The Return of Torgo and Wooley's September Excite-o-rama!

THE FORTRESS (1992)

This was the only remaining Stuart Gordon film that I hadn't seen, so I was pleased to find it streaming on Plex/Crackle. (I'm not counting the Ice Cream Suit thing unless one of you makes me watch that). The premise is that it's 2017 and Christopher Lambert is trying to escape from his futuristic prison. (He and his wife were imprisoned for breaking the one-child-per-couple rule).

I can confidently recommend this to anyone that also enjoys the Robot Jox/Space Truckers side of Gordon's films. Its low budget is very apparent and like those other films it feels like a poor man's version of a bigger hit, but as always Gordon manages to fill it with enough personality to keep things entertaining. There's lots of gore and J Combs plays a crazy person.

This is the first film I've seen with Lambert in the lead, and I gotta say I was less than impressed. (I guess I should watch Highlander one of these days). His wife was pretty unremarkable also. I read that this was originally being considered for Arnold but that didn't work out. So for the first time in history I found myself thinking "Gee I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger was in this." Has my long-standing Arnold phobia finally started to wane, or is Lambert just that dull?

But yeah, boring lead couple aside, this was pretty fun. None of my Letterboxd friends have logged this one. Anybody else seen it?

Sounds like we have similar thoughts except I'm slightly more tolerant of Lambert. He's sort of like the French Keanu Reeves: he has presence and physicality to spare, but I cringe whenever it's his turn to speak.

Yeah like I said that was my first exposure to him so I'm willing to give him another shot. It's not exactly his most famous role after all.

When it comes to Stuart Gordon, I take Bob Slydell’s approach to Michael Bolton: I celebrate the man's entire catalog. When he wasn't breathing new life into Lovecraft or Poe stories, he was sticking it to corporations like he did in Robot Jox and this movie. It's set in a dystopian 2010's - well, more so - in which there's a one-child policy that, if violated, results in a long sentence in the titular prison, which is operated by the evil Men-Tel corporation. While attempting to sneak into Canada, military man John (Christopher Lambert) and pregnant wife and fellow officer Karen (Loryn Locklin) learn this the hard way. In prison, he bonds with his cellmates, which include D-Day, one of Jeffrey Combs' many oddballs, and a young Clifton Collins, Jr. He also earns the ire of prison director Poe (Kurtwood Smith), who much to John's chagrin takes a liking to Karen.

Besides for-profit prisons, Gordon exploits our fears about corporations intruding into our lives in ways both scary and interesting. The most worrying of these is the prison AI that scans the inmates’ minds while they dream and punishes them for having good ones in a way that would make Freddy Kruger blush. In other words, this is likely David Cronenberg's favorite prison movie. It has a relatively low budget, but you wouldn't be able to tell based on how well-realized the fortress is. The laser bars on the cell walls are a bonus, as is the director's office, which is lined with so many video screens, Poe might as well be the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. Kurtwood Smith makes him into one of his many enjoyably hateable and sleazy villains, and he somehow manages to become even more loathsome when he reveals his origins and that one-child policy's purpose. As for Lambert, he's no expert at line delivery, but he makes up for it with his presence and physicality, and I enjoyed Locklin's performance for how good she makes Karen keep secrets from Poe. This is primarily an action movie, but fans of Gordon's horror work will be satisfied, especially in the stomach-churning (literally) ways the prison punishes inmates for violating the rules.

The predictions this movie makes about the dangers of corporations becoming too big and powerful are more on the nose than its creators probably would have liked. In spite of these predictions and everything I like about the movie, it doesn't do that much you haven't already seen in the typical prison flick. In fact, I could make a decent list of its similarities with The Shawshank Redemption, the Hong Kong movie The Prisoner from a couple years prior, etc. It still proves that Stuart Gordon could do no wrong, and considering how much more fun and smarter it is than similar movies from this era that have bigger budgets, it should have been more of a hit (it did very well overseas and on video, at least).

My rating: 3 intestinators out of 5

My guy (or gal): D-Day. Sure, he's a little crazy, but his selflessness and special skills are all that you could ask for in a cellmate. Plus, it's Jeffrey Combs.

These were my thoughts back in February of this year. I'm starting to think I'm a bigger fan of Gordon's space/sci-fi movies than of his Lovecrafts. Those are fun, of course, but they're not MY Lovecraft, if you know what I mean.

I have come to feel that if you even get the spirit of Lovecraft legit into your movie, you're doing pretty well.

Of course, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward is possibly the best contemporary adaptation I've seen in the form of The Resurrected (1991).

Everything else I either sort of dislike or I only like patches of. Even though I respect him as a unique voice, I generally find his aesthetic too superficially showy. Not terribly poetic. Garish in the worst sense. I think he simply has too many ideas in his head, and they are always pushing eachother out of the way. Nothing settles long enough for me to appreciate it. Or, I feel, long enough for even him to really actualize how to make it its best version of itself.

I agree for the most part and I think if I'd seen his films before reading the stories I'd have a better handle on his approach. But approaching Gordon's Reanimator for the first time, as an already-established HPL fan, requires some adjustments to say the least. Now that I know what he's up to I've enjoyed the films more on subsequent viewings. It's just not the Lovecraft movies I would make. With his sci-fi films, there isn't that hurdle for me to jump, so those are a more comfy fit for me.


oooooh Dan O'Bannon! Why haven't I seen this one? Watchlisted.

Oddly enough, I thought about the jousting scene in it when hearing other people recently complain about the ahistorically, overly violent (overly deadly) jousting in that Game of Thrones spinoff series.

Well, I agree on Re-Animator, while I think the movie is a ton of fun, it's playing extremely fast and loose with the original story. And you get a little less of the overall Lovecraft vibe also because that particular story doesn't deal much if at all in the lore of Lovecraft's universe.
From Beyond, on the other hand, I just eat up as a Lovecraft fan because it really does seem to come from the Lovecraft universe and is like what that story would be like if it took place in 1985. Plus it's just awesome. I'm pretty sure I was high the last time I saw it and I just gushed about how much I liked it (on Corri, unfortunately).
The Resurrected is just a contemporary retelling of CDW pretty much on the nose, it just uses a cop as the "main" character to essentially act as the narrator or reader/audience surrogate of the story. But it hits all the main points.

Dagon is another one where I think he nailed the HPL thing for the most part

I watched Jabberwocky a few years back and it just really fell flat for me. I was so bored. I kept waiting for something to grab me or startle me or make me laugh and it never happened.

I think Jabberwocky is a really interesting movie. But it is an underwhelming kind of interesting. I don't think anyone leaves it invigorated by what they just saw. It's kind of an experiment in weird drudgery.

Drudgery is the right word. And weirdly I didn't have any expectations, so it wasn't like "Why isn't this funnier?" or "Why isn't this weirder?". Nothing in it reached out to me, which was disappointing. I'd just seen it on someone's list of fantasy favorites or something like that.

I finally tried again during the pandemic and was charmed by its Bizarro nothingness. I still feel there is more there than I give it credit for. That I'm still missing something. But I'm now at an age where I'm mostly fascinated by it NOT being what I thought it would be all those years ago.

It has that distinctive 80s grime look (YES, I know it was made in the 70s, leave me alone!), in a similar space as movies like Neverending Story or Ladyhawke, but none of the fantasy or adventure or humor or real grit.

I'd like to say I'm intrigued like you are, but I'm not. The most interesting thing I can say about it is that it's one of a handful of times I forgot I was watching a film while watching that film.