'Penitentiary': a Review

This is a review of director Jamaa Fanaka's 1979 Blaxploitation drama film 'Penitentiary' starring Leon Isaac Kennedy.

What can I say? This movie brings back some old memories. Back in the day when me and my buddies would sit around my 13 inch TV set smoking, drinking, checking out this flick on video tape and rewinding it over and over to the funny parts like the brother with the broken cigarette sticking out his ear; the part when Big Jess clocks "Genie" for standing up to use the toilet; the part where the brothers are out in the yard dancing; the part where an inmate planning to rape another inmate says to his partner: "relax, Dead. Wait a few days, so we can set the booty up right."

This is "the" buddy movie for me growing up in my late teens. Basically, it's about a brother named Too Sweet who is set up and goes down for killing a racist hillbilly. Once he's sent up to the 'pen, the film becomes about survival and maintaining his sense of who and what he is against predators, like Half-Dead, probably the ugliest dude in the history of motion pictures, and homosexuals who have surrendered their manhood. But Too Sweet is a fighter both in his cell and also in the boxing-for-booty tournaments that take place in the film. His only friend is an institutionalized old head with a white fro named Hezekiah who has long stopped dreaming of being free and "deals with the meat" inside the walls.

This is one of the best Black films ever made and one of the best films about prison life, if not the funniest.