Stuck!

Stuck! is not a camp fest. Thank God. There are a zillion campy movies about women in prison. Camp is one of the easiest things in the world to produce. This movie is about character, mood, composition and craftsmanship. It is a visual poem. All the actresses are incredible and create 3 dimensional women in a genre known for 1 dimensional cut outs. Actually, Stuck! is not a part of the women in prison genre. It feels more like the hard boiled noir dramas of the 40s and 50s but with a European art cinema vibe. The metaphor of being Stuck! permeates every frame. I'm not a writer. I just know what I like. So many films to review. But I think this is one of those films that will be rediscovered down the road. Daisy is the innocent victim. She lands in jail. She shares death row with Dutch, a bisexual prostitute; Esther, a Bible-thumping zealot; MiMi, a black widow; and Princess, a broken little baby killer. A bitch of a prison guard called, Amazon, emotionally abuses the women. The neighbor lady who witnesses Daisy's "crime" slowly dissolves under the weight of her own guilt. The way this all plays out is incredible to watch: suspenseful, uplifting, terrifying, heartbreaking...and so much more. It is a movie about women and oppression. About justice and our propensity to disregard the truth in favor of what is easy. Stuck! will stick with you. I'm still reeling...

"Are you talking back at me, tampon socket?"

Awful, boring, awful, amateurish, awful, awful, and awful. That pretty much sums up Stuck!

Daisy (played by some woman with a terrible fake southern accent, whose name I certainly didn't bother to look up) walks in on her seriously ill mother plotting to end her own life with a gun, and in an attempt to prevent the suicide, the mother is accidentally shot and killed. A neighbor sees the struggle through her window and misinterprets it, resulting in Daisy getting sent to jail with a sentence of death. I don't really remember what happened after that, probably because this movie is so terrible that it gave me brain damage. 

What's supposed to be a modern homage to the "women in prison" genre, ends up being a mawkish bore that fails to entertain on any level. Stuck! isn't campy fun, and it's not anywhere near the good side of awful. From the acting, writing, and directing, to the incredibly cheap looking digital video it was filmed with, this movie is just a failure. 

Even the titillation that practically is a genre requirement is completely missing, because quite frankly, most of these women make actual prison inmates look like Adriana Lima.  

Skip this. Please.