aka Haunted Prison
- Directed by Kevin VanHook
- Written by Rick Glassman and Kevin VanHook
- Starring
- Jake Busey
- Kyle Schmid
- Claire Coffee
- Scott Whyte
- Shanna Collins
- Produced by Karen Bailey and Kevin VanHook
Cliches become cliches because people find them useful. Cliches stay cliches because people are lazy. Cliches stop being cliches because they are no longer useful, usually when lazy people overuse them until whatever power they once had has been sanded from their faces.
Kevin VanHook, the co-writer/co-producer/director (aka, the “Blame me!” guy), as done the world a service here. By multitasking, has hastened the demise of three, three, three cliches in a single movie by putting them to poor and lazy use.
The first such cliche is indicated in the title, or at least one of the titles under which this movie has been made available in various venues: The title “Haunted Prison” does indeed stem from the fact that the movie revolves around a haunted prison. I am obliged to note that there have been good and competent movies made about haunted prisons. The majority of haunted prison movies owe their genesis to the realization that, hey, there’s an abandoned prison available to shoot in! Quick, let’s come up with a haunted-prison script! (See also: haunted hospitals, haunted abandoned high school, and of course, haunted generic warehouse spaces.)
Mike, hammered.
But before we get to see the haunted prison, we’re introduced to Overwhelming Cliche #2: Keith (Kyle Schmid), Brian (Scott Whyte), and Missy (Claire Coffee), three college students researching the riots that shut down the old Isla de la Roca prison. Why? Because they’re shooting a documentary, of course! “College documentarians” have replaced “partying fratboys” as the new black of horror movies. These three start off by interviewing Mr. Elias (Stacy Keach), one of the guards present on that fateful day fifteen years ago when hundreds were killed in explosive riots, and the prison was shut down. Thanks to the flashback footage we see as Elias tells them his story, it soon becomes apparent that he’s scarcely an unimpeachable source: when he says that he kept himself clean, we see him accepting bribes; when he talks about how some guard just went off and shot a prisoner, we se that it was he who did that; and when he complains that “some fool” decided to open the cell doors from the master switch, we see that, again, it was he who did it. Elias escaped from the flames in the burning prison only by chopping off his own pinned legs with a fire axe, which is why he’s now legless and covered in scar tissue. All of which is very neat and keen and all, and contributes absolutely nothing to the movie as a whole. Except, you know, Whoa — ominous.
And now, finally, the prison, realized in its exterior shots by an unconvincing CGI facade ofa Spanish-style jail, completely unlike the gritty 20th-century interiors in which we’re going to wander for the rest of the movie. And here, finally, is Overwhelming Cliche #3: a cadre of jewel thieves on the run from a heist turned bloody, who decide to hole up in the abandoned prison for a couple of days. As tradition dictates, the band of thieves will be a varied bunch, all the better to bicker during their confinement; also as tradition dictates, their leader, Marco (Jake Busey) is ass-whack insane (because, hey, Jake Busey), and one of their number (James Leo Ryan) is wounded.
“Boy, I’ve never seen such tight security around a low-budget casting call!”
So. A bunch of thieves in one end of the prison, a bunch of filmmakers in the other, and not a soul wonders at why entering a locked maximum-security prison should be so easy. Not that they’ve got long to wonder, because — ghosts! First, only a few people see them, like Marco; but little by little, as members of the various parties (both of which are artificially inflated to provide body count) are killed by vengeful spirits, everyone begins to see the shades, their forms obscured by a CGI effect that says, “Hi! I’m a CGI effect!”
I could regale you with detailed accounts of who snipes at who and who waves guns at who and who encounters members of the other party first, but all of that bored me the first time around, and I have no wish to bore myself anew in the retelling. And far too much of that is filler, anyway; a character gets separated from the others by the mysterious tripping of the lockdown switch, and spends ten minutes apart before being reunited to no great consequence. Marco and his electrician co-thief Hector (Renaldo Gallegos) go back and forth to the fusebox about a bazillion times, trying to restart the power. Other characters crawl through ductwork — that’s right, maximum-security prisons have accessable ductwork large enough for adults to crawl through easily — and get outside the prison and the yard, then inexplicable head back inside when they find their boat is gone. “Hey, no boat, I guess we’ve got nothing better to do than allow ourselves to be trapped again inside the malevolent structure that wants us dead.”
“Five foot high, and three may walk abreast” should not apply to ductwork.
And that’s a large part of it; the place itself is evil, on top of the ghosts of the various criminals. (Lemme guess, VanHook always loved The Shining, right?) But more than simply evil, the prison also has a keen sense of exactly how long a feature film needs to be, and so it toys with its victims and picks them off just often enough to get a full ninety minutes out of their plight. Even then, there’s padding; when the longest single scene in the movie takes place in a bathroom, you know that the pacing’s just not right. And there’s simply no excuse for some of the dialogue, which includes such fresh gems as, “All right, let’s just try to stay calm,” And my personal favorite: “There’s gotta be some sort of logical explanation for all this.” (If ever those words escape my lips, I shall fully expect a well-deserved lethal smackdown.)
If you’re here for the gore, you might just find the bloody bits satisfying, if infrequent: One thief gets extruded through a wire mesh, another gets diced by a license-plate-cutting machine, a third is chopped in half by a ceiling fan. (An odd emphasis on sectioning, if you ask me.) Filmmakers also get killed, though usually in ways that maintain their structural integrity. And in between, various people are possessed by the malevolence of the place, though usually not long enough to have done any damage while under the influence.
Because what’s a prison movie without some kind of shower scene?
There is of course a deeper plot to it all, but it remains vague and underdeveloped, something about Marco’s grandfather having been both a guard and an inmate at Isla de la Roca. And the only way we find that out is is that Keith and Brian go looking in the administration offices for some kind of building schematic to find a way out. Not only did the Powers That Be leave the prison absolutely intact after the riots, not even bothering to clean the paperwork out of the offices, but Keith apparently thinks he’ll find the schematic he needs while perusing all of the old prisoner files. Because that’s where they’d be filed, right?
“Don’t give me any lip.” Get it? Get it? “Lip”? HA!
It’s a movie that never bothers to pick a protagonist, define the menace for the characters, or make much sense in any other respect, and because of that, it never really justifies its existence.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 34
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- Ghostbusters references: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
- (Julienne Irons, credited as “Female Clerk,” played Lt. Uhura in four episodes of the fan-produced Star Trek: New Voyages, but I can’t count that or the Paramount ninja attorneys will get me)
