PENITENTIARY

You know what they say about UK Prisons don’t you? The places are rife with sex starved individuals, caught in a web of drug debts with no prospects – and that’s just the screws!!! In all seriousness, the Prison Service in this country has been regularly criticized for being more akin to a Holiday Inn then a correctional facility. It’s a sentiment not lost on Arrow Video who, this month, have resurrected a title from the USA whereby being in the slammer really meant doing some hard time! Welcome folks to - PENITENTIARY!!

It’s 1979 and hitching across America to get over his parents tragic death is Martel Gordone. (Leon Isaac Kennedy). The young 20 something Nubian male appears to be healing when one happy hooker and two racist bikers later he finds himself incarcerated for a murder he did not commit.

6 months later and Gordone enters the state penitentiary. Now there are three essentials at these places:

1. A prison number.

2. A cell location.

3. A nickname!

Martel soon becomes known as ‘Too Sweet’. As he struts across the prison yard, which by the way is complimented with live disco band (Hey - this is the 1970’s after all!), he encounters the truly colourful inmate fraternity. There is Sweet Pea (Wilbur ‘HiFi’ White), the cross dressing out of the closet fag; Jesse ‘The Bull’ Amos (Donovan Womack); ‘Seldom Seen’ (Floyd Chatman), a mature studious lifer who will later become Too Sweets boxing coach - Mr Miyagi with an afro if you will. But the worst by far is Sweet’s sexual predator cellmate, ‘Half Dead’ (Badja Djola) who really should have been called Half Dentures due to the array of missing teeth in his feral mouth!

Too Sweets first challenge is to avoid getting "broken in". He swiftly avoids a good old fashioned buggering by knocking the bejeezus out of Half Dead. His fighting skills soon get noticed by Lieutenant Arnsworth (Chuck Mitchell - an obese Caucasian gentleman with a cigar permanently attached to his mouth who, refreshingly, is NOT portrayed as an evil white supremacist!) Hard but fair, Arnsworth actually comes across as quite likable character and is a far cry from "The Man’ clichés of lesser Blaxploitation flicks who blame poor old ‘honky’ for everything.

With Too Sweet’s anal virginity safely preserved, he enters the resident boxing tournament. With the added incentive of a prison endorsed connubial visit and early parole, he is determined to be covered in glory, freedom – and ‘some sweet sweet pusssaaaaaaay!’

OK well the first thing to say about this movie is it is an absolute blast from start to finish! Although the protracted fight scenes are so ridiculous they make Mr Balboa look plausible, they are totally engaging at the same time. The relentless flailing arms mean the only way you could witness a greater amount of windmills is on a Dutch postcard stand! The advice from the corners was also a touch of genius. Why bother with "jab and weave’ or ‘his guard is low on the left’ when you can incessantly holler "kick his ass Jesse, kick his ass Jesse, kick his ass Jesse" during the gruelling bouts??! With advice like that you can’t lose really can you???

And this point leads me seamlessly onto my favourite aspect of the picture – the dialogue. Given the era and ethnic leanings of the cast, get ready for a whirlwind lesson in that forgotten patter – JIVE! Remember the two black guys in Airplane?? Ok well multiply that by 10 and you have the dialogue from Penitentiary. I lost count of the amount of conversations that contained a mandatory fast quipped rhyme. Even the old boy Seldom gets in on the act with his "I ain’t too old, to get a little bold and knock your funky ass out cold" (Try that with your kids.. you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results!)

So with the main feature being such a romp, I eagerly clicked on to the EXTRAS section. As tempting as the Directors Commentary track was, it was the full length sequel, PENITENTIARY II, that was next up in Round Two!!!

Too Sweet is now released from the ‘Pen and getting his life together with by staying with his sister and her husband, who is a very successful lawyer (Kind of strikes me he could have done with his bro in lo in the first movie but that is NOTHING compared to what’s in store!)

After a classic homage to "Different Stokes", the scrolling worded intro, ditto to the Star Wars movies (!!), informs us that Half Dead has escaped at a court hearing and is baying for our over sugary protagonist’s blood. One of Sweets parole conditions is that he HAS to box for Arnsworths brother. It all coincides with the release of Seldom from prison, who is back to train him. Oh yeah - also training at Too Sweet’s gym is Mr T as erm... Mr T! Now that may all seem a little farfetched but proceedings get even more bizarre when you start to see the cast. For a start, Half Dead is not the canine compromised madman from the first movie – it’s the black dude from Ghostbusters, Ernie Hudson, who has quite perfect teeth! But the most ludicrous character change of all is Seldom Seen. Not only has he shed about 20 years off his age, he is now transformed from the wise old book worm with a slight build to a beast of a man, with a penchant for night clubs and liquor! Just to rub it in, the initial exchanges between the young boxer and his trainer has Too Sweet sincerely telling Seldom "Hey man, you haven’t changed one bit..."!! I kid you not!

Made in 1982 around the same time as Rocky 3, you may be a little disappointed if you are expecting Mr T to repeat his Clubber Lang performance. It starts of promisingly enough with the angriest chocolate bar salesman on the planet literally kicking someone to death in the ring for daring to pull a cut throat razor on him. But then, T wimps out a little. It all culminates in him being relegated to Sweets corner, and for the duration of the movie, T simply recites the mantra "Too fast.. Too quick.. Too Sweet!" before strange purple smoke smoulders from the Aladdin style lamp he faithfully coverts! With such idiocy as the subject matter, attempting any further synopsis would serve to only rob the viewer of some side splitting entertainment.

Although ridiculous, the second movie is notably more brutal then the first. For example, before Ernie Hudson was ‘bustin’ ghosts’ alongside Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, he was ‘bustin’ cherries’ while strangling his deflowered prey to death in the movies stand out nasty sequence.

As you can appreciate, the dialogue has more "Suckas" then a truck load of leeches, but it’s the boxing commentator at the finale between Too Sweet and The Bull (who actually IS played by Donovan Womack from the first movie) that was the highlight. "I believe in Too Sweet... I believe in apple pie... oh I believe... I believe..." was uncomfortably close to Martin Luther King’s "I have a dream" speech, but was at least consistent with the tomfoolery that went before it.

I mentioned the commentary track with writer, producer and director Jamaa Fanaka earlier. I have to say, it’s one of the most laid back director commentaries I have ever listened to. So laid back in fact he actually forgets to talk for literally minutes at a time leaving the viewer alone with the semi muted movie soundtrack. Now this may well be how it goes down in the hood, but staying silent for large periods of time kind of defeats the object of a mo fo commentary track - ya dig?? One rather interesting disclosure from Fanaka (who incidentally was born, Walter Gordon), is that he had, at the time, just launched a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Hollywood for all the wrong doings against black actors over the years. (Mmmmm , good luck with that Wally!)

You wont even have to dig deep in yo flared disco pants to find the cash for this hugely entertaining package, as Arrow Video are offering it for a 1970’s style £6.99!

The thumb of my boxing glove is most definitely pointing upward – hilarity like Penitentiary is quite simply KNOCK OUT!!

Review by Marc Lissenburg