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Animal Factory

2000, Movie, R, 95 mins

Animal Factory: Review

ANIMAL FACTORY
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For all the shankings, brawls and constant threat of sexual assault, there's something surprisingly sweet at the center of this grim prison drama. Ron Decker (Edward Furlong) is a young man with a rich daddy (John Heard) and the bad luck to have been caught with $200,000 worth of pot. To prove a point, the judge sentences Ron to 10 years at the state penitentiary; with luck, he'll be out in two. But two years is a long time to spend among hardened, sex-deprived criminals — as one convict puts it, you either have to be impossibly tough or sign on as someone's punk to survive. So it's baby-faced Decker's good luck that he attracts the attention of longtime inmate Earl Copen (Willem Dafoe), who has all the right jobs in all the right prison offices, knows all the guards and carries enough juice in the yard to snatch other inmates' dope and stay alive. Copen goes out of his way to help Decker, who's leery of the older man's intentions — especially when Copen arranges to have Decker moved to his own cell block. Whatever Copen's motivation, a strong bond forms between the two that not only enables Decker to survive but eventually offers him a possible means of escape. The film, directed with minimum fuss by actor-director Steven Buscemi, is based on the 1977 novel by former-inmate-turned-novelist Edward Bunker, and it rings with the kind of authenticity Bunker brings to his fiction. Defoe projects a nice balance of the avuncular and the menacing as an inmate who's mastered the system but probably couldn't last a day in the outside world; he's a man to be trusted but not fooled with. And Mickey Rourke's turn as Decker's cell mate, a toothless drag queen in a red bra and chartreuse nail polish, simply has to be seen to be believed. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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