Prison

Prison [Renny Harlin, 1987]:

Part of a brief wave of horror films about murderers coming back from the dead after being executed in the electric chair, the blandly titled Prison, which has the distinction of being director Renny Harlin's first feature film produced in America, stands head and shoulders above its similarly themed competition, Destroyer (1988), Shocker (1989) and House III (aka The Horror Show, 1989), but that isn't itself much of an endorsement. Harlin's preferred brand of horror, at least as far as his later films, such as Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Mindhunters (2004) might suggest, tends to be of the old dark house tradition, albeit with the house transposed to an uncharacteristic setting, so in many ways this type of film is well within the director's wheelhouse.

To his credit, Harlin does well with the material. A lot of the supernatural sequences and the general tone of dreamlike unreality makes the film feel like the director's audition reel for the subsequent A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), but certainly the casting of a young Viggo Mortensen, veteran Lane Smith and a pre-fame Tommy Lister give Prison a bit of a pedigree. Tonally, the film certainly has some issues, being both too serious and grim in its violence and setting, but too hokey and often silly to take seriously as anything other than supernatural shlock.

Born American

Born American [Renny Harlin, 1986]:

Given the implications of the title and the politics of the era when the film was first released, the expectation here was for something steeped in jingoistic, pro-U.S., anti-Soviet propaganda, in which the north American protagonists get to espouse their traditions of liberty, freedom and justice for all, while simultaneously violating a litany of international laws and treaties. Surprisingly, this isn't the case. While the film is unashamedly anti-Soviet to an almost parodic level, it also seems to view its trio of American characters with a level of derision. These teens, who travel to Finland for vague reasons and immediately cross the border into Russia for a bit of fun (taking photos of military checkpoints and shooting a bow and arrow into the snow is apparently how these kids get their rocks off) are shown to be so aggressively stupid and naïve that one can only conclude that co-writers Renny Harlin and Markus Selin (the former making his feature debut as director) are lampooning the perception of north American exceptionalism as enthusiastically as they're lampooning Soviet sleaze and corruption.

It's a strange film, with some plot points that are so brazenly bizarre that they could've come from a work of science-fiction. For instance, Harlin and Selin begin with a very grounded, character-based study of three American teenagers on a road trip across the Soviet border (which initially recalls elements of Walter Hill's film Southern Comfort, 1980) before hauling the characters off to prison for what can only be described as an even more sensationalist and reactionary version of the Alan Parker/Oliver Stone adaptation of Midnight Express (1978). Here, inmates compete in games of human chess, while high-ranking Russian ministers with a propensity for torturing inmates with jumper cables attached to their nipples, bribe the U.S. counsel with unwilling victims dragged from the women's prison.

The entire film has an odd tone that's pitched somewhere between serious commentary on proxy wars and the CIA's involvement in prolonging the Soviet conflict, and the most ludicrous action movie (n)ever released by The Cannon Group. As director, Harlin is already showing a lot of potential, despite the limitations of the text. While the film ultimately exemplifies many of the weaknesses that still affect his work to this day (under-written characters, vague plotting, a questionable tone) it also shows a natural talent for directing large-scale action and gritty heroism. With its snow-bound locations and emphasis on ordinary men pushed into violence and survival by extraordinary conditions, we can already see faint traces of his later Hollywood movies, such as Die Hard 2 (1990), Cliffhanger (1993) and even his found-footage horror film, Devil's Pass (2013).