Certainly not the best film to relax on the couch: You should still have seen Peter Watkins. The dystopian sci-fi film, which comes in the robe of a mockmentary-i.e. fictional documentation-is one of the hardest contributions to the political cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.
A few days ago he came to the streaming subscription at Amazon Prime.
Harder than the hunger games: Criminal park at Amazon Prime is an extremely disturbing sci-fi film
Criminal park takes you into an alternative historiography in which the conflicts on the globe are worried. From Soviet submarines that positioned themselves before Cuba, to the Vietnam War, which demands increasing victims: US President Richard Nixon is forced to use several emergency laws.
Based on the McCarran International Security Act, he targets political opponents. Anyone who is caught has only one chance to escape their prison sentence: with a walk through the penalty park. This penalty park is located in the desert and consists only of dry earth and pointed stones. No water, no food.
Here you can watch the trailer to a penalty park:
Criminal park – Trailer (German)
If you succeed in bringing an approximately 80-kilometer route to a united US flag in three days without meals, is free. The struggle for survival is made more difficult by the police and members of the National Guard, which hangs on the heels armed.
The hunger games seem relaxed against it: Watkins stages his film with rough pictures and intensive close-ups, so that one can impossible to escape the shown. An urgent film experience that looks terrifyingly tangible due to the mockumentary approach and the improvisation of the acting.
Criminal park at Amazon Prime: A disturbing realistic dystopia that caused controversy
Sometimes the impression could arise to see recordings that were actually captured somewhere in the 1971 desert by a camera team. No wonder that this relentless Film intended except for the bitterest consequence after his premiere caused numerous discussions and controversy.
Watkins, who also wrote the script, does not take a leaf out of his mouth when it comes to criticism of the political and social situation in the USA at the beginning of the 1970s. He consciously blurred the border between fiction and reality, while he draws the extremely dark and provocative image of a fascist state.
After the Cannes premiere, Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times:
[…] Criminal park is a film of such a blunt, misguided sincerity that you look at the first ten hysterical minutes before you realize that it is basically a masochist’s dream. Like Watkins’ earlier film The War Gable, who described Great Britain in rather loving, graused details after an atomic explosion, Projects current realities into a vision of the futurewhich is more fascinated by the effects of horror than the causes.
One and a half hours you look in vain for figures where you can stick to, but despite the heat issued, criminal park is a mercilessly cold film that brought the audience at the time to its limits. In recent years, however, the view of punitive park has changed, not least because of its timelessness.
In retrospect, Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian:
25 years later is Peter Watkins’ dystopian nightmare is still captivatingwhen he imagines how hippies and radicals are tortured by the National Guard for a quasi-judicial sport … a satire of the most acute art. Staff Park flew out of the cinema after four days and was not shown by television even
Although the film is often said due to its controversial reception that it was banned in the United States, there is no evidence of this. Rather, the penalty park simply did not receive a real commercial evaluation in the United States. In a self-guided interview from 2005, Peter Watkins summarizes the US publication of the film:
The Hollywood studios refused to drive away the film because-as they opened us-they feared retaliation measures on the part of the federal authorities. We managed to find someone who brought out the film, but either Fear of counter reactions Or because they could not find any other place that wanted to show the film, punitive park was shown in an obscure cinema at the bottom of the uninhabited financial district of Manhattan.
Watkins continues:
The film only ran four days. He was suddenly taken out of the program and we never found out why. As far as US television is concerned, at a conference of PBS producers (in my presence) everyone assured that they would never show such a terrible film on television. And as far as I know, you have never done that in 30 years.
The Murray Hill Cinema in Manhattan was the one cinema that was so brave to show criminal park for at least four days. After that, the film disappeared from the scene and was only gradually rediscovered. Since March 18, 2025, you can watch him at Amazon Prime without additional costs in streaming subscription.