For more special guests, I asked the gang over at I 400 Calci - the very professional Wim Diesel stepped up first with his take on 1985’s Runaway Train…

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You shall trust blindly any film whose cast is made of such ugly mugs that Eric Roberts is placed in the kind-at-heart slot.

The priest who taught us Religion in high school spent four years screening us movies so that we’d start asking ourselves questions about religion at large - come our final year, he’d stroll in with a bunch of clear, manifesto-ey answers leading up to Jesus (who was not James Caviezel at the time). His plan was wrecked by the fact that in your final year you only think about finals and your own fucking business, but you can’t imagine how bad we had it in the meantime: The Program, No Way Out, Kramer Vs. Kramer, Alive (this one, maybe, to help us familiarize with the “communion = cannibalism” metaphor), Guess Whose Color Is The Man Who’s Coming To Dinner, yada yada yada. One day, I think it was our sophomore year, priest walks into class with a movie called “Thirty Seconds To The End” (one of those rare cases of non-faithful Italo adaptation working better than the original title, as I’d find out much later), whose plot bears a vague resemblance to Locked Up, but with no Sly in sight and certainly with no Tom Sizemore being a snitch. So: charismatic inmates, ‘staches aplenty, local dudes acting heroic, a monumentally evil warden (not quite reaching to Sutherlandian proportions, but he could hold his own), a million tons of snow, an unstoppable train speeding into the unknown, boxing matches, helicopters, and redemption (which I learned from watching a tough-as-nails prison flick - Scorsese’s got nothing on me). Trailer bares it all, if you can make it past the first minutes of raving quotes. Who’s going to get it in the end? Every synopsis online can tell you that (guess that after 20+ years no spoiler policy applies), but you better drag yourself to the video store, stock up on beer and nachos and get ready to cry like a little bitch. EDWARD BUNKER wrote this one. There you go.