What They Say:
The correctional transport ship Antares is home to the baddest beauties this side of the Milky Way, but when their demented warden starts taking her jollies from the prisoners’ hides, the babes of Block E fix to bust out!
Creators:
Story and Letters: Alex de Campi
Art: Simon Fraser
Colors: Simon Fraser & Victoria Lau
The Review:
Prison Ship Antares is the second story arc in the planned eight issue run of Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight, the exploitation anthology series created by writer Alex de Campi. The first story, Bee Vixens from Mars, told a decidedly gross and sexy alien invasion story, but Prison Ship Antares changes the format and plays with the women behind bars subgenre.
In the not-so-distant future, space travel technology has progressed, but not to the point where humans can reach the nearest Earth-like planet without spending decades in space. Such a mission has never been undertaken before, and volunteers were scarce, so the world turns to a ready-made population: prisoners. The baddest, bustiest women serving life sentences are transferred to the prison ship Antares where they will serve out their sentences and be the first humans to reach another planet.
That is, of course, if they can survive the warden.
Once Antares passes out of communication range with Earth, the warden takes it upon herself to cleanse the prisoners of their sins so that they will be pure when they reach the new planet. This cleansing takes the form of acid baths, brutal beatings, and torture with red hot irons. Trapped in a tin can surrounded by the dead vacuum of space and up against an army of clones that serve the warden’s every command, the inmates must stage the greatest prison escape this galaxy has ever seen.
As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, Grindhouse movies rely on bodily horror. H.P. Lovecraft famously said that horror is the insistence on the gory and the repugnant whereas terror rests in the cosmic fear of the unknown. Grindhouse stories definitely fit into that first category and this story in particular seems to ramp up the bodily horror. While the first arc dealt with alien space bees, the monsters in this case are only too human. A case could be made about the clones being inhuman monsters, but they really just act as appendages of the warden. Her dementia and cruel will to act are what drives the horror here and the fact that she’s only a human being makes the acts performed even more gruesome.
The deaths and threats of violence are also more intense in this outing. One inmate is sprayed with acid, another (in a flashback) is threatened to be gang raped with a dildo encrusted with glass shards, and another has a hot poker speared through her eye. It’s bloody and right there on the page, and it’s very unsettling—which is both a good and bad thing.
The best Grindhouse movies set out to evoke a bodily reaction. They seek to raise the audience’s blood with acts of violence, raise their gorges with disgusting scenes, and arouse them with naked flesh and simulated sex acts. There are times when those movies reach such a level of stimulation that the audience’s reactions begin to blend and violence becomes arousing or flesh becomes nauseating, and that occurred here when I read this story. There are some genuinely disturbing scenes in this comic (the acid bath and the threat of the glass-encrusted dildo particularly stand out in my mind), but that’s not necessarily bad.
Entertainment comes in many forms and there is value in being disturbed. Some of the thrills of horror come from the ability to experience antisocial, deviant feelings in a safe, consequence-free environment. It allows for an expelling of pent up energy (to be Freudian about it) leaving the viewer feeling cleansed—an ironic choice of words considering the warden’s mania, but I digress.
At the very least, the fact that I found some parts of this disturbing just goes to show how well the story is being told. de Campi and Fraser know what they’re doing. The plot is tight, the dialogue natural, and the art excellent. Perhaps my favorite moment in the comic comes when Mei is telling the story of how the guards at Riker’s Island tried to rape her. It’s just two panels broken by a page break, but they do a great job of foreshadowing and establishing her character. The first panel, at the bottom of one page, simply shows her face and head. She’s staring directly at the camera and the background is completely blank. She says, “You people think all us Asians know Kung Fu. And that’s just not true.” The next panel is at the top of the next page and it’s a closeup of Mei’s mouth. We can see the background again and her lips are curled in a half-smile with just the bare minimum of lines used to show it. She finishes her thought: “Some of us know karate.” It’s a small moment, but small moments can be far more important than the large ones.
The issue ends with the now obligatory (and much-loved at least by me) fake movie posters and the first one may be my favorite yet. It’s for a fake movie called Black Russian and it shows Richard Roundtree wearing a ripped shirt and holding a sledgehammer, standing on a tank and holding a Russian by the neck. The Kremlin can be seen behind him and the tagline reads: HE CAME IN PEACE…HE LEFT THEM IN PIECES! The cast list for the movie is at the bottom and it includes John Saxon, Bruce Glover, Ed Lauter, and Joe Spinelli and I wish so much that this were a real movie that I’m a bit angry that it isn’t.
In Summary:
Prison Ship Antares sets out to be even gorier than Bee Vixens from Mars. This is the second story arc and third overall issue for this limited run anthology series and I hope that enough people buy it to warrant Dark Horse ordering a second run. There are some very smart people behind this comic that love and, more importantly, understand the Grindhouse genre. While there’s plenty of the gratuitous nudity and gore that the genre demands, the plot, characters, and art make this more than just a momentary titillation. It’s sexy and smart, gory and awful, and a whole lot of fun. Highly recommended.
Grade: A+
