The Worst Film Ever

Powerful

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

I remember a contemporary review of this film from a major news magazine - Time, Newsweek, that level of profundity - juicily enthralled with this insipid cartoon, a psychobabble valentine to an endlessly self-aggrandizing generation. After seeing it a few years later at a student cinema, I realized one of the reasons I hated American pseudo-radicals is their utter contempt not only for "law and order", but for ordinary Americans, as well. ...For me. One visionary hippie burbles, "we don't have to call them pigs because they know what they are." That pretty-much sums up the world-view of all our trust fund revolutionaries in that thankfully ancient era. They grew up to be Wall Street traders, bankers and other affluent thieves who've reduced the American working class to near-poverty status. They won. The pigs are suffering.Like some overheated reviewers here, the alternative press often has praised "PP" as a "chilling vision of the future". OK. It's 43 years later. Hippies have vanished as counterculture vanguard - not because they were hunted down in the desert, but because they outgrew their own retarded fables. So... Where are these killing fields? Where are the American gulags? This turgid agitprop is for true believers, the ones too tendentious to realize this musty dream failed decades ago. Power to the people. ...But only in Malibu and Great Neck, apparently.Enjoy!

Peter Watkins' Punishment Park is a compellingly brutal film, serving as commentary on the polarization of America and the treatment of those with unpopular viewpoints in the Vietnam-era. Shot in 1971 on a miniscule budget, the film offers its ideology on American youth at the time, the dehumanization and corruption of government, and the torment of people, with the looming thought that they may have not even been doing anything wrong.The film was one of the very first to be shot in the style and tone of "cinéma vérité," a technique used by filmmakers to generate a documentary-like vibe and to persuade the audiences into believing what they're seeing is real footage. It is 1970, and the Vietnam War is escalating, with president Richard Nixon losing control and running out of options. He declares America as a "state of emergency, and proposes the "McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950," which gave federal authorities the right to detain those who appeared as a "risk to internal security." We follow members, mostly young university students, of various political movements, such as the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the communist movement who are arrested and given the choice of either serving their full time sentences or spending three days at the ambiguously named "Punishment Park." Many of them choose the second option, where they are told that if they can run fifty-three miles in brutal California desert heat and make it to an American flag checkpoint, with a two hour head-start before National Guardsmen and federal authorities are dispatched to try and stop them, that they will be released and their pending dues will disappear.As we see many young students run helplessly through the desert, with temperatures well over one-hundred degrees, we focus on another group of students who are pleading their cases to a group of men and women in a tent on why they were resisting and evading the Vietnam war. The people are simply not interested in hearing their views and constantly interrupt them, leading to contentious interactions involving heavy cursing and strong morality and ethics that increasingly come into play as time goes on.The cinematography is as raw as they come, with extensive shots of desert locations inhabited by sweaty, breathless students desperately clinging to their last hope for survival and humanity-driven choices. Watkins directs this picture with numbing realism that stems not only from the provocative cinematography, but from the screenplay, composed of extemporaneous dialog and improvisation on the actors' part. Their performances are coldly real and chillingly authentic.Punishment Park sort of tires out in its third act, being that it greatly established its point and purpose within the first two, but the film relentlessly tries to depict a brutal reality filled with dissent, isolation, and strict government control that thankfully never was prophetic. What is amazing is despite ones assumption that the film's ideology and issues are dated and no longer relevant, in a post-9/11, Patriot Act, NDAA world, it would appear we must look onto films like these as poetry for the present.Directed by: Peter Watkins.

I was 16 in 1968 and got involved with all of the 'hippy' stuff, which for me/us, mainly consisted of going to lots of concerts and getting altered quite a bit - we had a lot of fun in a (believe it or not) simpler time. I attended several peaceful (for the most part) anti-war protests in Chicago in 1969 and got involved with a group of students at my high school (Lane Tech) who were trying to change the dress code and several other restrictive parts of the setting there; a few kids were even involved in SDS (a pretty radical group).I think this film, though well-made for the time and depicting a fairly accurate account of the conflict between true radicals and the 'establishment' (in the tribunal scenes) fails badly with the 'punishment park' part, a ridiculous and implausible scenario where young people convicted of conspiracy against the government are sent off into the dessert on foot and without water and then hunted down and executed by the police and National Guardsmen. In depicting law enforcement as such totally brutal cowards, the film does a disservice to the credibility of real events back then such as Kent State and the 1968 Democratic convention.Anyway, for me, the totally black/white stereotypical portrayals of law enforcement in this film ruin the credibility of the message so I'll pass on saying this is a good movie.

I loved the first 15 minutes, and I loved some of the dialogue in the tribunal--which proved to be the best showcase for the director's ahead-of-its-time method acting technique--but this movie ultimately disappoints. Even when viewed purely as a metaphor of the oppressor/oppressed dynamics that were and are prevalent in the relationship between the US government and its more "disobedient" citizens, it still lacks punch and believability, and ultimately left me looking at my watch hoping the obvious ending would happen already.And for the record: despite rampant rumors to the contrary, this movie has never been banned in the US (I can't comment on the rumors of UK censorship, but I'm suspicious). Hollywood refused to distribute it after its initial film festival showing, and I am more than willing to believe the Nixon government had some influence on this decision; however, the fact that it never appeared on American television is merely a reflection of this medium's rather careful and advertising-driven fashion of doing business. As for the present, you can have your very own copy of the DVD delivered to your door via Amazon in a few days.