Tonight I pulled down a DVD that I got from a garage sale and promptly forgot about for years, Fortress (1992).

I can’t believe I had never seen this movie before. I knew from quickly scanning the case that it starred Christopher Lambert (Highlander) and Kurtwood Smith (That 70s Show, RobCop), but I was not expecting to see my favorite actor of all time, Jeffrey Combs, especially in such a prominent role. There is almost no marketing copy on the case, so it was a hugely pleasant surprise.

The movie takes place in the distant future of 2017, when the United States has implemented a one-child policy and total ban on abortion, in a flatly contradictory scheme to control a booming population (and harvest babies from newly criminalized mothers). Lambert plays John Brennick, husband to Karen (Loryn Locklin) who is pregnant with her second child. While trying to cross the border into Canada, where they can have their child in peace, the couple are captured and sent to The Fortress, a massive underground Panopticon, lorded over by Poe (Kurtwood Smith) and the AI control system Zed-10 (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon).

The Fortress is a private prison run by Men-Tel, and they treat the prisoners to a hilarious guided tour with heavy reliance on the slogan/motto “Crime Does Not Pay.” Zed-10 and Poe inform the prisoners of the security measures in place, including the ‘Intestinator,’ a combination belly bomb and remote pain device. There are also red and yellow lines that the prisoners are not supposed to cross, upon pain of death. As soon as this is established we see a prisoner cross those lines and set off his Intestinator, and then the lines are never seen or mentioned again. Just a tough break for that guy I guess. The cells within the prison have laser-grid bars, and a series of ceiling-tracked robot cameras serve as Zed-10’s eyes and ears. We get to see a surprising amount of full frontal male nudity as the incoming prisoners are processed, which is the only nudity in the film apart from a psychedelic wet dream reconstructed by a computer later in the film, so points for breaking the mold there.

After the tour, Brennick meets his cell-mates, including Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr) the other newbie, Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick) the old timer, Stiggs (Tom Towles) the skinhead rapist, and D-Day (Jeffrey Combs) the hippie-dippy bomb-maker. Another prisoner, Maddox, is alluded to but not seen. Stiggs and Maddox are purely stereotypical prison skinheads, and they attempt to rape Gomez pretty much as soon as the prison part of the film starts. It’s cheap, gross, homophobic, and easily the worst part of the film. It’s a pretty graphic, if brief, depiction, and the only redeeming factor is that it’s not played for laughs (in that one scene at least, there is some other homophobic stuff sprinkled throughout).

Zed-10 and Poe are the weirdest part of the movie. She has a camera that can see prisoner’s dreams, and seems to be a fully general AI. She and Poe run the prison together, and neither one seems to be totally in charge. Zed-10 controls all of the infrastructure, but we see Poe talk her into all kinds of things, often by making emotional appeals. The best line in the movie is when he yells through a locked door, trying to convince Zed-10 to open it, “Do you know what they’ll do to you? You’ll be lucky if you end up a Speak-and-Spell!” Over the course of the film we learn that Poe is a cyborg, and that he himself was a baby taken by Men-Tel under the one-child policy. He was modified as an infant and spent his entire life in the control room of the Fortress. Clearly the experience has taken a toll on him, because he spends his time watching the wet dreams of prisoners, to Zed-10’s consternation, when he should be punishing them for ‘unauthorized thought processes’. The more we learn about Men-Tel and the cyborgs, the more horrific they become, and it’s honestly a very effective slow-burn escalation.

A lot of crazy shit happens in this movie. There is a fun gyroscope ride that wipes your brain, leading Karen to use Zed-10’s dream camera to Inception her brain-dead husband back to life. Brennick gets savaged by dogs, beaten to a pulp by Maddox, and Intestinated all in one day. D-Day uses the power of magnets to remove everyone’s belly bombs, and some fun is had with them after that. Several people get just massive holes blown in their torsos, and once the cyborg soldiers start dying we see some excellently creepy practical effects for their innards, all caked in blue goo. Zed-10 possesses a truck.

I just love Jeffrey Combs’ commentary on everything as it happens. When they first take out one of the cyborg guards, he pokes around in the innards, muttering to himself “the shit they’re coming up with these days!” He also refers to the bombs in their Intestinators as ‘TNT on PMS’ which made me giggle a little. Unfortunately, this movie conforms to the standard model of dystopic actioner, and everyone apart from the core couple has to die before the runtime is over, and D-Day is no exception. He gets a triumphant send-off which is nice, but it would be great to see one of these super silly action movies where a few more of the secondary characters make it to the end credits. They even get Gomez in the last few moments, and Abraham was marked for death from the moment he appeared on screen, in all his budget Morgan Freeman glory (He’s the other one I would have liked to see live, the non-rapist cellmates were both fun characters with more stories to tell, they should have lived).

This movie is pretty stupid from start to finish, but there are so many elements that I love about it, it’s hard to decide what score it deserves. I think I’m going to call it a 2.5/5. If the completely unnecessary prison rape trope was excised completely, I would bump it up another half star at least, but it’s more than just a line of dialogue and so it has to be reflected in the score. With that major caveat, I would still recommend this one for fans of Christopher Lambert’s hilarious accent, Kurtwood Smith’s unnerving smile, or Jeffrey Combs’ genius everything.