Watch Prison For Free

One of my all time favorites.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

While there are a number of plot flaws, this remains one of my all-time favorite horror films of the 80's. The film has a constant foreboding atmosphere and is very unpredictable. A great cast ensures credibility and the effects are really good for its time, especially the scenes where they break through the old execution chamber, the chair crashing upward through a ceiling, and the body falling through the roof during breakfast. The prison becomes increasingly chaotic as the film progresses and the haunting ensues, and it really is fantastic entertainment! I'm so thrilled the film had a beautifully restored Blu Ray release!

A cash-strapped prison board decides to reopen an old, run-down slammer that has been closed since 1968, putting no-nonsense warden Eaton Sharpe (Lane Smith), an ex-guard at the establishment, in charge of running the show. When Sharpe orders two of the new inmates (one of whom is played by a young Viggo Mortensen) to break down the sealed-up entrance to the execution chamber, he unwittingly unleashes the vengeful spirit of dead convict Charlie Forsythe, who was wrongfully sent to the electric chair.With the two men responsible for this dreadful miscarriage of justice currently residing in the very same prison as Forsythe's ghost, one might expect retribution to be swift, but director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea) drags out matters for over 100 minutes, chucking in as many hoary prison drama clichés as possible in the process, whilst having his malevolent spook kill off several other characters for no discernible reason other than to pad out the action and meet the gore quota—except that the splatter here is remarkably tame despite the inventive nature of the deaths.5.5/10, rounded down to 5 for the cinematography, which utilises a blue tint and smoke throughout in a bid to add style and atmosphere, but which, in reality, only succeeds in making everything blue and smoky.

I pulled down a VHS box from my vast collection - many unseen - and picked out a movie, based on the box art, I thought would be fun, and yes, bad. Prison had that 80s cheesy look all over that box. I sat down and watched, and lo! and behold!, found that sometimes we do indeed sit down to a movie with preconceived expectations in mind. Fortunately, I reversed mine quickly and soon realized I was sitting down not just to an okay film but a rather good movie in total. Prison tells the story of an old, dilapidated prison being reopened to save on budgetary concerns. It looks creepy as all empty and filled with prisoners. The prison used as a set is incredibly atmospheric and easily the most important character in the film. The story using the prison as its central setting tells in a prologue of a man being killed via the electric chair. We see Lane Smith as a guard - tearing away a Crucifix before sending the man to his Maker. We then go to present day, first with a government board at a meeting deciding to open the prison and send a beautiful doctor in to make sure that conditions are acceptable as she campaigned vigorously against re-opening the old prison. Then we see the new warden, Lane Smith, haunted by a nightmare in bed - and given the new job of opening a prison he has not been to in years. Well, the rest follows suit: prisoners and guards arrive with plenty of stereotypes abounding. We are given some character depth and several of the prisoners are interesting characters. The acting is better than one might expect with Lane Smith doing as always a workmanlike job. Viggo Mortenson as a very different prisoner being solid. Tom Everett, Tiny Lister, and Ivan Kane really exploring the boundaries of their stereotypical characters. Chelsea Field is okay as the female lead. The best performance is by Lincoln Kilpatrick, an underrated character actor, as Cresus - a prisoner who had been in that very same prison years ago when the "man" had been executed" with some kind of terrible secret. Prison is not the next best thing to sliced bread or anything like that, but it is definitely worth a look and definitely better than most would expect from it. I was pleasantly surprised at the way director Renny Harlin created a story so visually atmospheric. The film has a tense, taut pace and Harlin knows how to build his scenes. There are a few excessively shot gore scenes - the one with the barbed wire was a bit much as was the one with all the pipes. But these scenes are visually creative and interesting. The acting is uniformly decent. The script actually much more cohesive than one usually gets from films like these. That may in part be credited to Irwin Yablans who wrote the story. You may remember he came up with the idea of making Halloween scary as a holiday. Here he makes incarceration a hell of a lot more scarier than it already is. Give Prison a break(get it).

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.