Reptileenbu
Did you people see the same film I saw?
Bea Swanson
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Rosie Searle
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
Scott LeBrun
James Woods once again lights up the screen as a cheerful, mildly sleazy prison guard, Frank "Fast-Walking" Miniver. He's sometimes got some kind of hustle going on, but he's not all that bad. Yet, he finds himself drawn into a plot being engineered to assassinate William Galliott (Robert Hooks), a black revolutionary. Ultimately, Fast-Walking has to make a choice. Accept the money being offered to participate in the killing, or accept Galliotts' offer of cash to keep him safe.Although leisurely paced, "Fast-Walking" is a frequently riveting look at corruption in a prison system. It gets a fair amount of juice from a typically electrifying performance by Woods, but even he is outshone by the late Tim McIntire, who's magnetic as an ambitious and crafty convict named Wasco. Woods also has fine scenes with the tantalizingly sexy Kay Lenz, as Wascos' girl "Moke". Moke makes it clear from the moment of her first encounter with Fast-Walking that she's not somebody to be messed with. Lenz does have one extremely memorable sequence where she turns on almost every male present in the visiting room. The rest of the supporting cast is stocked with some excellent actors and actresses: M. Emmet Walsh as Fast-Walkings' superior, Charles Weldon as his co-worker, Susan Tyrrell (looking more glamorous than usual) as Evie, Lance LeGault as Lieutenant Barnes, Sandy Ward as the warden, and Sydney Lassick as an inmate. The great screen psycho Timothy Carey has an amusing role as eccentric kingpin "Bullet"."Fast-Walking" was adapted from the novel by Ernest Brawley by producer & director James B. Harris, who produced some of Kubricks' films when he was younger and who would again work with Woods on the police drama "Cop". The story is entertaining and on location shooting at a real prison aids in the authenticity. Some viewers will be pleased with the amount of full frontal female nudity. (Be warned, however, that we also get full frontal from Mr. Walsh!)Nicely scored by Lalo Schifrin, this is a fairly interesting film worth a look for fans of prison-based cinema and actor Woods.Eight out of 10.
Robert J. Maxwell
In the opening shots we see James Woods, with his mad grin and his cackling, driving along a country road and passing a joint back and forth with his black friend, Charles Weldon. When they reach their destination, they step out of the car and Woods dons the jacket, tie, and cap of a prison corrections officer before stepping through the iron door and going to work. A CO smoking DOPE! This is supposed to shock the audience, and maybe it did, someplace up in the hills.The movie is an quirky mixture of comedy and drama. The prison's physical plant itself is in pretty good shape. It's not a hell hole like Sing Sing. The building and grounds are in Deer Lodge, Montana. They may not be the only man-made structure in Deer Lodge, although close to it, but they're certainly the most impressive, and they're not unpleasant, either inside or out.A flourishing narcotics business is going on among the inmates. It's run by Timothy Carey, looking spookily old, but after Carey is thoroughly beaten, Tim McIntire takes over. All the lower-echelon COs appear to know about it but nobody cares enough to make waves.Not that it's all hunky dory. The black inmates don't like the white inmates, and vice versa, another shock. The dramatic Schwerpunkt of the story is the arrival of a black liberation figure, Robert Hooks, whom the higher-ups plan to have accidentally knocked off. Hooks is treated sympathetically and so are his outside compañeros, who have arranged for Hooks' escape. Woods, seeing that the alternative is that Hooks is killed, involves himself in the escape plan as a matter of principle and of fifty thousand dollars.Woods plays his usual wisecracking self. The movie could have been called "Fast Talking." He not only smokes dope, he confiscates and instrumentalizes it from the madam of the local hang out, Susan Tyrell -- my supporting player in the much-neglected gem of an art house miniseries called "Windmills of the Gods." Or maybe it was "Rage of Angels." I've done my best to forget. Woods also runs a couple of hookers at Tyrell's place and gets to hose them down naked in the back yard after their strenuous labors. One of the hookers is Kay Lenz, who gives what I judged to be a magnificent, artistic performance in the nude, and also masturbating in the visitors room, giving head at her first meeting with Woods, and what not.Tim McIntire gave me a bit of a problem. He's supposed to be the head honcho among the inmates -- ruthless, bearded, a trusty with outside influence, narcotics big wig. Yet he has a low voice with every speech sound clearly articulated. He's a juggernaut of evil but sounds like a Vassar graduate. I understand he was an excellent musician too. He died at 41.The comic moments are a nice relief. In one scene, the sergeant in charge of the COs leads Woods into an office where Woods has left a roach on the desk. After chewing Woods out, the sergeant, M. Emmet Walsh, notices the joint, picks it up, and shouts, "What's going on here?" Woods plucks the joint from his fingers, glances at it sternly, and leaps out of the room, saying, "We'll get to the bottom of this."
dweddle3
I loved this movie, one of James Woods' best. I certainly agree with the other reviewer about Kay Lenz, the woman is ravishing. It has a gritty, sleazy feel to it that reminds me of "To Live and Die In L.A.".. .. it's realistic, in other words. Kay Lenz was striking in this movie, I thought she was about the sexiest woman alive for years after watching this. The guy that played WASCO was really good too, and lots of underground prison slang in the movie..it's got that real feel to it... It reminds me of the movie "Colors".. or "Miami Vice" .. and mirrors the drug scene in California, indeed, in America. It's a gray movie.. without any real heroes. Reminds me of real life!
Woodyanders
One of the most exquisitely trashy -- and hence best -- seriocomic crime/prison movies to ever ooze onto celluloid. James Woods, that splendidly spacey, spastic, spindly stringbean who's turned sleazily engaging pent-up intensity into something of a modern science, is very much in his usual mondo nutzoid element as Frank "Fast Walking" Miniver, a lazy, dissolute, laid-back, don't-give-a-s**t-about-nothing, weed-toking, on the take Texas jail-house guard who's got his fingers in several filthy pies: he runs dope for cunning, calculating, double-dealing control freak top con Wasco (a magnificently lordly, mesmerizing, darkly charismatic characterization by the late, great Tim McIntire), helps Susan Tyrell run a south-of-the-border brothel, and has been hired by opposing racial factions to either protect or bump off powerful black civil rights leader Robert Hooks.The bang-up supporting cast smokes in no uncertain terms: a sensationally sassy'n'sexy Key Lenz as McIntire's fiery, fetching hot tramp main squeeze, M. Emmet Walsh, who scuzzes it up with his customary rip-snorting aplomb as the crooked chief of security; and a beautifully battered Timothy Carey as a foolishly obdurate elderly felon with exclusive dibs on the behind bars drug trade (McIntire's fabulously flamboyant spiel in which he explains to Carey how he's going to claim a monopoly on all the drug trafficking and bust it wide open by catering to the individual whims of each ethnic group serving time in the pokey is a real gem), plus colorful bits by such reliable thespians as Lance LeGault (as the ramrod captain of the guard who's itching to fire Woods), K. Callan, Sandy Ward (as the ineffectual warden) and the chronically geeky Sydney Lassick. Writer/director James B. Harris never makes a single misstep, tossing in enough seedy subplots, assorted sordid antics, startling plot twists, and smack dead on the money exploitation movie ingredients (wall-to-wall nudity, sex, illicit narcotics of every kind, seething racial tension, profanity-ridden dialog, lowbrow raunchy jokes -- y'know, the whole gnarly'n'nasty nine yards) to keep this delectably decadent doozy constantly entertaining throughout. Moreover, we've got Lalo Schifrin's flavorful jump band blues score, smashingly clear-eyed cinematography by King Baggott, a uniquely twisted sense of black-as-midnight goof-ball humor, and, natch, even a pervasively cynical and nihilistic edifying moral: If you put a whole bunch of ethically lacking scumballs together under one roof they'll get worse instead of better because they can take full advantage of the opportunity to feed off one another's moral baseness like a pack of leeches. Now, how could any fervent, hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool B-movie aficionado possibly pass this baby up? Well, the answer is you just can't, because this first-rate blithely amoral treat is quite simply the authentic funky article.
