Just to make sure everything gets remade, now we have PENITENTIARY!

Hey folks, Harry here... Ya know... sometimes they remake something that well... ya just don't expect. This time it is an old 1979 Blaxploitation flick called PENITENTIARY. Probably most of you have never seen it, the only reason I have was by accident. One night I was headed to the Alamo Drafthouse to see a showing of SWEET SWEETBACK'S BADASSSSS SONG after watching L.A. CONFIDENTIAL for the first time back in the Summer of '98... Weird how that date looks old now... Anyway, the Alamo Drafthouse wound up with a print of PENITENTIARY instead... turns out that Melvin's film was shipped to Italy by accident and we got Jamaa Fanaka's underseen film.

Being lazy as I am, and naturally curious... I decided to stick around... FOLKS... This is a STRANGE film to do a remake of. Essentially, the film consists of big black prisoners (almost exclusively) killing, beating and raping one another. There's some weird situations where a prisoner has sex with a visiting female prisoner during a boxing match, which is just this side of hardcore. So you have shots of a man's face being beaten as a woman's nipple is bit and twisted and on and on back and forth.

The "sissy" prisoners are portrayed with swishy relish and are very non-politically correct. In fact, everything was IN YOUR FACE in this flick. I will say this... saw it the same day I saw L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and it didn't disappear from memory. The rights to PENITENTIARY were acquired by New Orleans Hornets guard, Baron Davis. The film is very passionately made and was strong enough to support two sequels made in 1982 and 1987. Check out Variety for more details!