io9
An abandoned theme park called Playland becomes a prison without guards in Deadlocked: Escape From Zone 14. If you try to go outside a central transmitter's range, your collar explodes and destroys your head. It's a unique solution to prison overcrowding. Deadlocked mostly takes place in a world exactly like ours, except with these weird Hobbesian penal camps. Esai Morales, soon to be rocking out in Jericho, has a wry facial expression for every situation. Amazingly, the sequel is way smarter than Rutger Hauer's original.
An abandoned theme park called Playland becomes a prison without guards in Deadlocked, the sequel to 1991's Deadlock, stars Morales as a master thief who has to break Nia Peeples out of Playland. In Deadlock, every prisoner has a "partner" whose collar is locked to his/her own. If you go more than 100 yards away from your partner, your head goes splodey. But you don't know who your partner is, so it's safest to stay within the bounds of the prison, Happyland. In other words, all you need to do to escape Happyland is figure out who your partner is. Not surprisingly, that happens pretty quickly in Deadlock.
The sequel's approach, to have the collars that blow up your head if you get too far from a central transmitter, makes way more sense. It also gives Morales a purpose: to use his leet skills to hack his collar and Peebles'. Of course, he hacks their collars so they're locked to each other just like the collars in the original movie. So if Morales and Peebles get too far apart, they get headless. At one point, Morales have to skydive out of an exploding plane, and of course their parachutes drift just a little too far apart.
Deadlocked shows up on cable pretty often, and it's worth watching for all the zany my-head's-about-to-go-splat hijinks.
Comments
What? No exploding heads?
If by "unique solution", you mean ripped off whole cloth from The Running Man. They kept their prisoners from running off with a system called Sonic Deadlock that featured explodey-head collars, too.
You'd think the reviewer would have heard about this obscure little indy flick from the late eighties.
I always liked that movie back when it was called The Running Man starring Schwarzenegger
speaking of Rutger Hauer...when is "A Breed Apart" going to hit DVD?...
It was also a device used with such glee in Battle Royale. [from IMDB: In the beginning of the Twentieth-First Century, the economy of Japan is near a total collapse, with high rates of unemployment and students boycotting their classes. The government approves the Battle Royale Act, where one class is randomly selected and the students are sent to an island wearing necklaces with few supplies and one weapon. After three days, they have to kill each other and the survival wins his or her own life as a prize. The forty-two students of a ninth grade class are selected to participate in the survival game and abducted in their bus. Under the command of their former teacher Kitano, they have to eliminate each other following the rules of the sadistic game where only one wins.]
This was also a Sliders story, except it was the entire city of San Francisco.
@missyprimrose36: I hate being the one to say this, but Battle Royale the Novel version was much better. You weren't lost in the story like the movie. The movie left you to figure out a lot of stuff on your own that was crucial to the story.
Even worse, if you got a crappy subtitle then it makes it more confusing.
Pohl and Williamson had explodey heads first, with The Reefs of Space, no? Are there any earlier instances of remote-triggered explosive neck collars that can only be removed by surgery?
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