20. THE GREAT UNSTREAMBLE: Search all night with all your might, it still ain’t found on any site. Bonus for desert/drought content.

John Henry Brennick (Christopher Lambert), and his wife Karen B. Brennick (Loryn Locklin) have been punished for having a second child. He thinks that she escapes, but he’s been sent to  the Fortress, a private 30-level maximum security prison run by the Men-Tel Corporation (it’s the Australian theme park Warner Bros. Movie World).

Every prisoner has an intestinators inside them which allows the guards to put them in pain or even kill them. Director Poe (Kurtwood Smith) uses a computer called Zed-10 (voiced by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) to keep everything running and the prisoners working for the good of the company.

John is inside a crowded cell with Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick), who is nearly Poe’s slave; D-Day (Jeffrey Combs), a computer expert who knows how to blow things up; Nino Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr.), a teen captive; Stiggs (Tom Towles), a prison bully and his friend Maddox (Vernon Wells). After Stiggs and Maddox try to intimidate him, John gets into a fistfight and Maddox is killed by a security guard. As punishment, John is mindwiped, forgetting that his wife is also a prisoner and that Men-Tel will own his child when it is born. He gives D-Day Maddox’s intestinator before he is captured.

Poe takes Karen as his wife as long as he promises to not punish John after this. She sneaks into a room and reprograms John’s mind while D-Day figures out how to shut down the intestinators. During a riot, the Strike Clones are sent in, but the prisoners soon kill one and take its flamethrower. Soon, he learns that Men-Tel doesn’t negotiate and the full brunt of their security teams come down on the prison, just as his wife starts to give birth. And if that happens, the company will give her a fatal cesarian.

Stuart Gordon was such a dependable genre director, even if he switched from Lovecraft horror to giant robots and even men in ice cream suits. According to Gordon, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big fan of Re-Animator and was almost in this: “It was Arnold Schwarzenegger that got me the job and it was because of Re-Animator. We used Arnold’s body double in Re-Animator. The first reanimated corpse is a guy named Peter Kent, Arnold’s double. He’s got those big muscles. He got Arnold to see Re-Animator and Arnold liked it so much that he had a screening of it in his home, inviting all of these people, including producer John Davis. John had the rights to Fortress and Arnold was going to do it. For some reason, I’m not sure why, Arnold finally decided that he wasn’t going to do the movie and dropped out. They had a big budget, probably like 60 million, 70 million dollars, which was a huge budget in those days. Now it sounds small. Anyway, he dropped out and the budget went down. They cut the budget to about 15 million dollars.”

Fortress takes the prison film and adds in near-future cyberpunk. I don’t have to tell you how correct the script by Troy Neighbors and Steven Feinberg is today. The U.S. has more people in jail — 565 citizens per every 100,000 — than any other country in the world. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, those in jail only earn 12 cents to 40 cents per hour for jobs serving the prison and 23 cents to $1.15 per hour in Federal Prison Industries factories, which include food processing, shrinkwrapping and packaging product and even have worked in call centers for politicians.

None of them wear intestinators. Stay tuned on that, though.