An old lady (Elizabeth Ince) stays at a boarding house at the turn of the 20th Century. At least, I think it was supposed to be the turn of the 20th Century. There weren’t any cars or telephones but, at the same time, everyone had contemporary hair styles and they wore clothes that looked like they were supposed to be vintage but actually weren’t. The movie could have just as easily been taking place in a hipster coffeehouse in 1997.
The old lady likes to walk up to people ask them if they want to see proof that demons are real and it never occurs to anyone to just say no. The woman’s back is stitched together and when those stitches are untied, she drops her skinsuit and reveals herself to be the Devil. At least, I think that’s what happened because this was one of those movies where they didn’t have the money to actually show you what happened. You just have to guess by the shadows on the wall. The film’s poster makes it look like a horrifying transformation but sometimes, posters lie.
When the old devil woman steals your soul, she turns you into a paper doll. The boarding house made decides to serve the old woman. That’s pretty much the entire story. Stretching all that out to 81 minutes took some effort and determination so I’ll give the movie credit for that.
I appreciated the movie’s ambition. It’s too bad the wooden acting and the slow pace kept this movie from being as interesting as it should have been. Today’s lesson is don’t hang out with old women who offer to show you a demon. No good will come from it.
The streets are being flooded with lousy, synthetic heroin. Could the source be somewhere inside of Trabuco Federal Prison? That is what Nick Slater (Ben Maccabee) has been assigned to find out. Nick is a tough cop but now he is going undercover, pretending to be a tough but incarcerated bank robber. Nick discovers that Trabuco is like no other prison out there. For one thing, Wings Hauser is the warden. Warden Pitt is a smirking Aryan who forces his prisoners to box for his amusement and who enforces discipline with a CIA-style torture chamber. (Because the Warden is a boxing fanatic who likes to reward his best fighters, he also regularly brings prostitutes into the prison, which allows the film to reach its quota of B-movie nudity.) Even worse, Warden Pitt and the head of the Aryan Brotherhood, Jigsaw (Paulo Tocha) are working together. Only Nick can end Warden Pitt’s reign of terror but he will have to survive prison first. Fortunately, Ben knows how to throw a punch and deliver kick and he is going to have to do a lot of both if he is going to make it out alive.
Through the Shattered Lens 