“The Expendables”
Tonight at 9 on USA
“The Wildest Show In the South: The AngolaPrison Rodeo”
Tonight at 8 on Discovery Channel
IF you just can’t get enough jail time no matter what you do, tonight is the night to stay home and put yourself in prison, literally and figuratively.
If you loved “Women in Chains” (I did!) and “The Dirty Dozen” (oh yeah!) for sure you’ll hate “The Expendables,” a pretty terrible movie that takes the worst of both classics and throws in some cleavage for, well, I have no idea why.
In “The Expendables,” a Cuban-American female operative for the U.S. has been thrown in jail and the president wants her sprung-pronto.
The only people who can do this are female prisoners with nothing left to lose, including Robin Givens and Tempestt Bledsoe, who was the middle sister on Cosby and now looks like a wrestler.
A colonel (Brett Cullen) with one month to go until retirement, (I wish it was me!) is told that he must lead this mission or be thrown out of the Army. What?
So he goes to a women’s prison where he picks a collection of murderers who have no families and no hope. They are the only hope for America, and springing the freedom fighter is their only hope to win their freedom. Where’s Janet Reno when you need her?
They train as fighting machines, but only six will be left standing. Bledsoe, the meanest, gives her spot to Givens when she finds out that Givens, who is a murdering nurse (“I never killed anybody!”) who offed seven cancer patients, has a kid on the outside.
After much pyrotechnics, they spring the operative who is being tortured in a cocktail dress. The colonel gets shot in the crotch by Givens, who doesn’t mercy kill him.
My beau, who only watches action-adventure shows, as I’ve mentioned 400,000 times, fell asleep on the couch and accused me of poisoning him.
If you want some more bizarre prison stuff, turn instead to Discovery for a really insane documentary called “The Wildest Show in The South: The Angola Prison Rodeo.”
It’s the story of the annual October Rodeo at the prison where The Expendables would actually be housed if they weren’t actresses and were instead male murderers.
Every October, the prison hosts a rodeo in which these mass murdering, raping, looting convicts, (all innocent, by the way) do incredibly dangerous events that inevitably end up with them getting stomped by raging bulls and horses.
Events include horse jumping, where crazy convicts try to catch and then ride wild horses. (If I’m not mistaken the event was won by an aggravated rapist.)
My favorite is “Guts & Glory,” wherein 30 convicts run into the ring and each tries to grab a small plastic token that’s glued between the massive horns of a raging bull. Most of them get tossed about 10 feet in the air.
Outside the ring, convicts sell “hobby crafts,” like wooden humming birds which they make all year long.
The documentary was nominated for an Acadmey Award, in the short category, and is expanded here for Discovery, and it’s just terrific. It’s so good, I plan to go to the rodeo in October because, well, I mean, who can resist a bargain hobby craft while watching a rapist/murderer get tossed by a bull?
