9/5/2023 0 Comments Escape prison moviesReally the effect is nothing more than a celluloid version of the Quantel Paintbox screen-flips that were so much in vogue on better-budgeted British TV such as The Kenny Everett Video Show, but somehow it still works.Ħ: Fortress (1993) Stuart Gordon’s sci-fi prison flick shares the same explosive motif of Wedlock, wherein ward Christopher Lambert is implanted with an abdominal inhibitor which causes incredible pain to dissenters and misbehavers, and can even explode if necessary. In Superman II, the Phantom Zone was destroyed by a Richard Lester-added nuclear bomb being inadvertently thrown in its direction by Superman. For a sci-fi prison, it’s pretty low-tech hardly anything works, there are no weapons and, as inmate Danny Webb declares “all we’ve got here…is shit!”.ħ: Superman/II – (1978/80)The effects for the ‘Phantom Zone’, the bizarre floating quadrangle/mirror that sucks up supervillains Zod, Nod and Ursa at the start of Richard Donner’s trail-blazing superhero epic, were inspired by an optical that Donner had seen on a breakfast cereal commercial ultimately the company behind it were called in as consultants for the sequence. have all decided to become Ward-like monks and errr…happen to have an iron foundry and smelting vats round the back. Notionally it was originally a maximum-security prison for psychopaths, rapists and general galactic scum, who…errr. The confusion over the film’s transmogrification from Vincent Ward’s ‘wooden monastery in space’ to a cheaper ‘penitentiary planet’ set shows both in the design and mixed messages as to what Fiorina-161 was and has become. Ultimately the prison’s designers and security consultants didn’t count on Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) doping a dopey security guard with enough iron for Eric Lensherr to extract and reconstitute into a weapon of escape.Ĩ: Alien 3 (1992)Fiorina-161, known euphemistically – and rather biblically – as ‘Fury’ – is the much evolved prison setting for David Fincher’s ill-starred entry to the Alien canon. Whilst absurdly aesthetic for a correctional facility, the sight of Nelson apparently playing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on a row of frozen convicts is one of Minority Report’s most memorable visuals.ĩ: X-Men (2000)/ X2 (2003) Bryan Singer almost has us believing that you could construct a really solid penitentiary entirely from plastic at the end of the first X-Men film, and it’s a touching gesture from Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) to his life-long friend and recent nemesis Magneto (Ian McKellen) that he has a plastic wheelchair especially built so that he can keep up his prison visits and chess-games with the old rotter. The prison is an ethereal and undulating chamber of coffin-like structures within which the inmates dream out their lives, a typically PKD scenario that is nonetheless not in the original story (though has shades of his novel Ubik). In the meantime here are some other fantastical lock-ups from the deranged brain of science-fiction…ġ0: Minority Report (2002) Framed Precrime operative Tom Cruise finally ends up in the organ-like prison presided over by Tim Blake Nelson in Spielberg’s Philip K. Looking further ahead, there’s Sascha Penn’s Ditch (2010), where one of Jupiter’s moons serves as a ‘prison-planet’. Sounds like Alien Resurrection via Oz? We’ll have to wait and see. Long-time Jean Pierre Jeunet collaborator Marc Caro releases his space-prison movie Dante 01 in mid-September, where a mentally scarred survivor of an alien encounter is destined to cause psychological and practical torment amongst the prisoners and gaolers.
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