What's Next On My List? Lock Up

Welcome to the eight installment of #StalloneMonth, which I have to say, is my favorite time of the year! In February we look over the filmography of this wonderful actor, Sylvester Stallone, three-four movies at a time. This year I tried to keep a "prison" theme. So let us jump right into it!

Lock Up (1989)

Frank (Sylvester Stallone) is an inmate that gets transferred to a prison run by Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland), who has a personal vendetta against him. With six months left on his sentence, Drumgoole is determined to make Frank's life a living hell, furthermore, he tries to frame him for a larger crime, to ensure he spends his life in prison.

I did not know what to expect with this movie. While watching it I just felt anger... it was probably the intent of the movie, but I felt like I have my stomach is in a knot the whole time, and there was no real way of letting off steam, not even in scenes from the movie that were not part of the Warden's revenge scheme, as you feel something awful coming just around the corner. But whether you have seen it already or not, I do recommend that you look up trivia because the making of this film is fascinating. First of all, they filmed in a real prison, while the inmates were there, many of them are in the backgrounds in scenes, and were paid for their work as extras. Actually, some of the production got locked-in during the filming when the inmate count numbers didn't add up at the end of the day. Second, Sylvester Stallone was tackled repeatedly by some of the real-life prison's penitentiary extras during the filming of a football game that they played outside. The scenes themselves look tiring, I have no idea how long they shot those scenes out in the mud, but actually getting tackled is real dedication to the craft. Another wonderful piece of trivia is the following, according to imdb: "The movie was very well received in central Europe during the last echoes of communist oppression. The movie's title in Hungarian is: In the Prison of Revenge." I rarely talk about the background or the reception of movies, but last year I managed to watch a total of 365 movies, and I ended up reading a lot of trivia and I begun to have a new kind of appreciations for the making of movies. Even the ones that are not the best... I heard someone talk in a podcast about how nobody sets out to make a bad movie, and that is something we often forget and just think about a paycheck. However, even if this movie did not make my top 10 favorite Stallone films, it is still quite incredible in its making. So, final point, as you will see from the reviews I have lined up this year, this is not the only prison themed movie that Stallone starred in, one of them being the fantastic Tango & Cash, which was released in the same year! (Click here to read my review of it!)

So watch it? I think it is much better than some of the reviews and ratings suggest. I do not think it is re-watchable, purely because of the continuous tension in the film. Some like that feeling in their stomach, but for me personally this was enough once. I do with that justice would prevail in real life the way it does in movies. But it is sure satisfying when Frank finally defeats the warden!

Until the next Stallone movie on my list!