ANIMAL FACTORY, directed by Steve Buscemi in 2000, had the same fate as his piloting debut four years earlier with the darkly funny Trees Lounge, which traced boozy losers wasting time at the local bar. Like his comedy, this dead serious drama sketching greater losers doing time in prison, impressed critics yet couldn’t find an audience. Made for $3,600,000, listed at 316th for 2000’s boxoffice, figures blinked a crushing $43,805. Yet another instance where something deserving an audience has to make do with a following. The money matters are history, the movie is still here, work that holds its worth about subject matter that, sadly, is forever topical.
Twenty-one-year-old ‘Ron Decker’ (Edward Furlong) is foolish enough with drug possession to get busted and sentenced to eighteen months in the slammer. Slight of stature, ‘soft’ in appearance, he’s quickly marked as a lamb by the wolves in the can’t escape field. He gets a major break when veteran recidivist ‘Earl Copen’ (Willem Dafoe) decides to guide the kid thru the survival course, and welcomes Ron into his crew. Earl has clout in the pen’s hierarchy, but protection isn’t foolproof and it comes with a cost.
The screenplay was shared between con-turned-author Edward Bunker and John Steppling (52 Pickup), based on Bunker’s 236-page novel published 23 years earlier (he has a small role in the film, as an inmate), with the shoot accomplished at the decommissioned Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, using inmates as extras, bussed over from its replacement, the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. *
Furlong, who looks like he’d last ten minutes in lockup, does well enough, his performance as a feckless punk no doubt informed by his broiling personal issues (substance abuse and fallout which took a promising career and dumped it in the john). Dafoe, while not carrying an intimidating physique, conveys quiet, baked-in intensity. His pals include the readily convincing Mark Boone Jr. and Danny Trejo. Mickey Rourke enjoys a choice turn as ‘Jan, the Actress’, Ron’s transvestite cell mate. Tom Arnold is a nasty surprise as a deviant on the prowl. The presentation of ‘life’ as it’s lived behind the walls isn’t gummed up by sensationalism, spectacle or sentiment. Beyond the able casting, it’s selling point is in the cold subjectivity of matter-of-fact experience, as good a case of “you never want to go there” as any civilian would need.
With Seymour Cassel (a humane guard officer), John Heard (Ron’s well-off no-show father), Buscemi (stepping in briefly as a prison official), Jake LaBotz, Chris Bauer, Mark Webber and Anohni. John Lurie (Get Shorty) composed the aware & spare music score. 94 minutes.
* Decommissioned in 1995, Holmesburg Prison, nicknamed “The Terrordome”, had operated for 99 years. It was notorious for conducting biological experiments on inmates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmesburg_Prison
