Day 1. ‘90s Action!

Also known as Deadlock when released on VHS, this made-for-HBO movie stars Rutger Hauer as Frank Warren. He’s an electronics wizard and a master jewel thief who thinks he’s got it made after orchestrating a massive diamond heist. His crew consists of his gorgeous fiancée, Noelle (Joan Chen), and his long-time buddy, Sam (James Remar). But there is no honor among thieves. The moment the diamonds are safely stashed away, Sam and Noelle turn on Frank and leave him for the cops. Frank gets pinched, but he keeps his mouth shut about where the diamonds are hidden.

Cut to Camp Holliday, an experimental future prison that makes your standard maximum-security joint look like a country club. Run by the deliciously sadistic Warden Holliday (Stephen Tobolowsky, who seems to be having the time of his life), there are no iron bars or barbed wire fences here. Instead, the facility relies on the Wedlock system: every inmate is fitted with a bulky, electronic collar containing a proximity-fused explosive charge. Every collar is secretly linked to another random prisoner. If you move more than 100 yards away from your unknown partner, or if anyone tries to tamper with the hardware, BOOM—both of your heads get blown clean off your shoulders.

Naturally, Warden Holliday tries to torture the location of the diamonds out of Frank (using a sensory deprivation tank, which is for relaxation, not interrogation) but Frank isn’t talking. Things get complicated in the yard when Frank’s collar starts chirping, leading him to discover that his explosive soulmate is Tracy Riggs (Mimi Rogers), a woman claiming she was completely framed. One afternoon, when Frank fights a fellow inmate named Emerald (Basil Wallace) to the death, Tracy takes the ambulance he’s in and makes a run for it.

Sam and Noelle are working with the Warden to get the diamonds while Frank and Tracy are on the run. They hate each other’s guts, they’ve got the cops and a pair of heavily armed betrayers on their tails, and they have to stay within a football field’s distance of one another at all times or face instant decapitation.

What follows is an awesome mix of roadside tension, an underground collar-removal operation gone wrong (resulting in Noelle icing Sam) and a final showdown with the Warden himself, who has been tracking the duo via helicopter. Frank proves he’s the smarter criminal, tricking the Warden into wearing a collar and tossing the linked match into the departing chopper. Distance limit breached, chopper goes kaboom, and Frank and Tracy ride off into the sunset with a bag full of diamonds to live happily ever after.

Yes, in a 1990s action movie, there’s not much of a line between love and hate.

Wedlock is pure, unadulterated cinematic comfort food. Lewis Teague, as always, brings genuine studio-level competence to a B-movie premise, keeping the action moving fast enough that you don’t have time to question the prison logic. The chemistry between Hauer and Rogers works surprisingly well, turning the film into a twisted, high-stakes romantic comedy masquerading as a dystopian action flick. Tobolowsky steals every single scene he’s in as the Warden, playing him not as an imposing brute, but as a petty, bureaucratic psychopath. 

Hauer has weird hair, strange fashion choices and seems barely awake at some points. There are also some weird plot points, like how everyone in prison gets named after a color, can go to Magic Hour and sleep with anyone they want, and in the meantime, work on electronics. And while Frank is out for revenge, Noelle is just out to ruin the wedding of the ex who set her up.

Writer Broderick Miller recycled this same idea for another cable movie, Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14, where Esai Morales is breaking out Nia Peeples. 

Shout out to Vern, who points out. that despite this being set in the future, there’s a movie theater showing a double of Graffiti Bridge with the Seagal movie Marked for Death. That’s amazing. Basil Wallace was also in the movie, playing Screwface and his twin brother. And oh yeah, Camp Holiday Prison is totally the command center from Power Rangers. Really — it’s the House of the Book on the American Jewish University’s Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley, CA.

No other movie has Rutger Hauer and Mimi Rogers wearing traditional African clothing.

You can watch this on Tubi.