Watch Punishment Park For Free

Did you people see the same film I saw?

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

I remember a contemporary review of this film from a major news magazine - Time, Newsweek, that level of profundity - juicily enthralled with this insipid cartoon, a psychobabble valentine to an endlessly self-aggrandizing generation. After seeing it a few years later at a student cinema, I realized one of the reasons I hated American pseudo-radicals is their utter contempt not only for "law and order", but for ordinary Americans, as well. ...For me. One visionary hippie burbles, "we don't have to call them pigs because they know what they are." That pretty-much sums up the world-view of all our trust fund revolutionaries in that thankfully ancient era. They grew up to be Wall Street traders, bankers and other affluent thieves who've reduced the American working class to near-poverty status. They won. The pigs are suffering.Like some overheated reviewers here, the alternative press often has praised "PP" as a "chilling vision of the future". OK. It's 43 years later. Hippies have vanished as counterculture vanguard - not because they were hunted down in the desert, but because they outgrew their own retarded fables. So... Where are these killing fields? Where are the American gulags? This turgid agitprop is for true believers, the ones too tendentious to realize this musty dream failed decades ago. Power to the people. ...But only in Malibu and Great Neck, apparently.Enjoy!

Peter Watkins is arguably one of the most underrated and under appreciated filmmakers of all time. His documentary approach to fictional filmmaking is both unique and challenging in a way many modern audiences may have become unaccustomed too.Listen here: http://moccast.blogspot.no/2013/03/episode-one-punishment-park.htmlWatkins career never saw him become a mainstream director, his one studio production 1967's Privilege was not a commercial success although it did not stop Watkins from making several more films.In this first episode of the Masters of Cinema Cast Joakim and I will be discussing the Blu Ray re- release of his 1971 film Punishment Park.It is a film that could hardly be described as easy going wearing its political heart well and truly on its sleeve. It is possibly the most angry of Watkins films too, the 60's had come and gone and the cultural and sociological revolution many had anticipated had failed to materialise. Vietnam was still raging and even the Apollo moon landings were now barley making the news.Yet Punishment Park is not merely a relic of its time. Even today it is still frightening pertinent and in the wake of the War on Terror and the blurring of the lines of morality remains as powerful now as it was on its release.http://moccast.blogspot.no/2013/03/episode-one-punishment-park.html

Punishment park is nearly a good film. It revolves around a group of hippies who are suffering from some kind of political activism that has turned them into zombies intent on overthrowing all military might. Shot in documentary style fashion there are obviously many comparisons that have been made with The Blair Witch Project (a film that would come many years later and use different subject matter to tell the same story). Punishment Park fails in it's nihilistic premise of of outlandish bum sex scenes leading to a grand orgy of violence as the protesters are shot down and raped in front of a watching news crew. These scenes were a little overdone and the gore was of a very low quality. 3 out of 10. Watch this film only if you are a hippie.

I was 16 in 1968 and got involved with all of the 'hippy' stuff, which for me/us, mainly consisted of going to lots of concerts and getting altered quite a bit - we had a lot of fun in a (believe it or not) simpler time. I attended several peaceful (for the most part) anti-war protests in Chicago in 1969 and got involved with a group of students at my high school (Lane Tech) who were trying to change the dress code and several other restrictive parts of the setting there; a few kids were even involved in SDS (a pretty radical group).I think this film, though well-made for the time and depicting a fairly accurate account of the conflict between true radicals and the 'establishment' (in the tribunal scenes) fails badly with the 'punishment park' part, a ridiculous and implausible scenario where young people convicted of conspiracy against the government are sent off into the dessert on foot and without water and then hunted down and executed by the police and National Guardsmen. In depicting law enforcement as such totally brutal cowards, the film does a disservice to the credibility of real events back then such as Kent State and the 1968 Democratic convention.Anyway, for me, the totally black/white stereotypical portrayals of law enforcement in this film ruin the credibility of the message so I'll pass on saying this is a good movie.