Not Quite Hollywood

When I was a junior in college, I took a month-long January course on sociology and science fiction. Our prof–a nice guy, on a visiting gig–was striving mightily for a laidback, easygoing vibe, and we must have spent maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the actual class time watching movies. One day, to discuss the relationship between social deviance and Foucauldian discipline, we were scheduled to watch A Clockwork Orange. But in the pre-Netflix, pre-internet stone age, you were subject to the horrible whims of the local video store’s supply. (And this was in a small town an hour from the nearest metropolis, the only-large-in-relative-relation Watertown… so, one video store.) And the morning our prof went to get Kubrick’s film, it was out. So he scrambled about the store, and happened upon a film called Escape 2000. The back cover noted star Steve Railsback (of The Stunt Man fame), set up a plot where in the future prisons take in all social deviants–thieves, rapists, but also commies, homosexuals–for a bleak system of rehabilitation.

We started watching. The prisoners each morning had to come out and chant “We are social deviants” (or something similar), while a big bald mustachioed badass guard shadowboxed in front of them, trying to make them flinch, and if they did he kicked the shit out of them. The prisoners took lots of showers, the women in particular apparently concerned about their hygiene. Best of all, the prisoners’ “rehabilitation” involved rich people paying to hunt them. One of the rich hunters–a particularly lascivious sleazeball–hunted with a mutant. That’s right: his weapon was a large mutant, and the rich guy commanded his mutant, when the prey was cornered, to eat off their toes, and the like.

I have to say this again: a futuristic prison movie where the prisoners are hunted by rich people, one of whom uses mutants as weapons. Continue reading Not Quite Hollywood