Those familiar with the works of the late, great Stuart Gordon will no doubt cite his gore-tastic and magnificently perverted H.P. Lovecraft adaptations as the director’s greatest influence – although for the life of me I don’t remember reading about the head giving head sequence in any version of the author’s Herbert West: Re-Animator stories. However, when you step back and take a longer look at Gordon’s filmography, you can see that he had quite a random, three film love affair with pulpy science fiction too with the Transformers influenced Robot Jox stomping in at 1989 and the goofy Space Truckers touching down in the late nineties.
While these movies certainly have their clunky charm, sitting snugly in the middle is Fortress, a violent, gruesome futuristic prison flick that arrived on the scene after starting life as an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle (he’s a big fan of Re-Animator, apparently) and then down-sized drastically to feature Christopher Lambert instead.
We’re in yet another one of those dystopian futures that’s amusingly past its sell by date (2017, if you must know) and in this one, we all live in an absurdly strict police state where if you go over a one-child limit on your household, you get sent off to the worst prison imaginable. That’s the fate that’s befallen ex-military couple John Brennick and his wife Karen who accidentally have conceived a second child after their first died at birth and after getting caught trying to smuggle her bun in the oven into Canada, both are caught and thrown in the super-clink known as the Fortress.
Run by the impressively inhumane Men-Tel Corporation, this state of the art gulag is a subterranean facility thirty floors deep that uses its work force as slave labour when it’s not cramming them into crowded cells, monitoring their dreams with “unauthorized thought processes” or keeping them in line with orally implanted “Intestinators” that either inflict intense pain on command or explode entirely if the sadistic director Poe so wishes it.
Like many other prison flicks, Brennick slowly endears himself first to his motley cell mates; the hopeful old timer Abraham, young offender Nino, whacked out bomb expert D-Day; and then to the prison at large when he refuses to kill hulking psycho-rapist Maddox simply because Poe has demanded it (I mean, saving a rapist? That’s quite a statement.).
However, Poe has designs on the similarly incarcerated Karen and her unborn child, having never experienced life outside his office within the Fortress and he focuses the entirety of his callous will and all the vicious torments he has at his disposal in order to break Brennick and obtain the life Men-Tel gas never allowed him to have.
As Brennick and his gang of misfits try to figure out a way to escape, the true horrors of Men-Tel are revealed as we find out what the corporation does with all those illegal babies.
While the thought of Arnold Schwarzenegger headlining a Stuart Gordon feels like a missed opportunity, the finished movie still retains of classic Arnie tropes despite having the Highlander himself in the lead. The pulpy approach to ultra-violent future-shock as it pokes rampant fascism and psychotic capitalism directly feels very much like a familiar mix of The Running Man and Total Recall (possibly a hint why Arnold bailed) with the latter film in particular providing a visual touchstone of a blocky, brutal time where your internals could become externals at any minute. However, where Paul Verhoven’s sci-fi social commentary is far more layered, Gordon’s is noticably more simplistic, employing a standard “facism is bad” tone in order to broach an unsubtle human rights thread while dropping in an infinite number of prison tropes, each with a futuristic wrinkle.
As a result, Fortress may liberally steal from almost ever prison break movie ever made, but it ends up being absurdly entertaining thanks to the fact that Gordon is obviously having a great time coming up with an endless number of inventive torments for his sweaty cast to endure. Take the Intestinator, a small, metal gadget forcibly launched into your intestinal tract by an absurdly phallic tube that forces itself into your mouth and when the shit hits the fan and the severe abdominal pains aren’t enough to make you play ball, huge “spatter guns” use the little instrument to lock on and blow a hole in your sternum the size of a basketball.
It may not be particularly ground breaking, but this mixture of social commentary and splatter ends up being incredibly endearing to watch and matters are further enhanced by Gordon packing out his cast with a plethora of cult actors who are already used to being elbow deep in witty viscera. Christopher Lambert delivers his dependable, gravelly, french-accented brand of heroics and Loryn Lockin (who distractingly looks like an off-brand Heather Lockear) give plenty of pluck as his devoted wife – however, it’s the supporting cast that really brings that culty, B-list tone home. Not only do we have Gordon regular, Jeffery Combs, having an absolute ball playing the, frazzled, hippy haired D-Day while other genre stalwarts like Tom Towles, Clifton Collins Jr. and Lincoln Kilpatrick get stuck into playing Brennick’s diverse cell mates. Shit, we even get Commando’s Vernon Wells as a burly prison rapist with 187 tattooed across his forehead and Robocop’s Kurtwood Smith as the decidedly creepy Poe.
It’s also nice to see that Gordon’s more extreme tastes haven’t been dulled by making a sci-fi actioner as he sneaks in a few sexually subversive plot points that starts from the prisoner director being able to view and punish his charges by watching their erotic dreams – the only means of escape most of these people will have – and them punishing them for it. In fact Poe, impotent and enhanced by the Men-Tel Corporation fits right in line with other twisted Stuart Gordon villains such as the sexually controlling nature of the decapitated Dr. Hill from Re-Animator or the perverted sadism of the transformed Dr. Pretorious seen in From Beyond. The fact that Poe is not only a blatant voyeur, but desires to live a human life by coverting Brennick’s wife adds a fascinating extra layer to a movie that also has exploding torsos, cyborg people with flamethrower arms and a scene where an Intestinator is removed from someone by a magnet pulling up from their esophagus, just proves that Gordon hadn’t lost his touch.
Those looking for more delicate social commentary should probably seek elsewhere, but if you fancy your futuristic action blunt, exciting and generally quite weird, then Fortress proves to be something of a forgotten gem that fully deserves to be realised back into gen pop.
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