Frank Leone is nearing the end of his prison term for a relatively minor crime. Just before he is paroled, however, Warden Drumgoole takes charge. Drumgoole was assigned to a hell-hole prison after his administration was publicly humiliated by Leone, and has now arrived on the scene to ensure that Leone never sees the light of day.
Written by
Murray Chapman
Plot Synopsis:
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Frank Leone (Sylvester Stallone), a skilled mechanic and football player, in Hoboken, New Jersey is a model prisoner nearing the end of his sentence in Norwood, a low security prison. He occasionally spends time outside prison in his garage fixing cars and looking at pictures of his childhood and high school football years and pictures of him with his father. He also spends time with his girlfriend Melissa (Darlanne Fluegel) and he goes to the park playing football with kids in the neighbourhood. Melissa drives him back dropping him off at prison and gives him a lucky charm necklace. One night while sleeping in his cell, guards arrive and forcibly take Leone to maximum security Gateway Prison run by Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland). Drumgoole explains that Leone will serve hard timeLeone was the only person to escape from Treadmore and did so on Drumgoole's watch. Leone escaped because his mentor and friend was dying; Leone was refused even one hour to see him. Leone went to the press about the warden's treatment of his prisoners, resulting in Drumgoole's transfer to Gateway and Leone serving in minimum security before his transfer.

Leone befriends fellow prisoners Dallas (Tom Sizemore), Eclipse (Frank McRae) and First-Base (Larry Romano). The foursome refurbish a Ford Mustang, which Eclipse nicknames "Maybelline". After Leone reluctantly allows First-Base to start the car he refuses to turn it off and drives the Mustang out of the garage. Drumgoole has them watch as inmates destroy the car and Leone is subsequently sent to solitary confinement for six weeks. The warden orders that the letters sent to him from his girlfriend Melissa be stashed away but as Leone is released Braden the good conscientious prison guard secretly delivers them to Leone.

Upon release, the warden wants an excuse to slap Leone with more time, so he allows prisoner Chink Weber (Sonny Landham) and his bullying friends to kill First-Base in the gym. Leone fights and defeats Chink, but he spare's Chink's life because he knows that's precisely what Drumgoole wants. Since Leone didn't kill Chink one of Chink's friends stabs Leone from behind with a shank. Whilst Leone recovers in the prison infirmary, one night a stranger, an inmate who claims to be an old friend from Treadmore, says that Chink has paid him to rape and murder Melissa. Dallas offers to help Leone escape to warn Melissa but instead delivers Leone to the utility basement right into Drumgoole's hands where he finds out that Drumgoole wanted him to try to escape so he would receive a mandatory 10-year sentence for the second escape attempt and the inmate who was going to rape Melissa was just a corrupt prison guard called Mastrone who was part of the warden's scheme to set Leone up.

Dallas agreed with the warden to lead Leone into a trap only if the warden would give Dallas an early release from prison. But the warden betrays Dallas telling him he doesn't make deals with escaped prisoners. He then tells Dallas he'll be sent back to the prison's general population, and since they now know he's a snitch the inmates will kill him. Dallas tries to attack the warden but the corrupt sadistic prison guards beat him up and push him into a pool of water. The warden then leaves the sadistic guards to physically abuse Leone by pushing his face into a cloud of hot steam from the pipes. Leone breaks free burning Wiley, one of the guards, in the steam and knocking out Mastrone he then fights the sadistic guard Manly and beats him up and pushes him into the same pool of water Dallas fell into. Dallas badly beat up apologizes to Leone and as Leone tries to help him Manly attacks Leone from the water and Dallas then rips an electric cable off the railing and electrocutes Manly in the water taking his own life as well. Leone who wasn't in the water survives.

Enraged, Leone breaks into Drumgoole's office and takes him to the execution chamber and straps him to the electric chair. Leone activates the generator and secures his hand to the switch. The guards organize into a response team and secure heavy weaponry. The prison guards break into the execution chamber and point their Heckler & Koch HK33 and Winchester Model 70 rifles and Ithaca 37 shotguns at Leone, but if he is shot he will trip the switch and kill Drumgoole. The warden finally confesses to his plot to increase Leone's jail time. Leone pulls the switch but nothing happens; he then reveals he took one of the fuses out to trick the warden into confessing. Captain Meissner (John Amos) and his men cuff Frank whom the warden order's to be taken to the hole; however, Meissner and his men don't. They take Drumgoole into custody for the confession though the warden insists that he merely played along to save his life.

A judicial inquiry is made into the matter about the warden's corrupt behavior and Leone serves only the jail time required of him in the first place. A few weeks later Frank leaves prison to the cheers of his fellow inmates. He meets up with Eclipse one last time, and receives a Cuban cigar which supposedly was given to Eclipse by Fidel Castro. He tells the captain who walks him to the exit that he'll miss his incredible smile and Captain Meissner shakes his hand and says his farewell. Frank then exits Gateway and embraces the waiting Melissa.

Chuck Wepner, the real-life inspiration for Rocky (1976), was an inmate at the prison where the film was shot. Sylvester Stallone greeted Wepner and told the other inmates that Wepner was "the real Rocky".
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Director John Flynn has said of this movie, in a 2005 interview with Harvey F. Chartrand for Shock Cinema: "Lock Up (1989) is a strange lesson in how Hollywood movies are made. Stallone had a 'window' which means the guy was available for a certain window of time. Larry Gordon [Lawrence Gordon] had a terrible script set in a prison. Stallone calls James Woods and asks if I'm any good as a director. Woods says yeah, he's a good director and you ought to work with him. So we have a director and a star, but no script. All we have is a theme - a guy escaping from prison. So we hire Jeb Stuart, who was then one of the hottest writers in Hollywood, to rewrite the script and we go off looking for prison locations. Now we have a star, a theme, a shooting date, a budget, a studio, but we still have no script. So we all go back to New York City, and move into a hotel where Larry 'tortures' Jeb and Henry Rosenbaum into writing a script in record time. Meanwhile, I'm going around scouting prisons. We finally found one in Rahway, New Jersey. Jeb and Henry were writing the script as we were making the movie. New pages would come in every day. There was one day when I was on the third tier of a cell-block in Rahway Penitentiary and I had nothing to shoot. I had my movie star, all these extras and a great location - and the pages were on their way. So we sat around and bullshitted with the prisoners. Stallone is a smart guy and a very underrated actor. If I ever needed a better line, he'd come up with one. Stallone is a really hard worker. I had no problem whatsoever with him".
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The cast includes real inmates of Rahway State Prison, which is also known as East Jersey State Prison, and is located in Rahway, New Jersey. Some of the prisoners appear as extras and background artists in the movie.
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Sylvester Stallone gave Tom Sizemore his first real break in this film. Their friendship has lasted to this day.
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Sylvester Stallone was tackled repeatedly by some of the real-life prison's penitentiary extras during the filming of the football game scenes.
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No body doubles or stunt doubles were used during the filming of the football game sequence.
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Sylvester Stallone originally created a character named "Chink Weber" for Rocky II (1979) who was to be played by Chuck Wepner. But the character was deleted from the script. Stallone reused the "Chink Weber" name for the script for this film with the part being played by Sonny Landham.
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First starring role of actor Tom Sizemore.
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The brief dance done by Eclipse (Frank McRae) when he scores the touchdown during the football game resembles the "Ickey Shuffle" made famous by Elbert "Ickey" Woods [Ickey Woods aka Elbert Lee Woods] who played fullback for the Cincinnati Bengals in the late 1980s.
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Sylvester Stallone has said that during production he almost broke his leg during the filming of the football game sequence.
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Fourth and final of four films that Sylvester Stallone and Frank McRae have collaborated on. McRae, who plays Eclipse in this movie, portrayed the meat packaging plant foreman who lays Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) off in Rocky II (1979). The pair have both also appeared in F.I.S.T (1978) and Paradise Alley (1978).
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Some of the production got locked-in during the filming of Lock Up (1989), when the inmate count numbers didn't add up at the end of the day, so numerous cast and crew got delayed in the prison until around 7:30 p.m., until the calculation was correct.
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Darlanne Fluegel and Sonny Landham died in 2017.
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The movie was scored by Bill Conti who had composed the Oscar nominated music score for Sylvester Stallone's Rocky (1976). Lock Up (1989) is one of around ten collaborations of the pair and one of just a handful of non-Rocky franchise films scored by Conti and starring Stallone with the others being F.I.S.T (1978), Victory (1981) and Paradise Alley (1978).
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The production scouted for prison locations for several months and visited eight maximum security prisons, of which in the end, the jail setting used for the film was decided to be East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, New Jersey.
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In Turkey, the film was released under the name "Hür Kan" (meaning Free Blood) to fool audiences into thinking that this was another installment in Stallone's First Blood franchise.
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The majority of the guards acting as extras, actors and background artists in the movie were real-life guards from Rahway State Prison used for the film which is now known as the East Jersey State Prison (EJSP). The guards were paid the standard Screen Actors Guild (SAG) daily rate at the time of 93 dollars per day for playing their profession.
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John Flynn had worked uncredited as an assistant director on John Sturges' classic prison picture, The Great Escape (1963) starring Steve McQueen.
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Frank McRae, who participates in the football game sequence, had played as an NFL defensive tackle during the 1967 season, playing six games for the Chicago Bears.
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One of two movies released in 1989 that starred Sylvester Stallone being in a prison at some point, the other film being Tango & Cash (1989).
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According to the article "15 Things You May Not Have Known About 'Lock Up (1989)'" at the website Mental Floss, "each morning, director John Flynn had the producers hand-select 200 of the prison's 1,900 inmates to work from 7:30 a.m to 5 p.m. that day. The production reportedly provided the lucky inmates with donuts and coffee each day-luxuries they weren't normally allowed". The actual real-life prisoner extras and background artists were paid a minimum daily wage of 26 dollars per day.
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In 1990, In Dublin magazine described this film scathingly as "109 minutes of macho sewage."
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Many of the crew in the closing credits were duplicated role entries due to shooting in both New York City and Los Angeles.
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Sylvester Stallone, twenty-four years after Lock Up (1989), would star in another prison movie, Escape Plan (2013), this time co-starring with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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The movie was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards at the 10th annual ceremony including Worst Picture, Worst Actor - Sylvester Stallone and Worst Supporting Actor - Donald Sutherland, but the film failed to take home a Razzie in any category.
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The first name of Warden Drumgoole is never stated.
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Principal actors in prison crowd scenes acting next to real life inmate extras and background artists were protected by around thirty costumed unarmed body guards.
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This was the first of what was intended to be a ten-movie deal between Tri-Star, Carolco Pictures, and Sylvester Stallone's production company, White Eagle. The other nine films under the deal were never made.
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Playing Frank Leone, Sylvester Stallone also played a character called Frank in the earlier movie Capone (1975) as the character Frank Nitti, and similarly in Avenging Angelo (2002), as the character Frankie Delano. Stallone also played Frank the Repairman in two episodes of the television series Las Vegas (2003).
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The make and model of the car that the inmates restored was a red 1965 Ford Mustang coupè.
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The movie was very well received in central Europe during the last echoes of communist oppression. The movie's title in Hungarian is: In the Prison of Revenge.
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Robert Vazquez portrayed Officer Vazquez, who has the same last name as his own. Vazquez was also a technical consultant to the production, being also billed in the closing credits as a prison advisor.
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Number 510 - Frank Leone's Prison #.
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The nickname given to the refurbished 1965 red Mustang car by Eclipse (Frank McRae) was "Maybelline".
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The amount of time, at the start of the film, that inmate Frank Leone (Sylvester Stallone) had to go on his sentence, was six months.
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2nd action movie of the 1980s which Stallone's characters suffers abuse and brutality at the hands of a corrupt authority figure - the 1st was First Blood (1982). In that film, Stallone starred as a troubled former soldier suffering from a mental disorder whom fights back against the bully small town cop (Brian Dennehy) whom wrongfully arrested him for vagrancy.
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Whether a deliberate homage or merely coincidence, the cockroach race, including Stallone lifting the makeshift "gate" to let them run along two separate "lanes," was in the cult prison flick Short Eyes (1977). In each film, an Italian actor/prisoner started the race.
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Danny Trejo: As a gang member of Chink's gang.
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The inmate that gets the wind knocked out of him by Eclipse during the football game hat flies off, but it miraculously appears back on his head.
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When Frank Leone is quickly forced out of his tiny jail cell his pants are not on, but as he appears out of the cell his pants are on.
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The front glass on Leone's windshield gets broken twice after it reappears.
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An electrical cable Dallas used to electrocute Officer Manly and himself changes position between shots after Dallas rips it from the circuit panel. It alternates between being attached to the railing and laying on the floor, completely detached from the railing.
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The amount of mud on the players clothes throughout the football game.
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When Leone (Stallone) is getting forcefully taken to Gateway Prison, he is shown getting cuffed while just wearing a sleeveless t-shirt. However, when is getting taken outside to be transported, he is wearing another (prison?) shirt on top of that. With his hands cuffed, the guards would not have been able to have Leone put another shirt on because the cuffs would have gotten in the way.
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As around the 1:14 mark, as Leone (Stallone) and Chink Weber are fighting in the yard because of First Base getting killed, as Leone is on top of Chink hitting his face, within a few seconds Chink's face goes from bloodied, to almost no blood, back to bloodied again.
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During the first yard confrontation Leon's necklace appears and disappears throughout the scene.
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During the car build montage you can clearly see that it is shot out of order. The car gets painted red and when it cuts to the engine being put in, the car is back to gray primer color.
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