Say Cheese: Fortress

by Borg

Christopher Lambert is forced to watch the movie.

I do love a so-bad-it’s-good cheesy movie. You could divide these films into two categories. You also could not, but whatever. I’m going to do it:

Intentionally funny bad movies. The filmmakers know they’re not making high art. They aren’t trying to create the next Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia, or even Big Trouble in Little China. They just want to unleash something braindead and hopefully entertaining upon their audience, sort of like an comatose clown (without the scary sort of make-up). Many of these movies have rather amusing titles, such as Sharktopus, Mothman, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. They can also be tributes to other bad movies, like The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a film that’s poorly made on purpose (the actors play bad actors, the editing and cinematography are deliberately awkward, etc.). This kind of bad movies is perfect for boring evenings at home, especially in the company of some friends and/or alcoholic beverages. You’re in the mood for some silly humor, something that doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t demand that you watch each second in order to understand it. Like a movie about a dinocroc fighting a supergator.
Unintentionally funny bad movies. These are often made with little money but huge passion, by enthusiasts with big dreams, people who really, really love making films… but who are not so good at it. They lack the skill to tell a story properly, how to build tension in a scene, or even how to shoot a scene. The dialogue is often abysmal, brought forth by hilariously inadequate actors. I love this kind of movie. The obvious example would be Ed Wood’s classic Plan 9 From Outer Space. There are of course other rather famous examples too, such as Troll 2 and The Room, both of which might appear in this article series. Unintentionally funny bad movies can, however, also be made by capable filmmakers. Perhaps they didn’t set out to create the next 2001 – A Space Odyssey or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but they weren’t planning on making a shitty film… it just happened, somehow. The cast may be well known, or at least consist of a few competent actors who usually deliver great performances, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t work this time. Some modern examples are The Happening and the remake of The Wicker Man.

To me, unintentionally funny bad movies are among the most enjoyable things to watch. They beat most comedies when comparing LPM (Laughs Per Minute). I sometimes laugh so hard it hurts in my abdominal muscles and my jaw – it’s pure workout. The first time I watched my personal favorite among these movies, I laughed pretty much continuously from the first scene until well after it had ended. The amazing thing is that it’s part three in a series of four phenomenally bad movies!

I won’t begin this series with those four movies, though – I’m planning on having a possibly lethal marathon further on (I may die laughing). No, I’m going to start off with some low-fat cheese, if you will, then proceed to the fatter and more delicious ones later.

Allow me to introduce Fortress from the year of our Lord, 1992. It’s a film set in that near future we never seem to get to. We’re informed that the U.S. is overpopulated and that it’s illegal to have more than one child. This is not good news to Karen, who’s baking her second offspring in the oven (not literary). Apparently her first child was stillborn, but rules are rules. Thus, she and her husband, played by the ever so gracious Christopher Lambert, are about to cross the border into Mexico. Naturally, they run knee-deep into trouble.

A particularly sharp-eyed guard discovers her pregnancy, pointing at her and yelling stuff to his colleagues. Christopher rewards his attentiveness by breaking his arm and nose. The alarm howls in unison with the guard as the married couple runs across the bridge towards the promised land. It doesn’t take too long for Christopher to realize that they won’t make it. He tells his wife to keep going while he takes care of the dogs that have been unleashed and are quickly gaining on them. He turns around and tries staring them down. “You’re not that big,” he thinks, then they reach him and shut their jaws around his arms and legs, turning him into a twisting, screaming chew toy on the asphalt. Through the pain, he at least sees that his wife has escaped. He smiles at the guards who come running.

“Go ahead and do your worst!” he hisses defiantly, whereupon they strap him in a chair and force him to watch every single movie he’s starred in.

“Niyyyyaaaaaaaahhhh! NO! Anything but this!” he shrieks.

“Okay, you’re sentenced to 31 years in prison.”

He got off easy.

The prison he’ll be spending the next three decades in is naturally not your typical prison, but a private underground superstructure in the middle of the desert. “Completely escape-proof,” a female voice declares for the prisoners as they approach the establishment, densely packed in a truck. A man stares at the desert landscape through a small window, his eyes so wide open you fear his eyeballs might slip from their sockets. He tells the others he’s been sentenced to 60 days, and as soon as he’s said it, we know he’s not the surviving kind of character.

Before they’re escorted to their cells, they have to shove their heads into a box on the wall and give a blow job to some small machine, which gives them a real cracker in return for their efforts – a small bomb that distributes pain if they cross the yellow lines that are painted on the floors, and explodes if they step over the red lines. Of course it’s not enough just to hear this information. In the following scene, as they’re brought down a corridor, the 60-day man panics.

“I have claustrophobia!” he cries frantically and wide-eyed while tottering about like some beheaded chicken. “I’m not sure why I wasn’t aware of it when we were packed like sardines in that small truck, but I guess the scriptwriter-” He steps toward the yellow line and again we hear the female voice, warning him not to cross it. “The yellow line means pain.” As soon as his foot touches the line he screams and falls to the floor… the interesting thing is that he collapses in the middle of the corridor, so you would think the pain might stop then and there, but no. He realizes that he has landed in the wrong place and, still yelling for all he’s worth, starts crawling back to the yellow line, and then beyond it. Perhaps he’s the kind of person that gets off on pain.

“Don’t cross the red line,” the female voice calmly admonishes. “The red line means death.”

“Death, cool! That might be even more painful!” the 60-day man thinks while determinedly (and still screaming) dragging himself across the line.

“AAAAAHHHH!!!” he howls as he pulls up his shirt to show the audience what’s going on – his stomach is swelling, as if he’s about to birth an alien. He isn’t, though. Instead, a small pop is heard, his stomach explodes and he dies in a rather amusing way.

Then the rest of the movie happens. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s about Christopher Lambert trying to escape from the prison.

Fortress has a pretty cool concept and a few nice sceneries (laser grids instead of boring iron bars, yo!) and scenes. But it has some seriously cheesy stuff as well, like the evil warden having some sort of mumbo jumbo machine that can see what the prisoners are dreaming of. Being so evil, he doesn’t like dreams of a sexual or romantic nature, so he shocks them awake and asks them to please dream of something nicer, like snapping the neck of a kitten, eating a baby or something along those lines. My biggest question is: Why doesn’t he use that machine to see if the prisoners are cooking up some sort of escape plan? Maybe he’s too busy being evil, for he has put his greasy, evil warden fingers on Christopher’s sweet wife and because their second child is illegal, he intends for it to belong to MelTel Corporation (the company that owns the prison) when she has given birth to it!

“Muahahahaha!” he cackles evilly after having told Karen of his evil plans, dressed in bathrobe, a brandy cup in his hand. He tries to twirl his mustache before realizing he doesn’t have one. “Damn, I need a cat to sit in my lap!” he thinks. “A whole basket full of kittens, so I can snap their necks when I’ve finished patting them, just so I can show everyone how truly evil I am.”

Could this have been a better movie? Definitely. Like I said, it has a pretty cool concept. Just skipping cheesy stuff like the dream scanner would’ve improved it. To have an actor with more charisma than Christopher Lambert would’ve been another improvement. It would’ve been really interesting if the warden hadn’t been so utterly evil, perhaps someone who really believes in the system, a red tape sort of man, something like that. Just a thought. Anyway, there was real potential to create a scifi classic. Now it became cheese instead. Unfortunately not the best kind of cheesy movie, the one that leaves you with barely any air in your lungs because you keep laughing it all out, but one that puts a slight grin on your face and occasionally makes you chuckle in amusement.