“Welcome to the Fortress. Everything here is the property of the Men-Tel Corporation. Including you.”
In the wake of RoboCop and Total Recall, studios were seemingly willing to greenlight anything that resembled Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously campy sci-fi romps; a trend that led to a logjam of cheap knockoffs in the 1990s. Among these trashy macho projects—indeed, indistinguishable from them in many respects—is Stuart Gordon’s Fortress, a futuristic prison escape movie that differentiates itself by some solid character acting and its director’s macabre sensibilities. Indeed, although Fortress has found its fans primarily in VHS action movie circles, it feels quite of a piece with the rest of Gordon’s oeuvre in terms of theme, style, and tone.
It stars Christopher Lambert1 as former military officer John Brennick, who, as the film opens, is trying to smuggle his wife, Karen (Loryn Locklin), across the U.S.-Canada border. She carries his unborn child—technically their second after their first died in infancy. However, according to the heinous laws of this futuristic dystopia, having more than one child is a crime. When they are caught by the border patrol guards, they’re both sent to the Fortress, a privately-owned, underground, maximum security prison in the middle of the desert.
Run by the faceless Men-Tel corporation and directed on-site by the sadistic Poe (Kurtwood Smith)—a typically perverted Gordon antagonist—and the despotic robot monitor Zed-10 (voiced by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon), the Fortress is designed to torture its inmates both physically and psychologically. Mobile cameras track their whereabouts, lethal lasers limit their movements, and, upon entry, each prisoner is forced to swallow an “intestinator” that is used to control behavior and can both torment and kill. Considering the provocateur sitting in the director’s chair, it’s no surprise when we’re treated to an early demonstration of the intestinator at its most destructive (and that is not the last time).
But the torment doesn’t end there. Thoughts are also monitored and pain inflicted if they are deemed inappropriate. Violence, anger, love—anything other than resigned obedience is rewarded with a shock to the guts. Even so, Poe turns a blind eye to all manner of barbaric misdeeds, allowing Maddox (Vernon Wells) and Stiggs (Tom Towles) to have their way with their less assertive bunkmates D-Day (Jeffrey Combs) and Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr.). Brennick joins this group, finding an ally in the wise old Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick) and quickly recognizing the potential in D-Day’s obsessive gadgeteering. Soon they’ve hatched a plan to rescue Karen, who’s taken up residency in Poe’s quarters in exchange for mercy upon her husband, and escape.
I’ll be the first to admit that Fortress amounts to little more than a tasty piece of derivative low budget B movie fun. The story beats will feel familiar to a mildly attuned viewer, the characters come from generic stock, and there are numerous markers of the budgetary limitations. But, accepting that it exists within the confines of the generic, it’s competently written, and directed and acted with no small amount of flair. Gordon accents the standard plot with a series of nasty body horror touches—distended bellies, exploding heads, gouged eyes, rape, Frankenstein-esque cyborg guards, buzzsaws descending on the pregnant damsel’s midsection, Poe’s weirdly intimate relationship with Zed-10, male nudity—and frames his action in a way that charmingly leans into the low grade feel but adequately carries the intensity. It may feel exceedingly artificial (note the way Lambert’s stolen machine gun doesn’t recoil at all) but Gordon masks this with breakneck pacing. While I found Lambert to be an uninspiring leading man, his lack of screen presence is compensated for by his supporting cast, particularly Combs as a greasy hacker who ends every sentence with “man” and whose eyesight is so poor his glasses make him look like he has googly-eyes pasted on.
Fortress probably doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the other B-grade militaristic sci-fi films from its era. It lacks the wit and mayhem of Verhoeven’s films and its plot eventually moves on from its fun setup to a routine run ‘n’ gun finale. But despite its obvious shortcomings, if you set your expectations on a base hit instead of a home run, it functions quite adequately as a low tier midnight movie. Fans of Gordon, grue, or brainless sci-fi could do much worse than Fortress. A bigger budget and a more compelling lead and this could have achieved the heights of its antecedents.
1. It’s neither here nor there when evaluating the film on the screen, but Fortress was initially set to star Arnold Schwarzenegger and was accordingly given a budget of $50M. The Austrian Oak had seen Re-Animator (a film that featured his stunt double, Peter Kent) and enjoyed it so much that he insisted on Gordon as director. When Schwarzenegger left the production, Gordon’s budget was reduced to less than a quarter of that amount.