Fortress

Dir: Stuart Gordon

1993

*****

Stuart Gordon’s Fortress came out in the UK in July 1994. I remember going to see Martin Campbell’s No Escape in June of that year and being utterly disappointed by the whole thing. My best mate and I had read the synopsis and it sounded like a sci-fi, b-movie masterpiece full of possibilities and a cinema outing we would cherish for all time. You see, we had both managed to get tickets to see Jurassic Park the previous year at a screening that would show a whole 24 hours before the official premiere and release day. We took great pride in the fact we were one of the first people in the country to have seen the film and it remains one of my favorite cinema outings of all time. We have tried to better it ever since and have come close with memorable cinema visits to see Pulp Fiction and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America but No Escape didn’t come close to matching our expectations. I quite like it in retrospect but it was a bitter disappointment at the time. I do wonder whether we had read about Fortress and got the two films mixed up, as No Escape came out in June 1994 everywhere, while Fortress had come out the previous year in America and few other select countries. So a month later, our recent disappointment still in mind, we ventured into the cinema to see Fortress. Our expectations were low and the empty cinema we found ourselves in didn’t help any. However, 91 minutes and a large helping of popcorn later we agreed: Fortress was one of the best films we had ever seen and I still stand by that all these years later. It is a sci-fi, b-movie masterpiece. It’s got everything you could want from a low-budget action film and more. Set in a dystopian 2017, we find ex-army officer John Henry Brennick (Christopher Lambert) and his wife Karen (Loryn Locklin) attempting to cross the Canada–United States border to Vancouver to have a second child. They are fleeing the country as there is a strict one-child policy in force that forbids a second pregnancy due to over-population, even after their firstborn child died. Karen wears a magnetic vest to trick the security scanners but at the last minute a guard notices it and raises the alarm. Brennick is caught, believing Karen to have escaped, and sentenced to 31 years at the Fortress, a private maximum security prison run by the Men-Tel Corporation. To maintain discipline all inmates are implanted with "Intestinators" which induce severe pain or death as a form of physical control and mental conditioning. We are treated to an early demonstration of this as Brennick enters the Fortress and me and my best mate still refer to CCTV cameras as Intestinators to this day. The prison is co-run by Director Poe (cult hero Kurtwood Smith), who oversees Zed-10 (voiced by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), a computer that monitors day-to-day activities. The prison is located underground, in the middle of the desert, inside a deep pit that can only be crossed by a retractable bridge, while the prisoners are kept in overcrowded cells secured by laser walls. Brennick is imprisoned with inmates Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick), a model prisoner who works as Poe's manservant and is awaiting parole; D-Day (cult legend Jeffrey Combs), a machine and demolitions expert; Nino Gomez (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Stiggs who takes a dislike to Brennick and tries to extort him. John learns his wife has been captured and is held in another level with his unborn child who, being illegal, is now officially owned by Men-Tel and will be confiscated at birth. A plot twist that brings this b-movie into the relms of brilliant dystopian drama. Maddox, a large and aggressive inmate who is friends with Stiggs, intimidates Brennick and the two are involved in a brawl which culminates with Maddox being shot by a security turret. John manages to grab Maddox's Intestinator and gives it to D-Day before he is taken away to be subjected to a mind-wipe procedure as punishment. Poe, infatuated with Karen, tells her that if she lives with him he will treat John well and release him from the mind-wipe chamber. She accepts to help John. Poe is revealed to be a cyborg, powerfully enhanced by Men-Tel cybernetics. Four months later, a heavily pregnant Karen manages to use her access to the prison computer in Poe's quarters to help John by restoring him from his mind-wiped state. Karen steals a holographic map and gives it to Abraham to give to John. D-Day dismantles Maddox's Intestinator and uses a magnetic component to pull out the others' Intestinators. During their next work shift John's group puts their Intestinators in an air-duct and stage a brawl, causing Zed to trigger the devices and blow the duct open to prepare their escape. Poe promptly flushes the duct with steam and sends in "Strike Clones", networked cyborgs armed with flamethrowers and machine guns. Stiggs surrenders and gets shot dead, but the rest of the group kill a Strike Clone, steal its weapon and use it to kill the remaining clones. Zed alerts Poe of Karen's actions. He reveals to her that her child, like all MenTel-owned babies, will be extracted in a fatal Cesarean to be made a cyborg. Abraham and Karen resist, but are powerless against the cyborg Poe and Abraham dies of strangulation. Hijacking one of the gun turrets and using it as an elevator, John's group travels to Zed's control room. John takes Poe hostage and orders him to release Karen. Poe gives the order, but Zed refuses the command while stating that MenTel does not engage in any negotiations during hostage situations and a gun turret blasts Poe, blowing him to pieces and leaving John's group with no leverage. Once brought over to the core computer, D-Day hacks into Zed and accesses a powerful virus confiscated at the start of his sentence. D-Day manages to activate the virus after being shot and incapacitated, causing a complete systems crash and all automated security to fail. John and Gomez rescue Karen, hijack a truck, and escape to Mexico where Karen enters labor in an abandoned barn and gives birth to her and John's child. At least that’s what happens in the DVD version. In the version I saw in the cinema, Brennick, his wife, and Gomez end up at the barn where she starts going into labor. Gomez goes out to the truck to get a blanket for the soon-to-arrive baby. The Fortress computer manages to establish a remote linkup with the truck, overriding its internal controls. The truck suddenly comes to life and runs Gomez down, killing him. Brennick shoots the truck with the Strike Clone machine gun. He then sets it on fire with the flamethrower attachment. The truck crashes into the barn, exploding. Brennick climbs into the burning ruins to find his wife sitting against an old tractor, clutching her newborn baby. As much as it was harsh to see Clifton Collins, Jr. die after surviving the whole movie, it was a much better ending. Years later I met Jeffrey Combs at a Star Trek convention and asked him loads of stuff about Re-Animator and Fortress – his minder reminded me that we were at a Star Trek event but we continued anyway with hushed voices. He told me that much of the film was shot on location at a working prison facility. He and the other actors had to sign waivers stating that they understood that no rescue attempt would be made in the event that any of them would be held hostage by the prisoners. They were also given safety vests for protection but were also told by the head of security that they would most likely be useless because in most cases the prisoners usually go for the eyes in the event of a riot. It’s funny to think that initially Fortress was to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger film. Schwarzenegger actually got Stuart Gordon the job as director after his body-double stuntman Peter Kent showed him the Re-Animator series in which he had starred in. The budget was huge and they were all set to go but Schwarzenegger pulled out and most of the budget went with him. Fortress was filmed with what was left, Schwarzenegger was replaced with Christopher Lambert and Kurtwood Smith took over the villainous role from Richard E. Grant. It certainly doesn’t suffer from a smaller budget, in fact the opposite is the case. I still think it looks good, from the lasers to the fantastic Intestinator scenes. It’s a bit like RoboCop but without the satire – and the Robot Cop. I believe that had anyone else made the film it would have been a straight to video stinker – it is Stuart Gordon who makes it a masterpiece and it is thanks to Fortress (among many of Gordon’s films) many an actor has reached cult status. A low-budget B-movie that is better than most big-budget blockbusters, and one I can re-watch again and again.