When I look at the brief, but weirdly specific run of “electric chair horror” that sparked up during the late 80s, it really does seem that there’s some juice in the argument that the death penalty is simply not a deterrent. I mean, how can it be when movies like Wes Craven’s Shocker, or House III (aka. The Horror Show) kept maintaining that throwing the switch on mass murdering monsters such as Horace Pinker and Max Jenke would simply return jacked up with funky superpowers. But before those aforementioned psychos got a whole new lease of live after riding the lightning, there was one movie who beat them to the punch by a good couple of years.
Before he steered Freddy Krueger into MTV territory, sent Stallone up a mountain and bankrupted a studio with a pirate movie, Renny Harlin made his American debut with a moody ghost flick that flew in the face of convention by making its potential victims a bunch of stony-faced convicts rather than a bunch of clueless teens.
It’s to enter Prison – or as I like to call it: The Goreshank Redemption.
Back in 1964, a group of impassive faces watches as criminal Charles Forsyth is lead to the electric chair for a murder of a fellow prisoner the condemned man claimed he did not commit. However, that doesn’t stop him from getting fatally zapped into oblivion, while hard-ass prison guard Eaton Sharpe looks on – but a mere four years later, Creedmore Penitentiary is ultimately closed down and left to rot.
Or, at least, it should be. A quick zip forward to the present reveals that due to the chronic overflow of other prisons, Creedmore is being reopened to house around 300 imates who are being sent to the Wyoming facility despite the fact that it’s a rundown shithole. Tasked with helping to partially renovate the very prison they’ll be rotting in, many of the prisoners are already disgruntled at the ghastly conditions they’re being forced to live in, but matters are made worse when we discover that Sharpe has been posted as the warden. If the man was amoral during his time as a guard, the additional power has now made him virtually sadistic, and he constant throws his weight around in the form of brutal punishments he doles out every time some weird shit goes down.
However, the “weird shit” in question isn’t actually being caused by the prisoners, because after the wall leading to the sealed off execution chamber is broken down, the vengeful spirit of Charles Forsyth breaks free and starts slaughtering both guards and prisoners in various savage ways.
As career car thief, Burke; old timer, Cresus; gigantic Tiny and chatty Lazano try to avoid getting pierced by pipes, wrapped in barbed wire and getting shot by increasingly nervous guards, a member of the Department Of Corrections starts to believe that Eaton has more to do with these hauntings than he’s letting on. Hard time is about to get a whole lot harder.
While Prison seems to have been largely forgotten by the horror going public at large, I have to say that it impressively avoids a lot of conventions that you’d expect of an 80s haunted prison movie produced by Charlie Band and directed by Renny Harlin. For a start, while the genre was in the midst of sizable high that was packed with creative slashers and elaborate monsters, Prison is something of a more thoughtful, mature affair despite including more than it’s fair share of gruesomely creative deaths. While other takes of this movie probably would’ve had Forsyth bother a bunch of teens exploring a dilapidated prison, this movie embraces it’s concept and makes its cast hardened criminals, which is pretty ambitious when you consider that casting sweaty, man mountains as vulnerable victims is fairly counterintuitive. In addition to this, the film may adopt most of the common stereotype characters seen in prison movies (old, black lifer; enigmatic thief; vindictive, authoritarian warden), but it doesn’t actually run them into the ground and avoids them coming off as mere caricatures or cartoons. In fact, considering that a lot of stuff from Charlie Band’s Empire years were quite campy affairs (Ghoulies, Eliminators, Metalstorm 3D), it’s genuinely surprising that the premise is played so straight. Even more surprising is that the lead of the film is played by a mostly shirtless Viggo Mortensen who seems to have borrowed Til Schweiger’s butt chin for the gig and attacks the role with the same, bristling, enigmatic energy he later brought to his bigger roles. Other familiar faces in the form of Tommy Lister Jr. and Chelsea Field also round the film out nicely, but another surprise comes from how well Harlin can hold the atmosphere.
Not to downplay the talents of the director, but subtlety isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a guy that once gave us a scene that saw a shark use Stellan Skarsgård as a battering ram and another that had Freddy Krueger transform a gym nut into a cockroach.
However, large sections of Prison are devoted to sustaining a rather opessive ambience that’s greatly enhanced by some impressive lighting effects and the fact that the production is shooting in an actual closed down correctional facility which Harlin sensibly milks for all it’s worth. But what makes Prison so oddly memorable is that while the director takes the time to set up mood and gives the characters time to breathe and feel weight, he also can’t wait to move onto the film’s body count which proves to be so vicious, you can’t help but wonder if the whole enterprise was just to nab him that upcoming Elm Street gig.
While other movies predominantly featuring murderous hauntings usually result in people being pushed down the stairs or being goaded into suicide or something, the ghostly force of Charles Forsyth seems to have gotten his revenge training at the feet of the Cenobites from Hellraiser. For example, Chuck’s opening salvo involves roasting a man alive while he “cools” in solitary confinement, be then moves on to lancing a hopeful escapee with multiple pipes and, in arguably its most extreme moment, mummify one poor bastard with razorwire and launch him through the floor of his bosses office. It’s a nice, jarring juxtaposition to the quieter moments as the film veers from gritty drama/mystery to to flat out gore fest and then back again at a moment’s notice.
It ain’t perfect. For a guy who loves a bit of the old razzle dazzle, Harlin doesn’t seem to be as comfortable when it comes balancing the climax which seems torn between keeping things subtle or going “full Empire” as the corpse of Forsyth (played by future Jason, Kane Hodder) pops up in the final reel. However, while the result should be quite something, it’s so brief it feels more random than an actual big finish.
An under-the-radar prison chiller that takes its time to make the inmates actual human beings – and then rips them to pieces – Prison may not be an example of the absolute cream of the 80s horror crop, but it pulls enough of the right switches to nicely hold the attention. Plus with discussions about prisoner reform, overcrowding, corruption and the use of the death penalty, this electric chair powered chiller remains nicely… current.
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