Doctor Movie: Episode 302: Fortress

Show Notes

Life is not too fun the the 90s view into the future where you can go to prison for having more than one child. But thankfully we have Christopher Lambert to help us escape the Fortress. Lets talk about this cool concept and hang for a while.

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Cinematic oddities and awesomeness under the watchful of the all-powerful Ming and Doctor Movie!

Christopher Lambert is in a whole heap of trouble for getting his wife pregnant.

On this episode of Doctor Movie.

Wait a minute, I hear something.

For!

Well, what's happening, everybody?

Welcome back to Doctor Movie, your favorite show on wheels.

Again, just kind of going through the Tubi list again, if you guys are fans of the Tubi app.

I did hear that recently they are gonna start having Tubi in Britain and other areas over there in Europe.

And good for them, because, you know, that's gonna help out several of my listeners that will be able to check out these movies right on the spot, have easy access to them as I'm talking about them.

So maybe if it's the same format, that's gonna be the question is, are they gonna have the same movies on that we have?

It may be a totally different version.

Who knows?

But it is a step in the right direction.

And so today we are talking about a movie that I saw in 1992 with Danny Bennett.

This is one of those movies that me and Danny watch, you know, from Hell Ming, us Hell Ming guys, this is one of those movies that we watched, wow, eating lunch.

And we are talking about Fortress from 1992, directed by the great Stuart Gordon.

Stuart Gordon, you feel like he's kind of a hit and miss director, but I don't know, when you look at his work overall, yeah, there's a clunker or two.

But for the most part, I mean, the guy gave us Re-Animator and From Beyond, what else you want?

I mean, those two alone is worthy of just a career, right?

And not to mention, he had several other, you know, very popular movies as well.

But for this one, we have, let's see if I can read all this and drive.

When a couple break the population law in a fascist future, a fascist future US they fix themselves, they find themselves imprisoned in a maximum security jail.

Let's see, as an extra security measure, inmates are implanted with a device which implodes.

Yes, so if you start acting naughty or don't follow the rules, then yeah, they can enforce pain on you, even all the way up to death, right?

That's kind of the background here.

Let's see, we already talked about Stuart Gordon.

Do we have a wider watch?

Come on, man, we don't have a wider watch for this one.

There we go, wider watch.

It's thrilling, dark, and futuristic.

Well, futuristic may be from a 1990s point of view.

Thrilling?

I don't know, it's a prison movie.

Overall, a brilliant and very entertaining movie with some surprises in it.

My advice is to see the movie.

It's good.

Wow, that's pretty specific.

Let's see, it's fun-spirited and well-executed sci-fi action tale that doesn't drag the beat.

It doesn't drag or miss a beat, so much of this works.

Yeah, you know, that feels about right.

Let's see, Fortress is an extremely high concept and has a lot of elements going on in it.

Yeah, it's maybe too many elements.

I think the concept for this is brilliant.

I think 90% of what happens in this movie is pretty solid.

But I think you're overreaching some things, because some of the things you just kind of want to go, OK, but why?

And there's not really a good explanation of why.

So anyway, so we'll get into that in a minute.

Who we got in this?

We got Christopher Lambert, hello, you know, Highlander himself, right?

Which is, let's just face it, it's the reason I checked this movie out.

At the time, I did not know that Stuart Gordon had directed this, and I didn't put it together.

It was the same guy that did Re-Animate or whatever.

But it was Christopher Lambert.

Come on, I mean, Highlander was such a big movie.

And, yeah, this is quite a few years later.

And hey, it just, I thought the cover looked cool.

And here we go.

We were going to go watch Fortress, right?

As far as a cast, this is what's surprising on Re-Visit.

I mean, you got Christopher Lambert.

We got Kurt Wood Smith in this.

That's right.

Clarence Bottacher from RoboCop is in this, or Red from That 70s Show.

I mean, come on.

I mean, when you need a guy to be your main bad guy, yeah, I mean, can you go wrong with Clarence Bottacher, right?

Or Kurt Wood Smith.

He plays Paul in this.

He's the prison director.

And you kind of get some surprises about him as we go along, which he's kind of the overseer.

He sits in his surveillance room that's got, I don't know, 50 TV screens where he can kind of see everything.

And he basically can call an audible.

If he sees somebody doing something wrong, he can say, Siri, inflict pain on prisoner, blah, blah, blah, right?

So it's another movie that's showing this kind of AI intelligence, where we've got the interaction, AI intelligence, AI, that's already intelligence in the word, right?

I just said artificial intelligence, intelligence, which maybe makes more sense with this movie.

I don't know.

But anywho, he's the bee's knees in this one, right?

He's the one that's controlling everything.

We've got the great Jeffrey Combs in this, right?

Who plays D-Day.

And the formula to this, you've seen a hundred times since, right?

It's a prison movie.

And you know how the prison movie, even if you go back to Kool-Han Luke, there's your characters that are responsible for certain things.

They got certain traits that makes them who they are as far as how this plays out, right?

He's kind of the engineering nerd, right?

He's always interested in how things work, being able to break into things and all that, right?

It's Jeffrey Combs.

Again, can't go wrong.

We got Vernon Wells in this, who plays Maddox, who's a prisoner there, who, you know, he's the bad guy of all of them.

And if Vernon Wells isn't enough of a bad guy, you got Tom Towles in here, right?

Now, Tom Towles, he's the one that gets me, right?

In every movie he's in, he plays that guy that I just cannot stand in everything.

Everything he's in, you can't find a more disgusting person than Tom Towles.

You do get to see kind of a change in the character in this movie.

But for the most part, I'll never forget when I first met him.

Of course, he was in Henry, you know, I've talked about that movie, and he played Otis in that movie, which, I mean, the movie is about Henry Lee Lucas, but you walk away almost being okay with Henry because Otis is so bad.

He was also in the remake of Night of the Living Dead, the 90s version.

He's the dad that keeps his daughter down in the basement.

Total a-hole, man, and he is perfect for that role.

And I'll never forget when we were going to Texas to Texas Fright Mayor, and he was going to be there, and I told Danny, I was like, man, I don't know if I want to shake his hand or punch him, because he just seems like that's who he would be all the time.

Super nice guy when you meet him.

But, man, he nails it, right?

We've got Lincoln Patrick in this as well, who's been in a ton of stuff.

Almost every TV show you can think of from the 70s and 80s this guy was in.

And he plays Abraham in this.

He's one of the inmates as well, who's been there a long time, and he's kind of gotten on the good side of Poe.

And he's basically like his butler.

He will come in and shave him and take care of him and stuff.

But it's all, you know, just so he stays on the good side of him, and nothing bad happens to him.

That's pretty much your cast in the nutshell.

We do have Lauren Loughlin in this, who's been in quite a bit of stuff, and she's the wife of Christopher Lambert.

And getting into the story, they are trying to cross the border to get out of here because they've inflicted a law where you are allowed to have one child per household.

And if you end up having another one, you go to prison for it.

Yeah, there you go.

And that's kind of the starting point for this movie.

Kind of a weird reason to throw somebody in prison for 30 years, just because, you know, you felt like getting it on.

You know?

But that's kind of where this leads.

And this whole situation, you know, Christopher Lambert is trying to get his wife across the border so they can go off and have this baby and try to live a life.

Christopher Lambert's character, John Henry Benton, was it Benton or Benton?

I can't remember.

But Brenton, he's got a background where, you know, he was a military officer, had a troop that he led, which ended up in a bad situation where he lost his whole troop.

But he's kind of a bad dude, right?

So he's not scared of all this mess.

And they tried to put her in some kind of, I don't know if it's like a metal detector jacket or a, I don't know, something that was supposed to deter the scanning system that shows that she's pregnant, right?

He's trying to hide that.

And they almost get away with it, but they don't.

So they ended up taking Christopher Lambert.

He lets his wife run, and he lets a dog attack him, and he thinks that she got away, but she ends up getting caught later on too and placed in the female part of the prison.

This prison is like 30 feet underground, high tech.

It really looks a lot like the prison that's in Guardians of the Galaxy.

It kind of looks like that.

And it's super, super strict.

Like I said, they implant you with this device that goes down in your stomach, kind of a clockwork orange kind of idea, where if you don't obey, it's going to cause severe pain and can even explode and kill you, right?

Several movies are based on this kind of concept, right?

But they get put into a room.

It's him and another guy that he kind of becomes friends with that they get put in this room together with these other two, which is Tom Tows and Vernon Wells.

And, you know, these guys are lonely, so one of them, Vernon Wells, tries to rape the other guy, and Christopher Lambert comes to his rescue.

They get in a big fight, and, you know, it gets pretty crazy.

And from that point on, they capture all three of them that got in the fight, imprison them in these little chambers where it's got a little bit of a torture device, trying to find out who started, who instigated the fight.

Christopher Lambert picks up and says, I did, because he wants to keep the other guy innocent, because if he blames Vernon Wells, Vernon Wells will keep coming after him.

Christopher Lambert takes the blame, and they take him to a room where they pretty much, they do a mind sweep, right?

They wipe out your mind, and you basically become a zombie.

So they strap him into the thing that's in the lawnmower man, right?

That gyroscope kind of thing that you strap yourselves into.

And it looks a whole lot like that.

So this movie has elements from different things, right?

Because during the fight, there's a secondary fight that happens.

I'm kind of jumping around here.

But there's a fight that's on this kind of a drawbridge thing, which feels a whole lot like Flash Gordon, you know, when they're fighting on the platform.

You kind of got that thing where, again, Poe, the director of this thing, is saying, you know, pull in the bridge, right, to shorten it.

He's wanting to see some action here, right?

So he's letting them fight.

And Christopher Lambert knocks Vernon Wells off the platform, but he's hanging on the edge.

And Poe tells him that he wants him to finish the job.

And he won't do it.

He saves his life, pulls him back up there.

And then a floating kind of droid drone thing comes and kills Vernon Wells by shooting him in the stomach and blows his whole stomach completely out.

Christopher Lambert is up getting the device that was in his stomach because it falls to the ground.

He grabs it, gives it to one of the guys that he's, you know, the guy that becomes his buddy, tells him to hold on to it because he knows that he's going to be put away.

And this is where he gets put into the gyroscope thing.

And while he's in this thing, it looks like some Ken Russell effects, right?

Like from Altered States.

It's all this dreamscape stuff.

Again, flashing back to like the Flash Gordon movie where they wipe out the doctor's mind, right?

This is kind of that same thing, but it looks like a Ken Russell movie when it happens.

So that's pretty cool, right?

Well, all in all, when this all happens, I mean, eventually he's a zombie.

And while that's going on, he also knows that they've captured his wife before all this.

And Poe has decided that he wants Brennan's wife to live with him, and he wants to raise his kid.

So that's one of those things you're just kind of going, okay, why?

And then you find out that Poe is really kind of an android.

He's kind of half human, I guess.

But he's plugged in a bunch of wires, and it's like, okay, again, why?

So there's just some decisions here.

You're just kind of going, do we really need that?

Why do we want a cybernetic person wanting to raise a human child?

And I forgot to mention that during all this, while you're sleeping, they can scan you, and Poe can see your dreams.

And if you're dreaming something not allowed, they can start inflicting the pain on you, so you'll quit dreaming about it, right?

And he happens to see where him and his wife is getting on.

And again, going back to Flash Gordon, because remember when Ming is caressing Dale's body, and she's all affectionate?

He's like, wow, I've never seen a response like that.

That's kind of what Poe's thing is here.

He sees his wife in an intimate situation, and he's like, oh, wow, okay.

And I think maybe that's what intrigues him to want to have her around.

I mean, I kind of get it.

But again, you're not even a human, so I don't know.

It's just kind of a weird idea for that, right?

Like I said, the movie's not perfect.

But all in all, it gets to where all these guys that are going to sell together decide to team up and try to break out, which has not been done.

And they find out that they can actually remove or D-Day finds out you can remove this device that's in your body.

And so that becomes part of the plan.

And from there on, it's like the whole point is to break out of here, get his wife and break free.

And I tell you what, I'm just going to leave it there.

I think that's good enough.

And I don't know, I think by today's standard, the movie kind of drags a little bit.

But if you like these kind of prison movies, sci-fi movies, I think this one still holds up pretty well.

So that's kind of my thoughts on this one.

I say check it out.

There is a part two.

I don't know if part two is on Tubi, but this one definitely is.

So I say check it out.

I give it a four out of five.

I find it enjoyable.

I could watch it again.

And again, pretty good cast.

There's some good actors in this.

So there you go.

Check out Fortress and enjoy.

Let me know what you think about it.

All right, folks, that's it for this one.

We will check you later.