"it’s almost a hideous, nightmarish version of a high school drama"
DOG POUND starts as it means to go on, with three messy scenes of drugs, sex and violence in quick succession, introducing us to the film’s teenage trio as they commit the crimes that put them inside Montana’s ‘Enola Vale Correctional Facility’. Let me warn you; within the first fifteen minutes there are scenes that will have you recoiling and covering your eyes, and the film doesn’t get any less tough to take as it goes on. The young French director, Kim Chapiron, who made the 2006 satanic possession teen horror SHEITAN, is here using his penchant for grisly shock tactics to retell the Borstal story from the 1970‘s British film SCUM for 21st Century America. The themes are the same: institutionalised brutality from wardens and inmates alike, and a savage watch-your-back prison hierarchy where a psychotic few attempt to rule the rabble with violence, racism and rape as their weapons.
SCUM and DOG POUND both hook their portrayals of teenage lives warped behind bars around three main characters, who don’t know each other before incarceration, but loosely stick together as the vulnerable newbies. SCUM has Davis, Angel and Carlin; DOG POUND has Davis, Angel and the more offender-appropriately monikered Butch. Their young crimes have been toughened up from the 1970‘s: stealing scrap metal, car theft, and beating up a screw while escaping from an open institution here become drug dealing, auto theft with assault, and a serious assault on a correctional officer. Once inside the Institute, the film structures itself starkly around the miserable routine of prison life: the morning dormitory unlock and warders’ inspection; the canteen lunch slopped into plastic trays, some inventive spells of afternoon bullying, then lock up, lights out, screen to black - and morning rolls round once more. A recurring, lamenting blues soundtrack underscores the tedium, along with the frequent sound of slamming doors and jamming bolts. Identical shots of narrow corridors, locked dormitory doors and bare solitary confinement cells are repeated at intervals from exactly the same angle seen before, and to emphasise the intense claustrophobia even further, the characters are pursued sweatily closely by the camera. The lens doesn’t shy away from tight shots of fists shattering faces, blood stained bodies, death and anal rape.
With stock characters like the bully and his dumb stooges, the weird intellectual outsider, and the sexual braggadacio who boasts of bedding his girlfriend’s mum; it’s almost a hideous, nightmarish version of a high school drama, without any pretty cheerleaders or young romances to distract from all the adolescent cruelty. ‘Enola: A Place to Grow and Learn’ is the motto painted on the Institute’s walls and it certainly is a place where teenagers grow - ever tougher yet ever more deeply traumatised - and where they learn: ingenious new ways either to protect themselves or to inflict violent damage on their rivals. Adult haplessness and the frustrations and prejudices simmering within the prison staff, don’t help these kids find the rehabilitation prescribed to them by the State Judges who put them there. Instead an anger management class becomes a crowd brawl, and a gym dodgeball session becomes a racism-fuelled game of war. As both scenes of teenage hurt and frustration escalate dangerously out of control, they act as precursors to the film’s grim end.
Enola Vale’s solitary female teacher cuts a lonely figure as she tries to do her best to help her hormonal crowd of over-sexed and under-educated gangster wannabes. Miss Biggs, one of her doomed prison warder colleagues, and the kind acts of brotherly spirit sparingly shown between the boys, are the film’s occasional flashes of human grace, good intention and innocence, designed to leave the viewer in no doubt that the draconian and vengeful youth justice system is as much to blame for the damaged monsters inside it as any latent adolescent psychosis. Just as SCUM did in the 70’s, DOG POUND lays on the cruelty and violence with a heavy and blood-stained spade in order to drive its moral and political message relentlessly home. It’s not original or unexpected, but it is effectively and intelligently done. If you prefer to leave a movie without feeling traumatised for many hours afterwards, you should give this harrowing cinematic experience a miss. But if you want to see a powerful and ethically important film from an angry-young-man Director, watch this.