The Sunday Cult film corner: “The Park Is Mine (1985)”

Ok so things have been quiet her on the farm over the last couple of days. Mainly because we spent the weekend at a REAL farm… out in the country and stuff. While friends of ours were having BBQ’s, free beer and fun sexy times in bars (note: all this actually happened!), we had clouds, rain, Icelandic scrabble (the 5th circle of hell in my book), and had the wonderous sight of seeing an adult sheep being dragged away by some malevolent birds.

I also saw a frankly ludicrous TV show last night titled Söngkeppni Framhaldsskólanna, the annual High School song competition. Man there was some right guff on it. If you don’t believe me,  then SEE IT FOR YOURSELF IN ALL IT’S GLORY. Look out for the school that does the Architecture In Helsinki cover dressed in some fucked Blue Man Group/Smurf hybrid look. Go on, i fucking dare you….

But that was last night and tonight is tonight. And that can mean only one thing. the SUUUUUUUUUUUNNNDAAAAAAAAAY CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUULT FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILM CORNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER! (cough).

And i have for you this week an interesting little made-for-TV curio that almost passed by unnoticed were it not for the fact that it starred an up and coming actor who would go on to be famous, playing many tough guy roles in his later years. Ladies and gentlemen, i give to you THE PARK IS MINE.

Directed by some guy named Steven Hillard Stern (who seems to have done a LOT of TV movies), the film starts with an incident where a Vietnam war veteran suffering from terminal cancer commits suicide by throwing himself of the roof of the local veterans hospital. His friend Mitch (played by Tommy Lee Jones) when going through his effects, finds out about his friend’s plan to make a “statement” highlighting the unfair treatment meted out to Vietnam war vets. a plan to forcibly take over New Yorks Central Park.

While most men would have simply gone “Woah, intense!”, Mitch decides to honour his friend’s wishes by taking a shitload of weapons and igniting a guerilla war campaign against the local police and the National Guard. will it all end well, or will he end up blowing most of New York sky-high?

Now for a TV movie, TPIM actually has a few good things going for it. One is Jones, who is pretty good, considering the script and pretty bog standard direction. the second is that it has Yaphet Kotto in it, and ANY movie with him in it worth watching. Period. And the OST is provided by none other than Tangerine Dream working those classic urban 80s synth sounds.

But the real talking point is the premise that in a way brings up certain questions about loyalty and what makes the difference between a terrorist and freedom fighter. TPIM was made at the same time as Rambo Pt.II, which  has Stallone ins a climax monologue saying that we should be honouring those guys who went to Vietnam. Indeed there seemed to be a lot of films at the time containing Vietnam vets taking the war back home with them in more ways that one.

But now times have changed, with 9/11, Timothy McVeigh and other acts of Domestic terrorism, Now it seems that someone doing this sort fo thing would be very unlikely to get much sympathy.

But this is not a blog for political and moral philosophy. I’ll let you make up your own minds, as you get you bottle of whisky, loaded gun and flashbacks of ‘nam as you settle in to watch THE PARK IS MINE…

 

The Sunday Cult Film Corner: “Punishment Park (1970)”

We’re living in what can be called “interesting” times. A worldwide recession that should have been completely avoidable is exerting its vice-like grip on society. All over the world, governments are powerless to stop the rapacious demands of powerful, moneyed interests collectively buttfucking civilisation into the next dimension. In the middle east, nations are falling into chaos and even war as oppressive regimes find their power starting to crumble, while elsewhere, people are trying to fight back and protest, whether it’s student fees in the UK, the occupy movement in USA and elsewhere, and anti globalisation demos in places such as Toronto. Meanwhile they are being met with crackdowns from state and private mechanisms in the form of police, the judiciary and corporate backed media outlets.

It’s with this uncertain backdrop that i merrily drop this weeks fun action packed edition of the SUNDAY MOTHERFUCKING CULT FILM CORNER!!! This week, a truly realistic nightmarish vision of an American society at war with itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, ice give to you PUNISHMENT PARK.

Punishment Park is directed by Peter Watkins, a director who honed his talents with the BBC in the ’60s and is best known for his use of Docudrama techniques. Before Punishment Park, he was most infamous for his film “The War Game” (which describes in detail the effects of a nuclear attack on London), which to this day has never been shown in full on British TV.

Told in a faux documentary style, Punishment Park tells of a USA in the near future where escalation of the Vietnam war and increasing political unrest and violence at home has resulted in the enacting of the (completely real) McCarran Act, which authorizes Federal authorities, without reference to Congress, to detain persons judged to be “a risk to internal security”. Anti war protestors, conscientious objectors civil rights, feminist and various counterculture and left-wing activists are arrested en masse and given the  simple choice. Either spend 15 years in a federal prison, or run the gauntlet of “Punishment Park”, a 50 mile stretch of desert where they must reach a flag within 3 days, all the while hunted and chased by law enforcement officers and national guardsmen as part of their “Training”. The film has a British & German documentary film crew following two groups of people. One undergoing their summary court “tribunals”, while the other group undertakes the “game” of punishment park.

Part social commentary, part dystopian Sci-Fi, Punishment Park pulls no punches. Despite having an initial script, the film mostly consists of improvised dialogue and interaction, adding a sense of realism and urgency to the proceedings. According to the legend, some people identified so closely with their roles, at one point an actual fight broke out when actors hurled rocks at their pursuers only for them to open fire in return.

Despite the liberal leanings of Watkins and his complete denunciation of the state machine and the people who operate within it, nobody comes out of Punishment Park well. Even the “good guys” in the form of the activists are shrill, argumentative and somewhat naive in their expectations as they are manipulated by the people running the game.

What Watkins does manage to capture brilliantly is the increased polarisation that became evident in the Nixon ´nam years (he managed to get re-elected in 1972 on the back of creating an “Us Vs Them” divisiveness amongst the electorate). In the film, there is no real dialogue between the opposing sides, just shouting and general mistrust and often outright hatred of each other.

Punishment Park only received a tiny limited release in the USA. When it was shown, there was often a polarizing reaction within the audience, similar to the film, between those who thought it was hysterical and heavy-handed announcing that such things couldn’t happen in the USA, and those who felt it accurately chimed with the reality of US state oppression, pointing out that interment camps were a reality in the US during the second world war for the Japanese Americans.

Even though it was released 40 years ago and was about the Vietnam and Nixon years, the central messages of Punishment park are ironically more important today than ever. The last decade has seen a frightening increase in violent paranoia amongst many groups, both right and left-wing. The McCarran Act was eventually repealed, but in its place we now have the Patriot Act, which in some ways goes even further. The court scenes in Punishment Park wouldn’t look out-of-place in an interview on FOX news or MSNBC. In many countries in the western world, we’ve seen a gradual but real erosion of our ability to exercise our freedoms and rights to protest, all the while going hand in hand with an increase in the militarization of our Law Enforcement agencies and their willingness to exercise said force in ever more blatant abuses of power. Finding yourself detained while protesting in a legal black hole where you are no rights or access to lawyers has become a reality. And for people who still think that internment camps can’t happen in places such as the USA, I’ll leave this article about the fallout of Hurricane Katrina, where militia men rampaged with impunity, and a a detention facility called “Camp Greyhound” sprang up from nowhere and was used to detail all manner of citizens, with no legal recourse or oversight, subjecting detainees to brutal levels of abuse similar to Abu Ghraib.

So get that cup of tea and prepare to feel some righteous anger at the brutality of western state suppression. then go out and protest as if your life depended upon it.