Meadhall of the Comitatus

A SciFi Original!  Did you notice that?  Because SciFi wanted you to!  I don’t know why that is.

When you think of prisons that are haunted, your thoughts might naturally revolve around WHY said prisons are haunted.  Apparently you’re a freak for thinking that, because this movie has no interest in providing you with any such afterworldly motivations.  It’s a lot like when I play frisbee with my girlfriend.  It sails out there, looking good, asking only that I take that step forward for the catch, but somehow it never reaches me.  One step becomes two becomes a silly lunge to get something worth $0.99 at the dollar store.  SciFi’s Haunted Prison is my Frisbee, dammit.  I didn’t do well on the SATs, but that analogy can carry you home.  It’ll have to do that, too, because Jake Busey is too drunk to drive because this one time he saw Ron White drunk and decided he’d always be drunk too.  More on that in a bit.

Premise:  1/5

Can I please give this a 0?  Please?  A 6-man team of jewel robbers are on the lamb from the law (that’s practically the way they speak) and their Trigger McSqueezypants leader, Marco (Jake Busey), decides they’ll hole up in the above-mentioned Haunted Prison.  It’s the abandoned “Isla de la Roca Penitentiary,” on the Isle of the Rock, and it’s always had an evil reputation even before the cons were let loose and slaughtered the guards.  NOW, it’s just….barely interesting.

Meanwhile, a five-man team of college kids show up later that night to shoot their documentary on the island’s infamous prison.  Their leader, who’s directing the documentary, claims that they’ve never been there before, although later on we see them standing right there in a flashback.  Incredibly, the amount of sense this movie makes only sieves out from this point.  The kids meet the convicts, the convicts meet the ghosts, and a double-handful of people get possessed by a dorky goofball of a ghost.   One thread entices us throughout:  gore gore GORE GORE GORE!!!  GODLY gore!  This is one mean movie as far as undesirable deaths go, even if it has no idea what to do with itself past that.  What amused me is when the hot bandit girl got a pipe full of human waste dumped on her and then we cut right to her shower scene which is supposed to give us an immense boner.  Then she’s hung by the ceiling and chopped in half.  Nice SciFi employees.

Cast:  2/5

2 is a very common rating for Halloween Horrorama, and whether it stems from sympathy or a grudging admittance, I’m granting it to Haunted Prison‘s sad menagerie.  The actors themselves are tolerable enough–I just wanna drown their characters in bile or force them to play Russian Memory with forty Triscuits.  And Jake Busey, come on now.  His character concept for Marco, the robber bossman, is enitrely derived from the 3am coke-powered sentiment of “Hey, you know what I should DO.  I should be all like Ron White for this one.  Ron White with a GUN.  Tater Salad’s gonna tear shit UP, right Dad?” and then Gary Busey probably said “Right son, now go tell The Magic Indian in the backyard.”  In case that proves eerily accurate in a director’s cut, I should state that I don’t have any cameras in the Busey house, although now I want them on their own channel.  Anyhoo.

Sad thing is that Marco’s bullying antics are the only interesting thing going on from the cast.  The writers know this and cut to Marco all the way through.  Here Marco’s making a pun about someone not getting their cut, after they’ve been cut in half.  Now delight as Marco pulls out that old chestnut, “Why don’t you hang around?” when he sees…….yeah.  Blame the writing if you want, but Busey’s just a spazmo, flailing his gun around, kicking things, and yelling.  He even dressed and sported his hair so he could ape Ron White, fo fuck’s sake.  Beats hell out of the rest of the cast though.  A running gag for me was that the “director” kid is constantly called a “jock” or “big” when it’s clear he’s pretty puny.  He even manhandles the much-larger Busey, so I suspect he’s a member of the crew or a close relative.  Didn’t find him in the writing credits as expected

The actors playing the ghosts did okay, not great.  It was all in the cool FX!

Technical:  4/5

Oz is an innovator, so I’m just sticking with the broader “Technical,” too.

Weirdly high rating no?  But lo, ’tis so!  Honestly I think that Haunted Prison is simply an excuse for the SciFi guys to sharpen their gore FX, and for that I am truly grateful (someone gets his face strained through an iron grate, but I took the high road and DIDN’T pun on that.  Yeah, that’s what I did).  Goddamn were the FX cool!!  Someone gets hexsected in a licenseplate-cutting machine and that looks awesome, and the robber babe’s severed torso is about the grodiest thing you’ll see on cable.   Sure, they added about 20 organs you won’t find in the human body to make it outrageous, but I appreciate that.  Aside from intestinal spillage, ALL the gore looked realistic and really wowed me.

The ghosts also impressed me.  They materialize in a blackfire effect that I’ve seen more badly done in a few other films.  SciFi’s experimented with a lot of horror techniques and often missed its mark, i.e. the vibrating ghosts in Route 666, so I was glad to see this done right.  There’s also a visual clarity, a sharpness, about the ghosts that the living characters don’t have, accomplished with more use of white glare, I assume.

The penitentiary itself is the movie’s dirty secret.  It’s entirely CG, and the movie is ashamed of its private parts and only shows this outside shot for 1-3 seconds at a time.  Funny thing is, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared that much if I wasn’t forced to rewind after wondering how bad it must look when they cut away after 1.5 seconds.  Now I did it 6x.  You’re not the boss of me , movie.

So Waydigo crew! because the FX are the one-and-only reason you’d sit down for this puppy.  4/5 here really means jack shit.

Popcorn Factor: 1/5

You have popcorn? I’m eating your popcorn instead of watching Haunted Prison with you.  I’ll rather tease your parakeet with it, or flick it at your morbidly-overweight dog.  You know you shouldn’t feed that dog so much.  Don’t watch Haunted Prison as much as you do, either, because while the first half has ambitions to entertain and frighten, the last half is an insta-classic example of how you can’t inject plot into your movie like a pastry chef gets the cream into those delightful donuts of his.  Plot cannot be jizzed out.  Yeah, I said it.  This movie DOES it.  What can Diogenes have to do with Isla de la Roca Penitentiary?!  Who knows!  Just READ IT LIKE THEY WROTE IT, kid!  Haunted Prison‘s got one of the worst endings on record, not least because it commits the cardinal sin of ending the movie when it’s run out of film.  The action reaches a climax…of absurdity…and then the credits roll.  I always take that real personal.

So don’t see this, ever.  Now ya know, and I’m one review closer to the wizardry of Oz.