When car thief Jared (Mario Xavier) is sentenced to two years in prison, he certainly doesn’t exepct an easy time. But he is woefully unprepared for the dark history behind Stone Gate Penitentiary – stories of occult rituals, unexplained deaths, missing bodies – all thought to be nothing more than urban legend. But Jared is soon to discover the dark secret that zombies lurk in the prison’s basement, and soon he and his cellmate Miguel (Miguel Angel Novo) are forced to face that evil head on if they want to survive.
Content
In this movie’s opening credits, the characters are introduced with black and white still images and captions giving their names. This is an interesting choice – it’s a bit refreshing and unique from the normal way of rolling the credits. However, it might have been a good idea to also include the name of character as well – for example, “Mario Xavier as Jared.” Albeit, it’s a bit of a clichéd convention, but as the characters’ names aren’t mentioned very often, and they’re all wearing the same prison-style jumpsuit, it would probably help out the audience with keeping them all straight.
Despite being such a serious movie, there are a couple bits of humor. While being chased by zombies, Jared’s girlfriend Rachel pulls out a shotgun and blows a couple of them away. Jared stops for a second and stares at her with a very amused – and somewhat aroused – look on his face. I’ve noticed the same look on my fiancé’s face whenever I’m holding a gun, so it must be a guy thing. Either way, it made me laugh.
Perhaps the biggest issue in terms of the content section, are the many logic holes this film has. First, after fighting with - and being badly beaten by - another inmate, Jared has no bruises or scars in the next scene. In another scene, Jared is working in a kitchen, peeling an apple with what looks to be a rather sharp knife. It’s highly unlikely that he would even be allowed to have access to a knife, especially not without being watched by a guard. Along those same lines, whenever Rachel visits Jared, the “visiting room” looks almost like a broom closet of sort – no glass wall or divider to keep the two of them apart, plus she isn’t escorted by a guard and no on watches the visit. Later, while Rachel and Jared are running from the zombies, Jared uses Rachel’s cell phone to call a friend to come pick them up. It’s quite unlikely that she would have been allowed to bring that into the jail. MSNBC often does specials on prisons; it might be useful to watch a few of those to get a feel for locations, space, sound, and so forth.
The danger presented to our protagonists arises when the aforementioned zombies choose to leave the basement and come up into the prison, but it’s very unclear what causes them to suddenly come up into the main prison. There really ought to be some clearer reason for why this happened at that particular time. Another logic issue is that the zombies seem awfully easy to kill which, according to more zombie “lore,” shouldn’t normally be the case. Of course, every zombie film tends to make its own “rules” about what will kill the undead, so this could easily be left up to the filmmakers. In either case, though, it would help to give the film much better structure if there were more clearly defined obstacles that these characters had to face rather than just “killing zombies.”
