Director: Peter Watkins
Year Released: 1971
Rating: 1.0
During the Vietnam Era in America, political dissidents are arrested and given the option of many years in prison or a three-day trip to Punishment Park, a rip-off of "The Most Dangerous Game" in which the police drop the radicals in the desert, give them a head start and then chase after them with squad cars and shoot them. If it weren't for the skilled photography of Joan Churchill this would be almost contemptible, a quasi-documentary so egregiously one-sided and intentionally aggravating that modern-day rabble-rouser Michael Moore looks downright taciturn in comparison (irony of ironies: the movie's soundman is actually named Michael Moore ... no relation, of course). I don't care for Watkins' style in this particular case - he continuously cross cuts between the violence taking place in the desert and 'courtroom' footage where the prisoners shout their leftist ideals while their inquisitors shout their quasi-fascist ideals - although it isn't hard to see how this could have 'rallied' the already bubbling liberals of the time; Antonioni's Zabriskie Point is a similar - but mercifully more abstract - movie.
