terrible... so disappointed.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Peter Watkins' Punishment Park is a compellingly brutal film, serving as commentary on the polarization of America and the treatment of those with unpopular viewpoints in the Vietnam-era. Shot in 1971 on a miniscule budget, the film offers its ideology on American youth at the time, the dehumanization and corruption of government, and the torment of people, with the looming thought that they may have not even been doing anything wrong.The film was one of the very first to be shot in the style and tone of "cinéma vérité," a technique used by filmmakers to generate a documentary-like vibe and to persuade the audiences into believing what they're seeing is real footage. It is 1970, and the Vietnam War is escalating, with president Richard Nixon losing control and running out of options. He declares America as a "state of emergency, and proposes the "McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950," which gave federal authorities the right to detain those who appeared as a "risk to internal security." We follow members, mostly young university students, of various political movements, such as the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the communist movement who are arrested and given the choice of either serving their full time sentences or spending three days at the ambiguously named "Punishment Park." Many of them choose the second option, where they are told that if they can run fifty-three miles in brutal California desert heat and make it to an American flag checkpoint, with a two hour head-start before National Guardsmen and federal authorities are dispatched to try and stop them, that they will be released and their pending dues will disappear.As we see many young students run helplessly through the desert, with temperatures well over one-hundred degrees, we focus on another group of students who are pleading their cases to a group of men and women in a tent on why they were resisting and evading the Vietnam war. The people are simply not interested in hearing their views and constantly interrupt them, leading to contentious interactions involving heavy cursing and strong morality and ethics that increasingly come into play as time goes on.The cinematography is as raw as they come, with extensive shots of desert locations inhabited by sweaty, breathless students desperately clinging to their last hope for survival and humanity-driven choices. Watkins directs this picture with numbing realism that stems not only from the provocative cinematography, but from the screenplay, composed of extemporaneous dialog and improvisation on the actors' part. Their performances are coldly real and chillingly authentic.Punishment Park sort of tires out in its third act, being that it greatly established its point and purpose within the first two, but the film relentlessly tries to depict a brutal reality filled with dissent, isolation, and strict government control that thankfully never was prophetic. What is amazing is despite ones assumption that the film's ideology and issues are dated and no longer relevant, in a post-9/11, Patriot Act, NDAA world, it would appear we must look onto films like these as poetry for the present.Directed by: Peter Watkins.

Committed doom and gloomer Peter Watkins goes slummin' across the pond to take on the American justice system circa 1971 with this priceless piece of zeitgeist paranoia that leans so far left it falls over constantly. Watkins is pure tourist as he assembles this our gang tragedy with cliché freaks, hippies and black revolutionaries pitted against trigger happy cops and military and a kangaroo court tribunal made up of disapproving calcified adults making poor fashion statements. Talk about a revolution.In Punishment Park we have radical youth versus corrupt system as dissenters convicted of crimes are given the choice of imprisonment or a three day trek across Punishment Park (Death Valley) and freedom. Of course the law enforcement officials monitoring their journey aren't about to play fair and combined with the stifling heat the fate of our protagonists looks sealed.Punishment Park has elements of Kafka in setting as well as theme. Trials are held under a large canvas tent where shackled prisoners shout defiance at a hardcore love it or leave it group of inquisitors (such as members of Silent Majority for a Peaceful America) who snarl back. Neither group spends much time listening to the other and the proceedings sometime takes on a teen parent battle over the keys to the car look. Mostly its just one side saying what's wrong with America the other saying what's right with no one offering solutions for change. Meanwhile the Punishment Park martyrs stumble endlessly about the dessert while cops with guns act like twelve year olds. It kind of has the look and feel of some of my 70's college film making class when we were younger and knew more then than we do now.Peter Watkins has always been on the side of the underdog and the common man against what he perceives as a corrupt powerful few. Culledon was a strong indictment of military atrocity in 18th century Scotland that still resonates. War Game is a raw sobering look at nuclear aftermath that should be required viewing for all. Punishment Park has its value as well but for other than intended reason. Watkins vision today is a textbook example of the left in full tilt counter culture 70s paranoia and given the times ( Vietnam, Kent State, The Chicago 7) such strident hysteria seemed not that great a distance from the truth. But 35 years later the fever has subsided and Punishment Park with it's unrestrained narrow viewpoint is a pretty silly ride.

I stumbled across this in progress on Sundance. I'd never heard of it, and I have to say I had a hard time deciding whether it was real or not, except for the unrealistic plot of giving people a choice to walk this death-course in lieu of prison, and the unlikely events at the end. I kept asking myself, "why don't these people just walk at night in the cool, and sleep in the afternoon under some rocks or cave ?" I missed the beginning, so I'm guessing they didn't have that choice. The acting was incredible though, especially of the tribunal and the dissidents being interviewed. I can see how this would've been quite explosive in 1971 at such a fragile time in U.S. history after Kent State; I can understand why it was banned at the time. This movie would've given birth to even more riots and deaths, especially back then with the lack of electronic media vs. today, and the public not having been exposed to many fake documentaries. Wow, this movie was intriguing - the most life-like fake documentary I've ever seen !

Done in a mock-documentary style, late 60's subversives and supposed detractors of the mainstream government are arrested and given a choice. Upon sentencing for their wrong doings,there is a choice of going to prison for 7 years to life or spending three days and two nights in a southern California desert at Punishment Park. In the 100 degree heat, the prisoners are to trek fifty some odd miles to an American flag for their freedom. US and state law enforcers will follow two hours latter. If the dissidents are captured it means prison.Appearing in this pseudo-documentary: Carmen Argenziano, Katherine Quittner, Mary Ellen Kleinhall, Stan Armsted, Scott Turner, Patrick Boland and Kent Foreman.