Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars the voices of David Wain, Teddy Cohn, Richard Mathar,
Christopher McCulloch, Christy Karacas Created by Ben Gruber, Christy Karacas & Steve Warbrick
UK Certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 107 minutes | Directed by Christy Karacas
In the United States, when the kids are tucked away in bed, Cartoon Network's family-friendliness quickly dissolves into Adult Swim. And no, it isn't what you're thinking. Adult Swim is a bizarre cartoon channel that focuses on, well, adults, airing shows in somewhat of the same vein as Superjail! Somewhat because I have never seen anything quite like it in my life.
Imagine if you will that some kind of machine existed that could read a person's brain and show you in full exactly what they were thinking. Now, hook that machine up to Charles Manson and give him LSD. I imagine the readings would be quite similar to the contents of this warped little show, that provides 10-minute-long episodes of extreme violence, utterly untamed offbeat humour, and totally surreal imagery.
Superjail! is actually quite hard to describe for a cartoon comedy. It's even quite difficult to understand. Adult-themed cartoons like Fox's American Dad! and Family Guy can be quite easily summed up in their respective premises, but as for Superjail!, that's quite a problem, so I'll do my best: in a gargantuan maximum security prison that barely resembles one in the first place, a seemingly endless amount of the world's deadliest inmates are locked away. The prison is under the control of an eccentric warden who takes delight in devising mad, senseless plans that in some way or another involve those incarcerated in the facility, which is located in, oddly enough, a volcano that sits within another volcano. These schemes also involve the warden's Frankenstein's Monster-headed assistant, who is essentially his slave; his love interest, a colossal man-to-woman transgender with bulging muscles and facial hair; and 'Jailbot', a hovering robot that does little else except kill and maim the inmates. Got it?
Each episode begins the same way with convict Jacknife, the pretty face on the box art, being dragged through the air for (super sped-up) days on end by Jailbot, eventually arriving at Superjail. During these 10-minute pills of blood, guts and sheer weirdness, Jacknife escapes the prison, only to be caught at the top of the next episode, which is quite fun in a Where's Wally? kind of way, where you have to look carefully in order to catch him flee. Having said that, the entire series is a bit like those colourful books — there is usually so much happening on-screen at once that you actually have to pause or rewind to see everything.
Each show climaxes in the most graphic violence, albeit crudely drawn, that I've ever seen in a cartoon, with people being literally ripped limb-from-limb and completely devoured. I'm not quite sure why the F-bombs, etc are bleeped out when there's so much death and destruction, though. There is so much gore that if you rewatched the entire season, I could almost guarantee that you would see a lot of things that you missed in your original viewing. Each show is packed full of WTF moments — it's equally as random as Family Guy, if not more, in the toon comparison stakes.
Superjail! is a strange, unique creation of black-as-night humour that's pretty funny, most of the time. Give it a chance if you dislike the first episode because it took me those first 10 minutes to understand the warped formula of the programme, and after those 600 seconds, like a car crash, I just couldn't turn away.
EXTRAS ★★ The original pilot episode, trailers for other Adult Swim shows, a music video of the show's theme by Cheeseburger, and animatics for the pilot and three episodes.