Customer Reviews

Locked Up

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Erotic content good (requisite shower/rape scenes with ample full frontal footage). Dramatic content NOT very good or believable. Do German prisons really allow inmates to choose their cellmates and to set up housekeeping as lovers? Attractive actors. The "special features" interview with the 2 lead actors is very "honest" and worth listening to to hear their views on porn. Apparently the sex scenes are "hardcore" according to the actors, although the scenes appear to have been edited--perhaps for the US release?

Locked Up opens with Dennis (Marcel Schlutt) going to prison for 2 years for credit card fraud and while in prison he falls in love with Mike (Mike Sale) who is serving 15 year for murder. The supposing dilemma comes from Dennis leaving before Mike's time is up.
This movie is flat out laughable soft porn that has many beautiful faces and bodies and really nothing more. The cells are the size of dorm rooms and have funishing like lamps, radios, televisions and coffe makers to name a few. Some of the prisoners are wearing uniforms and some are not, not to mention I think most prisons would have you remove your piecings both the belly and the penis. The movie only becomes more ludicrous as the two fall in love after having five minute quikies in a cell. Several scenes were diturbing like the guy that was drenched in spit and the shower rape scene. If all this wasn't bad enough when you get to the last scene of this movie, and see how it ends you'll want the writer, director and producer locked up and the key thrown away.

I bought this as I thought all three movies would be worth watching and boy was I wrong. The only one of the three that is worth it is Exposed: The Making of a Legend, which is a documentary on the making of Buckleroos. It is well made, funny and has a wonderful insight into the world of gay porn and how it is made.
The other two movies were pretty appalling - softcore porn that didn't really do much. Sure, the men were kinda hot but really, it doesn't go far enough to make it porn and the acting is appalling enough to be porn!
Locked Up has some interesting moments but the characters are bad, the story was kinda shallow and the Mike character (and the actor himself - as seen in the cast interviews) is really annoying.
The Hole can be deemed as kinda funny but, yet again, the acting was bad and I guess perhaps the 'hardcore' version, if there is one, would've been more fulfilling.

All in all, I recommend buying Exposed on its own and ignoring the other two.

German Caucasian Dennis (Marcel Schlutt) gets sent to a German prison for credit-card fraud and falls for Mike (Mike Sale), an African American (?) who is serving a sentence of fifteen years for murdering his wife. What you expect in a prison movie is here: the gang cliques, the drug activity, the violence, the crooked guards and of course more sex than on a Saturday in a New Orleans House of Prostitution.

Although this film is not rated, there is frontal and backal nudity galore, some S & M activity-- for instance, a scene where the bigger, stonger inmates line up and spit on one of their "punks"-- visual masturbation and a gang rape. So is the movie pornographic? You be the judge. Pornography, for my money, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A supreme court justice once said he couldn't define pornography but he knew it when he saw it. The photographer Tom Bianchi would say that whether or not something is pornographic depends on the artistic ability of the artist. Certainly Robert Mapplethorpe photographed and exhibited in world class galleries images that make some of these look tame by comparison.

Not everybody acts in this film. Some of the men obviously got cast, not for their acting prowess, but for their bodies or perhaps only men with buffed bodies go to German prisons. Marcel Schlutt as Dennis has his moments. The ending, however, is a quite a stretch. This movie probably is one for watching on a cold, winter night.

Ok, forget the actual movie. All the good stuff is in the DVD extras. Watch the interviews with the two main characters and you'll learn that they were actually having real sex in this movie! Which is surprising because it doesn't appear to be real sex. But anyway, in the interviews, Marcel Schlutt reveals that he has a fetish for black men and he tells this to Mike Sale who is rightfully offended by him. Mike is then put off by Marcel but remains friendly with him. But both men say it was difficult working together. Mike jokingly says the best thing about making this movie for him was getting paid. He tells a lot about how he felt the director was a "monster" and Marcel also talks about how difficult he was to work with. Both men discuss their respect for pornography and how much they enjoy being in porn. Mike has never been in a movie before and Marcel has only had a few tiny roles.

As for the movie itself, it is extremely unrealistic but who cares? Mike is a terrible actor but Marcel is surprisingly very good. He could go on to bigger and better roles. Mike was just painful to watch. And some of the stuff in this movie is unintentionally funny. It's worth a rental for sure!

The black character says he's American, but he has the most obvious British accent in the world. He can't speak a word of German, yet the couple seem to understand each other. With all the Black American soldiers in Germany, the director is telling the viewers he couldn't find a single Black American who spoke German (or could take a crash course) to play this role? Further, the black guy is kinda queeny. I don't think he would survive in an American jail. Yet in this film, he is DA MAN, and both white German prisoners and officers are in awe of him. This movie is a watered-down "Oz" written by some German who's obviously worships us brothas. And worse, the English subtitles were riddled with spelling errors. That only added to the campiness of the film.

The first thing that strikes you about this film is that it can't decide whether it's soft porn or a sexy drama. It's filed on video, (albeit with single camera) and the sound and music are a little poor; just like cheap porn! On the plus side, there's a love story, and the lead, Dennis, is very attractive. It's shot in a disused prison, so no wobbly studio sets; but there's a lack of attention to detail, eg. one prisoner has a tongue-stud (unlikely to be allowed) and there's a distinct lack of discipline. The DVD extra's include a lengthy interview with the two lead actors, I found this more interesting than the feature and shows an insight into such a film making process, if you're interested!

Okay, so this movie takes place in some strange gay fantasy prison world where everyone is sexy and waxed (even after years in prison). Plenty of full nudity and sex (especially in the deleted scenes), but why film actual hardcore scenes and then edit them out of the movie? Marcel Schlutt is simply adorable in every scene. Mike (the other male lead) unfortunately couldn't act his way out of a damp paper bag (possibly enhanced by the fact that his lines are all in English). If you enjoy "Oz" you will definitely like this film.

Shot on digital video with a budget that might buy you a nice lunch, Locked Up is a by-the-numbers story. There wasn't a plot point you couldn't see coming, even if you haven't seen Oz. While everyone involved gets full marks for trying, this is only one or two steps above an amateur effort--not a bad effort, but amateur none-the-less. The predictable script aside, the other element that really robs it of any punch is the fact that all the punches are so badly performed. With the exception of the shower scene, the violence is badly performed, so what is supposed to be brutal comes across as amusing. I can't say that I really hated this movie (Marcel Schlutt has enough charisma to carry the film), it's not one that I would recommend to anyone--not because it's out and out bad, but becuase it's not really good.

(C)2005 Joe Edkin.

In the spirit of Genet's Un Chant d'Amor, this movie was quite a spectacle, really. I found it enjoyable to see such a fantastical tale of prison romance (and the explicit sex scenes between men were not bad either). At the same time, I tend to agree with the other reviewers when they say that there was not enough in either category, drama or porn, to latch on to.

I was saddened to see that these actors seemed to think they were in a porn first as opposed to a movie that had great potential to have well developed plot, characters, and settings. Some people might have even related to the idea that love can occur in the least likely of places. But the acting level was elementary school play at best, and it kind of subtracted from the story (and I found it was easier to just focus on the scantily clad bodies messing around on screen rather than try and glean something from the scene itself).

I saw, very briefly, that the director, whether he wanted to or not, set up a wonderful dichotomy between the stereotypical prison homosexual and the actual homosexual. The "love" that existed between the tougher inmates and their "punk" was used to demonstrate the rough nature of the prison itself (although I will admit, it was quite a strange prison with rather lax rules and regulations... especially for Germany) and was based more on a sodomitical need to dominate (as are most prison "romances"), whereas the connection between the main characters was more along the lines of an actually love story.

(Sigh) I wish this movie had been filmed, acted, and graphed out better. That someone tried at all is appreciated, but in all actuallity, it could have been SOOOO much better. 2 stars.