surprise, pre-intermission plot twists in the above paragraph, but there are plenty more to be discovered throughout Jawan (including a ludicrous development that directly addresses how far its star has aged out of these kinds of roles).  This is a non-stop entertainment machine, the full package.  It marries the recent transcendent achievements of South Indian action-blockbusters out of Tollywood & Kollywood with the classic payoffs of Bollywood masala cinema (by hiring Tamil director Atlee for a traditional big-budget Hindi production).  You can feel that marriage most clearly in the musical romance sequences, which in recent years have more often been downplayed as music video asides but here feature at a central, prominent place in the narrative, emphasized just as much as the CG action spectacle of its mass shoot-outs, liberally tossed explosives, and glimpses of flaming horses.  There are references in the dialogue to other mass-entertainers in the same vein like the S.S. Rajamouli historical action epic Baahubali and the reliably charming Indian actor Alia Bhatt, solidly rooting the film in a larger industry of peers.  SRK is a major, load bearing pilar in that industry, and he’s afforded plenty of screenspace to ham it up here, both as a dashing romantic lead and as a grizzled political terrorist who hides behind old-school Universal Monster masks styled after The Phantom of the Opera & The Mummy.  His appeal as an action star is universal (to the point where comparing him to Tom Cruise really is an insult to his own unique, unmatched celebrity), but it’s probably not out of line to note that he has a particular appeal to heterosexual women as an object of desire.  So, there’s something wonderful about the way this particular crowd-pleaser surrounds SRK with hundreds of women, filling the frame to cheer him on and fight beside him as if the entire gender as a social group were his co-star instead of his assigned romantic partner in South Indian “Lady Superstar” Nayanthara.  I was charmed by the brief flash of that army-of-women supporting cast in Dead Reckoning, but Jawan outshone that aspect of it with the same blinding commitment to excess that Pathaan outshone all other McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible sequels with, besting them at their own game (even while their MVPs played on entirely different fields).

-Brandon Ledet

Project Wolf Hunting (2023)

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Often, when movie buffs say “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” they’re lamenting the loss of movie-star vehicles, serious dramas for adults, or mainstream movies that include any visual depiction of sex.  The “They don’t make ’em like they used to” complaint could extend to much trashier tropes & genres that have disappeared from American multiplexes in the past few decades, though, and it occurred to me while watching the Korean gore fest Project Wolf Hunting.  There is no time in history when a major American studio would have produced a film as grotesquely violent as Project Wolf Hunting for wide theatrical release, but it still plays like a nostalgic throwback to the blockbuster days of 1990s Hollywood.  Specifically, it’s a revival of the preposterous prison thrillers of that era, titles like Con Air, The Rock, Death Warrant, Ricochet, and Alien³.  Back when movies used to be led by action stars instead of IP brands, there was a wave of grimy, idiotic thrillers set in futuristic superprisons, which repentant or wrongfully convicted dirtbags played by Jean Claude Van Damme or Nicolas Cage would have to escape via brute lone-wolf strength & communal riots.  Project Wolf Hunting wistfully calls back to that era in its chaotic “story” of prisoner cargo ship mutiny, but it also triples down on the genre’s hyperviolence with tons more blood & viscera than all its previous titles combined.  Tons.  It’s an exciting change until it’s a numbing one, and by the end I would have much rather returned to the dinky charm of its Bruckheimer Era predecessors than spend another minute slipping around in its red-dyed corn syrup slop.  They just don’t make over-the-top prison thrillers like they used to, and apparently they never will again.

It appears that even the team behind Project Wolf Hunting knows that the nonstop hyperviolence of its cargo ship prison break can be numbingly monotonous, since it only plays the scenario straight for its opening hour.  The premise starts simple enough, with a ludicrous prisoner-exchange transport returning all of Korea’s cruelest, most dangerous criminals from their Philippines hiding place for trial & punishment via one lone, vulnerable cargo ship.  Of course, their criminal buddies on the outside seize the opportunity to start a jail-break riot on the ship, and most of the first hour is nonstop slaughter of cops & prison guards at the receiving end of bullets & blades.  Just as the movie’s threatening to tire itself out halfway into its runtime, the prisoners accidentally free a new flavor of violent threat they didn’t know was being transported in tandem: a Frankensteined supersoldier that has been kept “alive” via sci-fi superdrugs since Japanese experiments in World War II.  The zombie monster among them has stapled-shut eyes, a mouth full of maggots, and a bottomless appetite for “extreme & indiscriminate violence.”  He’s an impossible intrusion into what starts as a fairly pedestrian prison break thriller, so you’d think he’d change the film’s rhythms & trajectory in an exciting way.  Not really.  All the invincible Frankenmonster really does as a late addition to the party is allow the bloodbath to continue after practically all the cops have been destroyed, giving the prisoners a single target to focus their fists, knives, and bullets on, now to their own peril.  The practical gore and close-quarters combat is impressively staged throughout, with all victims & villains spraying the supercharged blood geysers familiar to vintage martial arts films like Lady Snowblood (and their modern homages like Kill Bill).  Whether they’re impressive enough to justify two consecutive hours of “extreme & indiscriminate violence” is up for debate.

The #1 thing that would’ve made me more enthusiastic about Project Wolf Hunting is if it were made when I was still a teenage gore hound.  The #2 thing is if it had a more charismatic action-hero lead.  This is the kind of large ensemble-cast action thriller where the main objective is to pack the cargo ship with as many high-pressure blood bags as possible without bothering to assign any one of them much of a distinctive personality.  The range between the most sensitive, pensive criminal on the ship and the scariest, most violent one is pretty wide, and no one really matters between those two extremes outside the brutal novelty of their individual kill scenes.  Because they’re all professional scumbags & sociopaths, they don’t even have much motivation to distinguish personalities amongst each other.  In the aggro parlance of the film, everyone is either an “asshole”, a “bastard,” a “motherfucker”, or a “piece of shit” – all unified in their collective need to “shut the fuck up.”  I always find that kind of shouted-expletive dialogue to be the telltale sign of a weak screenplay, but I also don’t know how much that matters in this particular instance.  Project Wolf Hunting‘s greatest assets are its value as a revival of the preposterous prison thriller genre and its eagerness to overwhelm the audience with bone-crunching gore.  As someone with a baseline affection for any monster movie with a high-concept gimmick premise, I’m willing to overlook a lot of its narrative shortcomings to enjoy its practical-effects violence.  It’s a pretty good movie in that context.  All it really needed to be a great one was a charismatic action star to help anchor the audience amidst the sprawling mayhem.  Unfortunately, they don’t really make those anymore.

-Brandon Ledet

The Platform (2020)

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“There are three types of people: those at the top, those at the bottom, and those who fall.”

Last December, James and I recorded a podcast episode on what we called “Vertical Class Warfare.” We discussed three genre movies that illustrated their class-based conflicts through an excessively blatant, literal metaphor in which the working class had to physically fight their way up a vertical structure to take down the upper-class oppressors who towered above them. The three movies that anchored the episode were Parasite, Us, and C.H.U.D., while High-Rise & Snowpiercer (a horizontal deviation on the theme) naturally came up in conversation. I would now like to add the Netflix-released sci-fi picture The Platform to that growing list, which is may even be more dutifully committed to its Vertical Class Warfare gimmick than any other movie mentioned. While the two films from last year that inspired the episode—Parasite & Us—invest time in developing the characters & interpersonal relationships staged in their Vertical Class Warfare scenarios, The Platform is almost singularly obsessed with the actual structure of its geographical class divide and how it is policed. It’s so into Philosophy & economic theory that there’s room for little else, ensuring that the movie is almost 100% worldbuilding – a guided tour of an already established dystopian hellscape. Luckily, it has more than enough Big Ideas & gory catharsis to pull that indulgence off.

A man with no established background or goals awakes in a concrete tower that resembles an impossibly tall prison. We learn the circumstances of this tower (“The Vertical Self-Management Center” in the official corporate-speak) along with this new resident/prisoner as he finds his own bearings. A viciously unhelpful, mysterious cellmate dodges his endless flood of questions and allows him to discover the rules of their confinement in his own time. As the stranger puts it (and as the rules of this growing subgenre dictate), there’s no need to explain these things because, “It’s obvious” – a phrase that’s repeated so often it effectively becomes the film’s self-parodic mantra. Gradually, we learn that prisoners are randomly assigned floor numbers at the start of each month, counting down from Floor #1 at the top to the seemingly bottomless number of higher-numbered floors hundreds of levels below. Every day, a platform lowers down each of these levels with an overflowing banquet that offers more than enough food to feed everyone housed in the facility. Except—and it’s obvious—the arbitrarily privileged gluttons on the upper floors gorge themselves on as much food as they can stomach, leaving little to nothing for the peasants below (despite having tasted the raw end of that deal themselves many, many months prior). Once this preposterous scenario is established, all there’s left to do is contrive a way for that cycle to be broken. How to achieve that systemic change, it turns out, is the one thing that is not Obvious.

The most rewarding thing about these kinds of movies is that they’re excellent conversation starters. The entire struggle of the movie is rooted in the frustration that the prisoners are wholly committed to their arbitrarily assigned class divides, abusing their temporary power over one another rather than seeking solidarity or inciting a prison-wide riot. It’s the same compromise most of us make every day in a rigged-to-exploit, Capitalist hierarchy: the need to comfortably survive another day outweighs the huge risks & efforts it would take to positively change the system forever. The way The Platform applies its titular metaphor to topics as wide-ranging as worker solidarity, the fallacy of “upward mobility,” and the cruel frivolity of fine dining in an age where people who cannot access it literally starve to death all serve to provoke the audience into active debate with its themes. Even the questions left by its constant worldbuilding (basically, what any aspect of society looks like outside the jail cells or the haute cuisine kitchen where the banquets are prepared) seem designed to provoke further discussion after the credits roll. Yes, the function of its central metaphor is brazenly Obvious, but the movie digs far enough into each logistic of its dystopian hierarchy that it keeps itself plenty busy after the rules of its world are initially established.

Luckily, heady ideas about economic inequality aren’t all that’s being offered on a platter here. The Platform is also committed to serving up horrific, stomach-turning violence in a full-on practical gore spectacle. The Platform pursues a “Eat or be eaten” cannibalism metaphor just as literally & extensively as it explores the logistics of its vertical food distribution contrivance. That way, your eyes are dazzled by traditional, gross-out genre payoffs in the forefront while your mind prods at the meaning & shortcomings of its Obvious political provocations in the background. This is an incredibly nasty slice of schlock with a deviously wicked sense of humor; it’s also a politically engaged provocation that’s obsessed with understanding & undermining the systemic power imbalances that keep us all stuck in place and at each other’s throats. It’s a perfect film to watch in these increasingly bizarre, dysfunctional helltimes where it seems like those very systems are crumbling before our eyes. It feels like there might be a chance that we’ll all soon break out of our own arbitrarily cruel rut and tear this prison down any day now – as long as we don’t eat each other alive before we achieve that solidarity.

-Brandon Ledet

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

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I’m struggling fully getting on board with the macho genre throwbacks of S. Craig Zahler. I did enjoy his instantly infamous cannibal gross-out Bone Tomahawk, despite my general distaste for Westerns and the feeling that its participation in “Native savage” tropes is a little too easily excused. I guess on some level I also enjoyed his follow-up to that attention-grabbing debut, the violent prison film Brawl in Cell Block 99. The overdose of testosterone running through Zahler’s films is wearing me down, though, a feeling that’s only compounded by his work’s slow-to-act, self-serious tone that “elevates” schlocky concepts with extended runtimes & deliberately over-written dialogue. Zahler is very good at what he does: revitalizing long-dormant “trash” genres with a fresh sense of meticulous craft & feel-it-in-your-bones brutality. There’s just a large part of me that misses the versions of these pictures that were quick, goofy, and less steeped in unexamined machismo.

I’m usually not a fan of his “lovable asshole”/Tough Guy with a Heart of Coal routine, but Vince Vaughn is perfectly cast here as a broken macho man on the wrong side of the law (and economic hardship). Recently laid off and facing the early signs of a crumbling marriage, his overly muscled protagonist becomes a reluctant drug-runner for some sneering, racial & homophobic slur-slinging Bad Guys, a career path that obviously lands him in jail. Once inside the pen, eternally typecast creep Udo Kier threatens the safety of his pregnant wife unless he assassinates a man held at the Maximum Security population of Cell Block 99, a prison within the prison. Motivated by this wicked act of blackmail, our anti-hero descends into the lower levels of the prison, as if clearing obstacles in a video game, by violently attacking/physically dismantling the guards & fellow prisoners. He eventually finds his target, but also engineers a spectacular act of revenge on his blackmailers in the process, leaving many destroyed bodies of (literally & figuratively) faceless baddies in his wake.

This plot feels just as akin to an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris cheapie from the 1980s (especially the part about the wife being held ransom as blackmail) as it does to the grindhouse prison movies Brawl in Cell Block 99 lovingly pays tribute to. The setup to the violent spectacle of the payoff takes much longer to develop, however, attempting to build a genuine emotional response out of its narrative those films never achieved. I’m not convinced Zahler achieved it either. I was on board for the film’s scraped-against-concrete, Saw-level torture device violence. However, outside being impressed by a stray turn of phrase, I was left completely cold by the emotional core of the story it told. This detachment was only made worse by its ugly, high-contrast digital photography and even uglier commitment to brute force masculinity. It’s not like the movie isn’t critical of Vaughn’s brutal machismo either. Early on, unchecked masculine rage is made to be monstrously grotesque, especially as he dismantles an entire car by hand out of romantic anger and benevolently lords over his tiny, shrinking domain. It only gets worse as he applies that same destructive masculine anger to human bodies, something the movie is well aware of. I just found the experience of dwelling in that headspace for over two hours to be exhausting & ultimately alienating, a similar feeling I had with Zahler’s previous film. Not everyone will have that experience, of course. Much like Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a technically well-made picture and your patience for diving into the depths of destructive masculinity will determine much of your experience with it.

-Brandon Ledet

Rewind Moment: Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

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Rewind Moments are those special scenes in films that deserve to revisited over & over again due to their overwhelming impact.

One of my all-time favorite documentaries is Nick Broomfield’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer. Aileen Wuornos is known as a psychotic serial killer who murdered several johns while prostituting in Florida from 1989-1990, a life detailed in the 2003 biopic Monster. Broomfield used this documentary to shed some light on Wuornos’ unfortunate upbringing while giving her the opportunity to speak and share her own story. After watching the film in its entirety, it’s difficult to not feel some sort of attachment to Wuornos. Her bulging eyes will haunt you for days.

There are so many “rewind moments” in this unforgettable documentary, but my favorite is the shot where she pretty much begs for her execution. She’s so terrifying and unstable in this moment, but at the end, I just want to give her a huge high-five for saying something so badass. I swear, if she’d ever been released from prison, John Waters would’ve picked her up in a heartbeat to star in one of his films. She has that special kind of charm.

-Britnee Lombas