Jailbreakers (1994)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Who would have ever thought that the director of THE EXORCIST and the co-writer of HALLOWEEN could come up with something this poor? High school cheerleader Angel (Shannen Doherty) has a great life in front of her but she ends up falling for Tony (Antonio Sabato, Jr.), a rebel lowlife who slowly but surely brings her down to his level and before long the two are trying to evade the police. This was another one of those in-name-only remakes of the older AIP flick. This one here has Debra Hill co-writing the screenplay as well as producing and we've got William Friedkin directing but you really wouldn't know it just by watching this film. Friedkin's direction can not be spotted as it appears he was either very bored with this production and didn't care about it or perhaps we could give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wanted to pay homage to all those bad "C" movies from AIP. If his goal was to make a bad movie just like people would have seen back in the 1950s then I guess you can call this a success. The biggest problem is that there's simply no energy in the film and even at just 76-minutes the thing feels way too long. Another problem is the screenplay, which just seems to jump around in time as there's really no character development and there are so many things that just seem to happen for no reason. Both Doherty and Sabato, Jr. actually do decent jobs with their roles and there's even a young Adrien Brody playing one of the sidekicks. Adrienne Barbeau plays the girl's mother but she's pretty much wasted and spends most of the film just standing around. JAILBREAKERS really doesn't have much going for it so only those who need to see all the films in the series should bother with it.
* 1/2 (out of 4)
Who would have ever thought that the director of THE EXORCIST and the co-writer of HALLOWEEN could come up with something this poor? High school cheerleader Angel (Shannen Doherty) has a great life in front of her but she ends up falling for Tony (Antonio Sabato, Jr.), a rebel lowlife who slowly but surely brings her down to his level and before long the two are trying to evade the police. This was another one of those in-name-only remakes of the older AIP flick. This one here has Debra Hill co-writing the screenplay as well as producing and we've got William Friedkin directing but you really wouldn't know it just by watching this film. Friedkin's direction can not be spotted as it appears he was either very bored with this production and didn't care about it or perhaps we could give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wanted to pay homage to all those bad "C" movies from AIP. If his goal was to make a bad movie just like people would have seen back in the 1950s then I guess you can call this a success. The biggest problem is that there's simply no energy in the film and even at just 76-minutes the thing feels way too long. Another problem is the screenplay, which just seems to jump around in time as there's really no character development and there are so many things that just seem to happen for no reason. Both Doherty and Sabato, Jr. actually do decent jobs with their roles and there's even a young Adrien Brody playing one of the sidekicks. Adrienne Barbeau plays the girl's mother but she's pretty much wasted and spends most of the film just standing around. JAILBREAKERS really doesn't have much going for it so only those who need to see all the films in the series should bother with it.