Press > Reviews > Escape From New York


Shreveport-Bossier Times (Mar 18/1981/US)
By Lane Crockett


John Carpenter is one of those filmmakers who does it all. In his latest offering, Escape From New York, he co-wrote the script, composed the music and directed, and came up with a not-unsuccessful futuristic thriller.

The director, who guided
Halloween and The Fog to good box offices, this time has turned his attention to a "suspenser" set in the 1990s when the entire island of Manhattan has become a central prison for the nation's lawbreakers. America, one assumes, has evolved into a police state.

The impetus of the picture comes when the president's plane crashes within Manhattan and the head of the state is held hostage. One man, Snake Plissken (
Kurt Russell), a young war hero and now dangerous criminal, is the only man who can go in and bring the president out. To ensure that Plissken, who is offered complete freedom if he does so, will accomplish the feat, tiny bombs are planted in his system which will destruct in 24 hours.

This is straightforward derring-do with a smattering of fancy to give it a twist. Carpenter likes this kind of nervy project, and when he settles down to action sequences the picture has a good deal to recommend it. Somehow, though, it never quite gets one on the edge of the seat.

The director's conception of a walled-in Manhattan seems to be large piles of garbage in the streets and a good many deserted stores. Otherwise he doesn't give us much in the way of what the island looks like in scope. He partly gets around that by shooting the picture throughout an evening, so that one picks out shadowy images.

Carpenter also is not much interested in filling in story gaps. Where, for instance, do all those criminals get food? We are already told the state ignores the place (only patrolling it around the perimeters). The mysterious Snake seems to be known by every Tom, Dick and Harry - and all of them think he is dead. Why? What happened to the rest of the country? Granted, Carpenter is only interested in this telescoped escape attempt, but it comes off as a small part of a larger drama.

Russell, speaking in a muted growl, wearing an eyepatch and straining for a super-macho attitude, pushes too hard until he finally settles down. Apparently this is Russell's try at breaking out of the characters he created for so many Walt Disney films. Ernest Borgnine, a former oscar winner for
Marty, gives another of his silly evocations of blue-collar worker, this time, oddly, a cab driver in the prison. The rest - Lee Van Cleef
as a steely-eyed police official, Isaac Hayes as Manhattan's acknowledged kingpin, Harry Dean Stanton as his inventive toady and Adrienne Barbeau as Stanton's girl - walk through stick roles.


Hollywood Reporter (Jun 12/1981/US) By Arthur Knight


The year is 1997, and Manhattan - all of it from the Battery to the Bronx - has been converted into a walled-off, maximum security prison in John Carpenter's Escape From New York. Theoretically, escape is impossible. The bridges are mined, and radar maintains an implacable vigil over the surrounding waters. And yet an escape route must be found - and in less than 24 hours - for the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence), whose sabotaged Air Force One has placed him in the hands of New York's criminal population.

Who can set him free? Police Commissioner Lee Van Cleef believes he has found his man in Kurt Russell, a scruffy war hero who is also a convicted master criminal. If Russell can accomplish his mission, he can go free; if not, two tiny explosives implanted in his arteries will kill him - which doesn't leave him much choice.

The focus of this Avco Embassy production is on Russell's efforts to locate the President in the ravaged city despite organized terror gangs and the murderous, hunger-driven "gypsies" who roam the streets by night.

Despite his assortment of futuristic gadgetry (including a gun that never seems to run out of bullets) Russell is forced mainly to rely upon - or to outwit - such hardened criminal types as Season Hubley, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, the androgynous Tom Atkins and, most formidable of all, Isaac Hayes' self-styled Duke of New York. (Hubley, who gives him his first lead, is billed simply as Girl in Chock Full o'Nuts - and is unceremoniously dragged underground for her efforts).

Escape From New York is the kind of movie that calls for an immediate suspension of disbelief. One must credit Carpenter (and co-writer Nick Castle) for their ingenuity in devising the central situation; but that granted, the major credit would seem to go to Carpenter's teams of special effects experts and stuntmen, to Joe Alves, his production designer, to Stephen Loomis, his costume designer, and to Brian Chin, for his brilliant miniatures. Together they have created an altogether convincing picture of New York's grisly future - and all the more impressive for knowing that most of the exteriors were shot in St. Louis and Los Angeles. 

Using the new Elicon camera equipment, Carpenter remains ever on the alert for the confirming details - figures that flit disconcertingly by or that menacingly materialize out of the shadows, rats that have become unconcerned by the presence of man, a vast terminal lined with decrepit and mouldering railway cars. The photography, supervised by Dean Cundey, startlingly combines the deep, electric blues of dark, rain swept surfaces with an oddly cold orange given off by the flickering street fires that appear everywhere. Carpenter, working for the first time with a budget ($7 million) approaching the adequate, has given his picture a marvelous look.

It also has a great sound to it thanks in part to his judicious use of Dolby (which has a tendency to enhance effects while obliterating dialogue), and to his own twangy, percussive electronic score, which Carpenter both wrote and performed in association with Alan Howarth. It is admirably functional, underlining and at the same time enhancing the action passages.

Which is important, for in the long run, it's the film's incessant action, along with its high imagination, that will spell out the success of Escape from New York. There are few of the shock elements of Halloween or The Fog; in spirit, it's much closer to his earlier Assault on Precinct 13, which ever since it's recent rediscovery has been developing into a cult classic. My guess is that Escape won't have to wait so long. It has got an intriguing premise, an effective cast, and it has been expertly mounted.



Chicago Sun Times (Jul 10/1981/US) By Roger Ebert


Escape From New York is far from what it could have been, but it does have sufficient energy and the idea is different. Carpenter is a bit more than a competent director and he comes up with some nice camera work, instilling a sense of eeriness. But, unlike his previous efforts, this one falls a little short in shaking up the adrenalin. The ending is clever and not really unexpected.

John Carpenter's Escape from New York is a cross between three of the most reliable ingredients in pulp fantasy: (1) the President is Missing, (2) New York is a Jungle, and (3) the Anti-Hero as Time Bomb. Carpenter has gone after an original angle on each of the ingredients, with disappointing results.

The president, for example, would be much more convincing if he were not played as a sniveling wimp by Donald Pleasence (of all people). The movie's New York of 1997 would have been more interesting if it were seen as a genuinely different prison society, rather than as a recycled version of The Warriors. And the anti-hero needs more human qualities and quirks; he seems lifted from old spaghetti Westerns.

These basic problems prevent the movie from becoming more than it is, a competent job of craftmanship. Escape from New York has the misfortune of being a merely good thriller in a summer when the standard has already been set by Raiders of the Lost Ark. And yet it's fun to see old standby science-fiction ingredients rehashed for our cynical times.

The vision of a post-civilization New York has been used in several movies, most memorably in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), in which Harry Belafonte walked down city streets that were all the more frightening because they were simply deserted and quiet.

At the beginning of Escape from New York, we learn that the city was turned into a federal maximum security prison in 1987, and that several years later the island is ruled by prowling gangs who have their own sources of power, food and clout. When we see New York, however, it is essentially just a garbage-strewn junkyard roamed by wild-eyed crazies.

How do people survive there? If the movie had provided specific details, it could have been fascinating. Instead, we get tantalizing hints of how things work; for example, a gang leader (Isaac Hayes) has a small oil well pumping inside his headquarters.

The president has been missing, endangered, kidnapped, blackmailed or otherwise inconvenienced in countless other movies and novels. This time, after terrorists hijack Air Force One and crash it into Manhattan Island, the president escapes inside an ingenious armored pod that is never explained. He is then held hostage, along with a cassette tape that contains the means of preventing World War III. Carpenter's decision to cast Donald Pleasence in the role reminds us that Pleasence added great credibility and psychic weight to Halloween, in the role of the psychiatrist. But he never makes a convincing president.

The movie's plot revolves around the decision of the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) to send a convicted criminal into New York to bring the president back alive. The criminal is a Special Forces veteran (he fought, we learn, at Leningrad and Siberia). If he gets the president out within 24 hours, he gets a pardon. If he doesn't, tiny time bombs rupture his major arteries.

The criminal is played by Kurt Russell, a talented veteran of several Disney movies (and of the title role in Carpenter's TV movie, Elvis). Russell is so determined to shake his Disney image that he goes whole hog, with an eye patch, a three-day beard and growl so hoarse he seems to be moaning most of the time. It's an interesting idea for a performance, maybe, but nothing is done to give the character human qualities, and so we're allowed to remain detached about his plight.

A bunch of familiar faces turn up in supporting roles. Ernest Borgnine is the last of the wise-guy New York cabbies, still looking for fares in the jungle. Isaac Hayes is the gang leader, Harry Dean Stanton is his personal advisor, and Adrienne Barbeau is his "squeeze." Making this list, I keep being reminded of the word I started out with: Ingredients. Everything is here, and it all works fairly well, but it never quite comes together into an involving story or an overpowering adventure.



Los Angeles
Times (Jul 10/1981/US) By Kevin Thomas


In John Carpenter's stylish, scary and utterly nihilistic
Escape From New York (selected theaters) it's 1997, and the crime rate is so bad that Manhattan has been turned into one big sealed-off prison.

The President (
Donald Pleasence) is headed for a summit conference in Hartford, Conn., when terrorists commandeer Air Force 1, and it crashes into a Manhattan skyscraper. The President survives by having slipped into a special escape pod, but he must be rescued within 22 hours to make that conference in order to blackmail the world into peace with a nuclear fission formula contained in a cassette in his possession.

At just that moment a much-decorated hero of the Russian and Siberian Wars turned bank robber (
Kurt Russell) is being told to choose between execution and imprisonment in Manhattan. The commissioner of the U.S. Police Force (Lee Van Cleef) tells him if he rescues the President he will be set free. Russell accepts, but just to make sure he follows through, Van Cleef has him injected with a drug that will make his arteries pop unless he meets the deadline and thus will be able to have the drug neutralized by X-ray.

Whew!

With
Halloween
and The Fog behind him, John Carpenter certainly knows how to work up an audience, but how deeply you become involved in Escape From New York will depend on whether you will be able to root for the relentlessly surly Russell (who starred in Carpenter's TV movie Elvis)

Neither he nor anyone else in the film generates a trace of sympathy, but the youthful audience with whom Carpenter has connected so successfully may like Russell. How he turned from war hero to robber is left unexplained by Carpenter and his co-writer Nick Castle, who apparently expect people to identify Russell with the disenchanted veterans of Vietnam.

But then
Escape From New York is a totally disillusioned film that presents the government as an absolute monolith dedicated to the unhesitating and hypocritical exploitation of the individual. Not that the criminal denizens of Manhattan are any better. There are monthly drops of food supplies in Central Park, but other than that, the prisoners are completely on their own in devising fuel supplies and satisfying all their other needs. They have been reduced to animals engaged in an unrelenting struggle for survival in the ravaged metropolis.

What Carpenter has projected with his usual effectiveness is a vision of hell on earth. His view is utterly cynical, but his cynicism is one of exploitation rather than protest. Along with large doses of brutality with strong visceral appeal there are sexist and racist overtones. In this, as in so many other talented filmmakers' work, it's hard not to find Carpenter irresponsible. (He, no doubt, could argue that he's simply telling it as it is.)

Carpenter's Manhattan is seen almost entirely at night, which makes for an ominous mood and a good disguise of any limitations of budget. His derelict prisoners gather in a moldy Art Deco movie palace for seedy live entertainment. Gladiators with spiked maces fight in a ring set up in a vast old Romanesque train station lobby. (It's Union Station in St. Louis, where much of the film was shot.)

The supreme ruler of New York is the menacing Duke (Isaac Hayes
) who tools around in a Cadillac with crystal chandeliers decorating the hood. His top adviser is The Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives with his tough moll (Adrienne Barbeau) in a public library with an oil well pumping up in its main reading room. There's a crazed old cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) who somehow has managed to drive the same cab for 30 years.

Escape From New York is crude, brutal but undeniably vital. It is the kind of film widely admired in Hollywood because Carpenter and his colleagues have managed to get every cent of its relatively modest $7 million budget right up there on the screen. A new special lens and other new gadgetry have allowed cameraman Dean Cundey to shoot most effectively in darkness, and production designer Joe Alves has been most imaginative in evoking a Manhattan in ruins. Carpenter's sense of style is strong enough to sustain some obvious miniature work, and his eerie, insistent synthesizer score, which he composed with Alan Howarth, contributes strongly to the film's brooding aura of danger.

In short,
Escape From New York is a film of sleekly impressive surfaces. Its suspense is not really all that inherent but rather derives from Carpenter's reputation for the unpredictable. Escape From New York (rated R for strong violence and language) can be compelling, but it's perfectly understandable that many will not be able to go along with the corrosive, pessimistic view of humanity that Carpenter projects with such force.


New York Times (Jul 10/1981/US) By Vincent Canby


Manhattan is a giant island-prison inhabited by humanity's dregs - murderers, terrorists, thieves, swindlers, perverts of all persuasions, petty criminals and people who are permanently disoriented. The place is a zoo without bars, but there's no way out. The bridges have been mined and walled off. The tunnels are sealed. The once great buildings are mostly shells, but because these Manhattanites don't read much, and don't care about books one way or the other, the Public Library on 42nd Street doesn't look to be in quite the state of disrepair of the other landmarks.

There are no services, no government, no work. The place is a random trash heap. Life is a permanent scavenger hunt, a nonstop game of hide-and-seek - when you're "it" you're dead.

This isn't the nightmare of someone who decided to stay in town last weekend but the startlingly eerie premise of
Escape From New York, the brutal very fine-looking suspense melodrama by John Carpenter, the man who directed the horror-classic Halloween, the not-so-hot The Fog and the very good, small budgeted Assault on Precinct 13. Escape From New York, which opens today at Loew's State One and other theaters, is by far Mr. Carpenter's most ambitious, most riveting film to date.

Set in the not-too-distant future (1997), the film works so effectively as a warped vision of ordinary urban blight that it seems to be some kind of hallucinatory editorial. It may even remind you a little bit of
Alphaville, if Alphaville had been directed not by Jean-Luc Goddard but by Frederico Fellini in an uncharacteristically antic mood. Its economy of style, though, would do credit to Don Siegel.

It is the dark idea of Mr. Carpenter and Nick Castle, with whom he collaborated on the screenplay, that this nation's crime rate quadruples by the late 1980's, at which time the United States Government officially takes over what's left of Manhattan and turns it into a Federal prison. Manhattan becomes a sort of super Roach Motel: the inmates check in but they don't check out. The place is supervised from the outside, from a central command post on Liberty Island, by guards and radar stations on the facing shores and by constant helicopter patrols. Once a month there is a food drop into Central Park.

At the beginning of the film, Air Force One, carrying the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence
) to a summit meeting in Boston, is hijacked and crash-lands near the "old" World Trade Center, where the President is retrieved and held for ransom (amnesty for all prisoners) by Manhattan's leading citizen. This is a splendidly nervy, vicious fellow (Isaac Hayes) who calls himself The Duke of New York and who drives around the city's ruins with his entourage in a limousine fitted with crystal chandeliers on either side of the front hood.

To retrieve the President, the Federal authorities coerce a young man named Snake Plissken (
Kurt Russell), who's on his way into the prison to serve a life sentence for a gold heist. Snake, we're given to understand, has been something of a national figure - described as "the hero of the Leningrad campaign" - before he went wrong. Snake is promised his freedom if he can get the President out in 24 hours and, just to make sure he doesn't lose interest in his mission, the authorities have implanted in his neck microscopic explosives that will go off at the end of the 24-hour period and can only be neutralized by doctors waiting on the outside.

So much for the plot, which emphasizes that the fate of the human race depends on Snake and which may not be all together plausible but works efficiently under these heightened circumstances.

Among the flotsam Snake encounters in his adventures in one of the most ominous underworlds ever seen on the screen are Brain (
Harry Dean Stanton), who functions as the Duke's chief demolitions expert, Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), the mistress of Brain, and an untypically helpful New York cab driver (Ernest Borgnine) who, typically, manages to find fuel for his car where none exists.

Though Mr. Carpenter wastes no time on picturesque details, the "look" of the film is as important as its tightly constructed narrative. Credit must go to Joe Alves, the production designer, and to Dean Cundey, the cameraman, who worked on a series of actual locations in St. Louis, Los Angeles and New York, as well as with some stunning miniature sets, to create a marvelously credible, lost city.

Mr. Russell, who played the title role in Mr. Carpenter's television film
Elvis, is malevolently good as the fallen hero, a man who seems to have had a look into hell even before he lands in the remains of Manhattan. Mr. Borgnine is more or less the comedy relief, as well as the magical character who always happens to turn up with his cab when he's most needed. Mr. Stanton is fine as the emotionally unreliable Brain, and Mr. Hayes very impressive as the flamboyant Duke. Is it a coincidence that when he exhorts a crowd of followers about their coming freedom, he sounds more than a little like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? The fact that he's the film's principal villain may not sit well with some audiences, but then perhaps they'll respond to his style.

Escape From New York is not to be analyzed too solemnly, though. It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season.


Washington Post (Jul 10/1981/US) By Lloyd Grove


Escape From New York - At 20 area theaters.

By 1997, the whole of Manhattan Island will have become a maximum-security prison, the East and Hudson rivers will brim with mines, and the view from Jersey will be marred by a 50-foot retaining wall.

Ed Koch wouldn't much like the idea, but it's the premise anyhow of Escape for New York, a movie that manages, agaist all odds, to be likable and even fun - if you can stand a little violence.

Director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill, the team responsible for Halloween and The Fog, have come up with another B-movie thriller whose ambitions get exceeded by respectable results. What you're left to wonder - what with the film's byzantine plot and wildly stupid thesis (Air Force One crash-lands in a penal colony; the Feds choose a felon to get the president out) - is how they were able to bring it off.

Kurt Russell plays the felon, "Snake" Plissken, a strong, silent type in the tradition of Clint Eastwood. Except that "Snake," an ex-Special Forces man with a weakness for robbery, is better and braver than Clint because he wears an eye-patch, which miraculously hasn't the slightest effect on his peripheral vision. He's helped by the sultry Adrienne Barbeau and the good-hearted Ernest Borgnine, who's been playing the simpleton in movies so long that he hardly needs to act it.

Donald Pleasence as the president, by comparison, comes off as a selfish old fool, who more than deserved the treatment he gets from Isaac Hayes - who's added a twitching eye to his normal "bad" act - plus assorted other wrongdoers.

Tight editing for the sake of suspense, and whatever amusement you might get from seeing the World Trade Center as a vacant shell, work to make this movie a pleasure to watch.

By the way, this business of abusing the president, as in Superman II, appears to be gaining cachet in Hollywood, which once showed the chief executive the greatest of deference. Are things so bad that there's some national cartharsis in having the poor fellow smacked around?



Time Magazine (Jul 13/1981/US) By Richard Corliss


It is 1997. Manhattan Island is a maximum-security prison, surrounded by a 50 ft. high wall and containing every scurvy convict in the land. When Air Force One crashes on the island and the President (
Donald Pleasence) is taken hostage, only one man has the smarts and guts to get him out alive: War Hero and Master Criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). He has 24 hours to accomplish his mission before the President misses a summit conference and the microscopic explosives implanted in Snake's arteries are automatically detonated.

On its face - and a stubbly, scarred, scowling visage it is -
Escape From New York functions smoothly as another of the new action-adventure films. John Carpenter, who hit it big with a pair of graceful, scary horror movies (Halloween, The Fog), here returns to the tones and textures of his earlier garrison melodrama Assault on Precinct 13: an apocolyptic shootout between the good-bad guys and the forces of maleficence. With his runty muscularity and a voice whispered through sandpaper, Kurt Russell is a sawed-off, charmless Clint Eastwood. Rather than involving the viewer with the characters, Carpenter seems content to put them on elegant display. Take it or leave it, love 'em or hate 'em, this is the face of America's future.

Maybe. But it makes more sense to see
Escape From New York as a ferocious parody of popular notions about Manhattan today - the mugger's playground and pervert's paradise made notorious in comedy monologues and movies like Death Wish and Taxi Driver. In Escape, parking meters are piked with gaping corpse heads, bridges are mined to kill, the New York Public Library houses an evil genius named Brain, and Penn Station is littered with train carcasses out of a brobdingnagian's toy chest. John Carpenter is offering this summer's moviegoers a rare opportunity: to escape from the air-conditioned torpor of ordinary entertainment into the hothouse humidity of their own paranoia. It's a trip worth taking.


Newsweek Magazine (Jul 27/1981/US) By David Ansen


How's this for a pulp premise? It's 1997, and all of Manhattan has been converted into a maximum-security prison for the country's convicts. There are no guards inside, just crooks - and the captive President of the United States (
Donald Pleasence), who's been hijacked en route to a summit conference where the future of the world hangs in the balance. Who can get him out? The job falls to an eye-patched felon named Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), who must successfully complete his mission in 24 hours or else two lethal time bombs implanted in his neck will explode.

What follows in John Carpenter's dark and dangerous
Escape From New York will probably satisfy most action-movie addicts. It's a good workmanlike, unpretentious entertainment. But given his terrific setup, does Carpenter really make the most of it? The fun in store isn't just a matter of how Snake will rescue the Prez, but how Carpenter will play with the Big Apple. What kind of crazy society have the outcasts created? What will the new New York look like? There's a fine, funny and menacing scene when Snake first arrives and stumbles into a decrepit, candlelit old theater whose wardrobe has been appropriated by some old bums for a low-camp Broadway song-and-dance routine. It's a promising intro, but Carpenter and co-writer Nick Castle don't give their imaginations free reign. Escape from New York gets more conventional as it goes along, settling for chases and narrow escapes when it could have had wild social satire as well.

Carpenter has a deeply ingrained B-movie sensibility - which is both his strength and limitation. He does clean work, but settles for too little. He uses Russell well, however. His voice muted to a soft rasp, Russell is a compelling action hero - tough, cynical and sexy. After his title performance in Carpenter's TV movie
Elvis, his wonderfully fast talking car dealer in Used Cars, this former Disney child actor has emerged as one of the most versatile leading men on the scene. And keep your eyes open for Frank Doubleday as Carpenter's most delicious villain - a wild-haired, androgynous punk who looks like a ghoulish cross between Mick Jagger and Medusa.



The Times-Picayune (Aug 13/1981/US) By Richard Dodds


It probably wont make Mayor Koch's 10 Best list, but
Escape From New York (now at area theaters) is trashy fun for those who don't take John Carpenter's blithely nihilistic view of the future of New York City too seriously.

What Carpenter has done in his new movie (set in 1997) that might make the mayor unhappy is to turn the island of Manhattan into a maximum-security prison where the inmates, allowed to roam wild, have developed their own barbaric society amidst the relics of the former metropolis. Is this a commentary on Crime in the Big Apple? Is Carpenter pandering to a Middle American distaste for the troubled city?

Carpenter hasn't displayed much interest in making statements in his previous films, including
Halloween
and The Fog, wanting simply to entertain, and that's what Escape From New York seems to be about as well. But the director (who co-authored the screenplay with Nick Castle) does show a sardonic side in his treatment of American life 16 years in the future.

If he's pandering to anyone, it's the young moviegoers who will identify with his anti-establishment hero who disdains all authority, from the whimpering president of the United States who's being held hostage in New York to the black leader of the prison society pack. But with his eye patch and a name like Snake Plissken, this is an anti-hero out of an adult comic book, a kind of surly right-wing hippie with a screw-you attitude.

Snake Plissken is a war hero (World War III) who's gone bad. Sentenced to spend the rest of his life imprisoned on Manhattan, he's offered a deal: a full pardon if he can rescue the president within 24 hours. The president's hijacked jet has crashed onto the island, and the chief executive is a hostage. He must reach a crucial summit meeting within 24 hours or the world-wide hostilities may resume. Snake enters this alien world, making allies and enemies as he searches for his ticket out.

Carpenter manages to maintain a high level of suspense as the situations seesaw in and out of Snakes favor. There's also a surprising degree of character shading for what's basically a chase flick, and a grim sense of humor further enhances the action.

Kurt Russell
, once a child actor in Disney films, growls his way through the movie as Snake. It's not a complex performance, but its intensity does have an effect.

Offbeat casting has
Lee Van Cleef, seen to surprisingly good advantage, as the almost decent prison warden and Isaac Hayes as the ominous self-appointed dictator who rules Manhattan. Harry Dean Stanton credibly handles the role of a brainy but weaselly prisoner, and even Ernest Borgnine holds his own as a kindly but anachronistic cab driver. Adrienne Barbeau isn't so good as Stanton's moll though, and Donald Pleasence
doesn't quite cut it as the milquetoast president. Times may be tough, but this guy couldn't beat Harold Stassen.

The look and feel of the film are sharp and dark. Its hip cynicism may rub some the wrong way, but the bleak future Carpenter paints does have its roots in rising crime rates and world tensions.
Escape From New York
is a cartoon with a sneaky bite.


Rolling Stone (Aug 20/1981/US) By Michael Sragow


Judging from the number of imitators, the most influential movie of the Seventies was not Jaws or The Godfather or even Star Wars - it was John Carpenter's Halloween. Produced in in 1978 at a cost of $300,000, it went on to gross $60 million worldwide, making it perhaps the most profitable independent production of all time.

Everything in Halloween recalled other movies, especially Carrie and Psycho. Only its raw relentlessness was distictive. There wasn't much plot (just a mad killer on the loose), the humor was freshmanic, and the characterizations amounted to dividing teen angels into "good" girls and "bad" girls.

But Halloween's sizzling financial success sent smoke signals to other independent filmmakers: the easiest way to a quick buck was to show mad killers terrorizing teenagers. For Hitchcock, the thrill of anticipating a shock was more entertaining than the shock itself. Carpenter and his imitators were content to pinch nerves. A deluge of cheap chop-'em-ups followed, from Friday the 13th to Final  Exam. For a large part part of the mass movie audience, it seems that a general cultural depression has set in - only the whooshing slice of an axe can keep them awake in the theaters.

In his later films, Carpenter makes this depression an explicit theme, plunging ever deeper into no-mind nihilism and bringing many of his fans with him. In his 1980 feature, The Fog, the ghosts of a nineteenth-century leper colony take vengeance on a town whose founding fathers robbed and murdered them. The message: American history is a bummer. Carpenter's latest movie, Escape from New York, is an equally pessimistic, dimwitted nightmare of the future.

The follow-the-dots screenplay, by Carpenter and Nick Castle, portrays the United States in 1997 as a police state with all of New York City turned into a maximum-security penal colony. The convicts - nearly every one of them a nut, a junkie or a slimeball - are left alone to roam the rotting Big Apple and stew in their own rank juices. The fascist police stay outside, quartered (ironically enough) on Liberty Island. Carpenter has said that his vision of New York as a rat hole derives from Death Wish, but this movie is more like Dirty Harry, the ultimate mean-cop film. Like the space mine in Outland. Manhattan in 1997 is supposed to be a mere extension of our present-day existence. What Escape from New York tries to tell us that the U.S. is out of control - its citizens crazy and its cities virtual insane asylums: the only objective standard and reforming force is the power of a gun.

At the start, a kamikaze revolutionary hijacks Air Force One and crashes in Manhattan in an attempt to kill the president, who's carrying plans for a nuclear fusion bomb. The president, however, escapes in a special "pod." The Liberty Island cops send famous war hero and crook Snake Plissken to retrieve him. According to Carpenter, this oddly named hero "is a real person. A friend of mine from high school, kind of a hoodlum." Indeed, Plissken could be summarized in a yearbook caption: "He's a rebel... loves those weights..." In Plissken, the image of the high-school delinquent and the righteous strong-arm tough guy come together. He's all sneer and glare.

As Snake, Kurt Russell looks like Jeff Bridges gone rancid, with pirate-length hair and a Moshe Dayan eye-patch. He sounds, however, like Clint Eastwood - he has the same toneless, desert-dry inflections - and he moves like Eastwood too, with a surly language. The vicious top cop who employs him is played by Eastwoods' arch nemesis, Lee Van Cleef - the ugly third of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Carpenter has to rely on borrowed iconography for his effects, since he's not very good at construction himself. He'll either throw shocks in your face, jump between subplots to create a frenzy or move the camera along on a smooth track until he stops for a  deliberate jolt. None of his films exposes his one-dimensionality as grueling as Escape from New York. Even in this futuristic action- adventure, "crazies" clutch at the characters through manhole covers and floorboards, threatening to drag them down and eat them. People disappear, seemingly for good, only to turn up two reels later. Do Carpenter's movies seem so arbitrary because that's how he sees life?

Life in this film is just the way capitalist philosopher Thomas Hobbes said it would be in the state of nature: nasty, brutish and short. But there's no political consciousness behind this movie's tear-it-down spirit. The crooks walled up in the city have so little humanity that most audiences will probably wind up rooting for the ruthless, clack-shirted cops. The closest a con comes to representing the human species is an engineer called The Brain (Harry Dean Stanton at his most comical, low-key and malevolent). Though he holes up with a voluptuous "squeeze" (Adrienne Barbeau) in a deserted library, mostly he works for the Duke - the city's gang warlord and the president's captor, played by gaudy Isaac Hayes. The Duke dresses like a turn-of-the-next-century Super Fly and conducts his affairs like a jungle chieftain. And though it's not very clear what points are being made in this movie (if any), you could take the Duke's leadership as a racist vision of what happens to city government when blacks take over.

The movie might have some potency if it suggested why society has come to this unpretty pass. Even Mike McQuay's novelization indicates that a failing economy and gas warfare have wreaked havoc with the body politic. But Carpenter plugs in dumb gags where his explanations should be. He said he hoped to make "an extremely black comedy, reflecting my very dim, cynical view of life." but there's hardly any mental energy in this movie at all - black, dim, cynical or otherwise.

There are a few lame running jokes: most everyone stops the hero in the street and says, "Snake Plissken - I though you were dead!" And whenever anyone calls him Plissken, he says, "Call me Snake." But Carpenter's tone is so unsteady you're often not sure whether to laugh or choke. What are we to make of the character called Cabbie (played by the irrepressible Ernest Borgnine), who smiles like a lunatic and brags, "I've been driving a cab in this city for thirty years"? Did he love New York so much he couldn't bear to leave? Carpenter sure doesn't - the only part of the city he takes full advantage of is the skyline.

It's typical of the movie's mingy-mindedness that in order to ensure Snake's speedy return with the president, Lee Van Cleef injects him with microscopic time bombs that will blow his body apart unless he returns in twenty-four hours. The fellow who administers this punishment is called Cronenberg (after David, director of Scanners), while the Duke's most zombiefied lieutenant, a pointy-toothed, spiky-haired near-albino is called Romero (after George, director of Dawn of the Dead.) Carpenter must see himself as part of an unholy trio - three cinematic outlaws trashing taboo. But he also borrows from higher sources. Escape from New York aspires to the nighttime  carnival colors of Walter Hill's The Warriors, and there's a brutal fight with nail-studded baseball bats staged like a clumsy imitation of the street fights in Hill's Hard Times. Carpenter has used Joe Alves, Steven Spielberg's production designer on Close Encounter's of the Third Kind, to fill the cops' flashing instrument panels with electronic pastels. But Carpenter isn't a visual virtuoso - he's got no rhythm. And as the composer of his own thudding electronic score, he proves himself to be a real Johnny one-note as well.

If our cities really do continue to degenerate, and if the young - increasingly lost in affectless altered states - turn to cynical tough men for ideals, a movie like Escape from New York will have contributed to the problem. It's a dumb-cluck Clockwork Orange.               


Cinefantastique (Sep/1981/US) By Stephen Rebello


The smart money still rides on the talents of director John Carpenter (Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween). Sooner or later, he'll make the breakthrough film that will catapult him solidly into the big league. Unfortunately Escape From New York, like last summer's The Fog, isn't it. While it is one of summer's most entertaining pleasure machines, Escape From New York serves mostly as an appetizer for better Thing(s) to come.

Carpenter's newest film is a dark, comic vision of the future. The year is 1997, and Manhattan Island is a maximum-security prison, an end-of-the-line, gang-infested hell hole. The crime rate has risen over 400% and three million hardcases are sealed behind the 50-foot containment wall that encircles the island. Into this maelstrom, the President (Donald Pleasence), while en route to a peace summit, is force-landed by a terrorist group. Wily, snarling "Snake" Plissken (Kurt Russell) is given 24 hours to get the President out or be blown to smithereens by the explosives planted in his neck. All the plot screws are in place, all right, but Carpenter is amazingly slow in applying them.

Escape From New York, made for a comparatively puny $7 million, represents Carpenter's uptown move. Although it is graced by the mighty contributions of production designer Joe Alves (you can practically hear him goading everyone to THINK BIG), it is the film's smaller, looney-tunes physical details that give it snap: the ragged, psychotic crazies who roam above and below the city's hellish streets like human packrats; a scary, almost-love scene in a scorched-out Chock Full O'Nuts; the lighted candelabra on the hood of "Duke of New York's" stretch limo; the gallows humor of a left-for-dead theater where a male chorus sings "Everyone's Coming to New York" in drag; the grated-over windows of a yellow Cab zig-zagging toward the landmined 69th Street Bridge to the strains of the American Bandstand theme. This is nice, sly stuff, but it's not enough to fuel Escape From New York's surprisingly enervated rhythm.

The broad-stroke star-turns by Harry Dean Stanton, Season Hubley (Russell's wife), Pleasence and Ernest Borgnine work wonders in fleshing out paltry characterizations and goosing the stop-start screenplay into gear. There isn't an actor on this picture who doesn't looked primed for a rousing good time., but they are all given so little to say that most of them are reduced to attitudes hiding behind costumes.

Russell, who did such fine work on Carpenter's TV film Elvis, does a mean parody of Clint Eastwood and, with his eye patch and leather shirt, has terrific on-screen presence. His performance, however, wears thin after the first twenty minutes or so, since he has nothing to do but snarl, shoot and run.

Adrienne Barbeau, as a tart-faced gun-moll, trade's a few jibes with the monotone hero ("Snake Plissken? I thought you were dead!"),but, like so much in Escape From New York, the sexy banter is dropped and the characters run breathlessly for a few more reels. By the time Russell and the band of burn-outs group together for the big effort, even though Carpenter's slambang editing and action take off like a firecracker it's almost too late for us to care. Doesn't Carpenter realize we're longing to see some hokey, Hawksian, B-movie camaraderie?

Dean Cundey's cinematography uses Panaglide extensively and has a handsome, big-movie feel in its use of nighttime landscapes from the inferno. New World/Venice and Roy Arbogast are to be applauded for their realizations of a ravaged city where beheadings, detonations of landmines, plane crashes and molotov cocktails are commonplace.

Finally, for those who find that sort of thing reassuring, Escape From New York is studded with in-jokes that score on everything from The Bride of Frankenstein (very wittily) to George Romero to David Cronenberg - enough to assure anyone picking up on all of them at least six months' membership in the National Society of Movie Trivia Aficionados.


Films On Screen And Video (Sep/1981/UK) By Eric Braun


With Escape From New York John Carpenter and his producer Debra Hill turn from domestic horror to nation-wide devastation; the terror that stalks the small town community escalates into a criminal community, contained in a New York that has but survived a brutal war against the United States Police State. From this maximum security prison-city, escape is impossible; every bridge is mined and walled, the surrounding waters are filled with electricity and the Statue of Liberty has become another guard tower from which officers in infra-red goggles blast any prisoners desperate enough to try to get away. Radio scanners circle the island of Manhattan ceaselessly and the survivors within are left on their own to prey on each other, apart from a monthly food drop made by air into Central Park. The year is 1997, and we're Orwell country out of H.G. Wells; the Zombies who have inherited George Washington's land of liberty are not carnivorous, just mindless and faceless, dominated by scanners that monitor every movement, and lest we have any doubt in whose territory we are, two of the characters are called Romero and Cronenberg.

A neat touch in what can only be described as satirical sci-fi; a nod from a giant in the field of mind-blowing horror to his peers, and an almost loving reconstruction of the kind of fate towards which we could be hurtling as the crime rate in the American capital rises 400 per cent from 1988 onwards, so that all traces of humanity are erased from controllers and controlled alike. The President is Donald Pleasence at his most reptilian; 'Snake' Plissken, the master criminal on a lethal 24 hour parole who will be terminated unless he rescues him from his New York captors in time to get to a summit conference 'vital to world survival' is Kurt Russell, complete with eye-patch, leather gear and an outfit that makes his mission look more like a trip into 'crusing' territory; and the deadly enemy, the Duke of New York, played by Isaac Hayes as a black giant whose limousine obviously looted the chandeliers which serve as headlights from the home of miraculously preserved Liberace, turns out in the long run to be if anything on a slightly higher moral plane than the President. At least the Duke cares enough to go to all lengths to secure release for the captives of the big City, whereas the President's peace mission is just one more hypocritical ploy in the world power game. This cynical framework encapsulates a marvellously well-controlled and spine-tingly adventure story, with just one human touch in the casting of Ernest Borgnine in a prototype performance of all the lovable, good-hearted Martyesque characters he has played in the past, as the Cabbie who's guileless, warm hearted and even able to enjoy the unspeakable drag show on offer at the surviving boite in the city, The Chock Full O'Nuts. Of course he's too good to live, but he's a joy while he's on.

The cast in general serve the director well, with Mrs Carpenter (Adrienne Barbeau) the only female accorded maximum exposure as the semi-goodie who rather inexplicable is prepared to lay down her life for love of Brain, in the coldly two-timing persona of Harry Dean Stanton. The film rates AA, partly because the violence is almost all of the Superman - Ray Gun variety - except for two scenes where the Duke makes Plissken submit to torture by knife and by unarmed combat with a nail-filled baseball bat - and because the only hint of sex is a briefly chaste kiss in the Chock Full O'Nuts between Russell and his real-wife Season Hubley in her tiny guest role as the most comely groupie surviving in the Club, before she is abruptly terminated by the invading hordes. All this family cosiness may well be another reassuring touch from the Carpenter-Hill team, to round out a tough but exciting movie that succeeds in all its sets out to do.

For the charasmatic Kurt Russell, whose laconic growl is located somewhere between Brando and Bascall and whose performance owes as much to Presley as it does to Eastwood this could be the one to do as for him as The Gun For Hire did for Alan Ladd: the up-dated version of the heartless but infinitely sexy mercenary. 
     


Monthly Film Bulletin (Sep/1981/UK) By Richard Combs


1997. With a four hundred per cent rise in the crime rate. Manhattan Island has been turned into one vast maximum security prison, encircled by a wall on the opposite shore. When the U.S. President, hijacked on his way to an important summit conference, bales out over the city and is taken prisoner by the convict gangs, security commander Bob Hauk is faced with the problem of getting him out within twenty-four hours (before the summit is over). He offers "Snake" Plissken, once a war hero now a felon on his way to the island, the chance of a reprieve if he carries out the mission (and ensures his compliance by having two electrodes, set to detonate at tile end of the time period, implanted in his neck). Landing by glider, Snake makes his way through the ruined city, meeting Cabbie (who still drives a hack and who recognizes him) and learning that the President is held by the convict kingpin, the Duke. After a narrow escape from the "crazies" (who emerge from the subways to hunt after dark), Snake is taken by Cabbie to meet "Brain", the Duke's adviser. Recognizing Brain as an old confederate who once betrayed him, Snake forces him (and his 'squeeze' Maggie) to lead him to the Duke's HQ in derelict railway coaches. But Snake is captured while attempting to rescue the President, and later put in the ring for lethal combat with the convicts' champion. Snake wins, and then escapes during the confusion after Brain and Maggie take the President (Brain has a map which will allow them to escape over the mined 69th Street bridge). Snake joins up with them, and from the ensuing chase with the Duke (who hoped to use the President to secure an amnesty for all the convicts) only Snake and the President survive. The electrodes in Snake's neck arc neutralised and the President leaves for the summit - though the precious tape he was carrying has been cynically swapped by Snake for one of Cabbie's music tapes.

At seven million dollars, Escape from New York is John Carpenter's most lavish production to date. That, however, is still almost low-budget in today's Hollywood, particularly for a fantasy set in New York, 1997, when social desolation has to be specially effected (in St. Louis, Missouri, apparently) along with electronic sophistication. And for about as long as it takes him to set his plot in motion, Carpenter generates all the excitement or genuinely shoestring film-making, the knife-edge dynamism of a project with rather greater ambitions than it has resources to fulfil. Mainly this is a matter of knowing just how much of his spectacle to leave to the movie consciousness of the audience. In his exposition - one or two shadowy figures and a fragment of wall representing the security forces who man a rampart that now entirely rings the maximum security prison of Manhattan Island; some swift action in the river demonstrating the impossibility of escape against a matte of the familiar skyline - economy and cheek are mixed with true Hitchcockian flair. The trouble is that Escape from New York has rather too much plot to set in motion, and by the time Carpenter has finished explaining what has happened to New York, the plight of the President, and why his anti-hero simply must go through with the rescue (two electrodes, deceitfully planted in his neck and due to explode in some twenty-two hours, must be electronically defused...), the film seems to have run out of steam. Certainly nothing that subsequently happens in the ghost town of New York could not have been predicted by a computer programmed with the foregoing exposition. Added to which, the whole plot apparatus revolves around a detail - the President is carrying a tape about nuclear fission which must be delivered to a summit conference - so perfunctory it scarcely even qualifies as a MacGuffin. The beauty of Carpenter's past plot conceits is that they had a simplicity and compression (even, in the case of Halloween, a dangerously reductive one) that gave them their charge as pure movie fantasies. But only in his musical score this time does Carpenter seem to be working to the requisite relentless pulse. Escape from New York never has an effectively clear image of what it is about,  and looks too often as if Carpenter were simply trying to spin more material out of the Assault on Precinct 13 situation (the story was apparently conceived at the same time as the earlier film). Hawksian echoes also filter through these characters, though without adding anything to the atmosphere. The pity is that Carpenter, who had shown signs to (in the underrated Fog) or being able to flesh out his elemental movie situations with some sense of place and character, retreats here into basic Saturday matinee juvenilia. Even leading lady Adrienne Barbeau, a New Woman in The Fog, more or less just goes along for this ride as a 'squeeze'.


Playboy
(Sep/1981/US) By Bruce Williamson


In yet another futuristic tingler, Escape from New York (Avco-Embassy), writer-director John Carpenter proves once more that he is a very skillful movie-maker but not a very astute judge of his own script. Far more ambitious than either Halloween or The Fog, Escape from New York has everything else clicking in on cue - fine effects depicting Manhattan in 1997 as a kind of maximum-security Devil's Island for vicious criminals, a flamboyant performance by Kurt Russell, smashingly dramatic soundtrack by Carpenter and Alan Howarth. One of the flashier new faces in cinema, best remembered for Used Cars and TV's Elvis. Russell plays Snake Plissken, an amoral master crook with a patch over his eye and no visible scruples, who is sent into Manhattan to rescue the President of the U.S. (Donald Pleasence) after Air Force One crashes inside the walled city. The idea is pretty good, though Carpenter and his collaborator Nick Castle fail to develop it much beyond some standard doomsday melodrama. Lee Van Cleef, Isaac Hayes, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau (Mrs. Carpenter, by the way) all do their bits to make Fun City look lethal. Mayor Ed Koch should be horrified. Otherwise, it's not dull, just mildly disappointing, for Carpenter does things so well that he teases his audience into anticipating a grandly imaginative adventure, then leaves 'em wondering at the end why the really big lift never came.


Film Review (Oct/1981/UK)



The scene is one of utter desolation. Among piles of garbage in the unbelievably sleazy streets, weird figures in tattered garments momentarily flit by before disappearing into darkened alleyways. Piles of rubbish smoulder fitfully, occasionally bursting into flame which merely serves to heighten the prevailing picture of decay and squalor. Where are on Earth are we? A clue appears in the far distance - the silhouette of one of the world's most famous land marks - the Statue of Liberty. Surely this can't be New York? Alas! it is, and this is what confronts us in Escape From New York.

The explanation of the holocaust is simple. The year is 1997 and we learn that in 1988 the crime rate in the United States rose by 400 percent. So widespread were the riots and disorder that the federal authorities actually declared war on the criminal fraternity. A United States Police Force was recruited that year to fight the criminals, and by 1994 the war was over with victory for the police.

The problem was what to do with the three million convicted criminals from all parts of the United States, and a drastic solution was agreed upon. The entire Manhattan Island was turned into an enormous prison, a completely walled-in, high security penitentiary which was virtually escape-proof. The prisoners have food air-lifted in to them, but only when a new prisoner arrives do they get any news of the outside world, and when a prisoner lands in this hell hole, he or she is there for life.

For two years the system works without a hitch. Then, as usually happens, fate takes a hand. The US President's plane, Air Force One, is carrying him to an important international summit meeting, but the aircraft has been sabotaged by a revolutionary group bent on killing him. The plane crashes on the prison complex, killing everyone on board except the President who has been put in an escape pod. He is at once captured by the savage inmates of Manhattan and held to ransom. The terms? The immediate release of all the three million criminals!

Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) leads a squad into Manhattan to rescue the President (Donald Pleasence), but the prisoners demand the immediate withdrawal of the police or the President will be summarily executed. As an earnest of their intentions, the police are shown the President's severed finger. Hauk has no option but to comply.

Back at his headquarters, Hauk decides to enlist the help of a convict who is on his way to Manhattan. He is Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) who is offered his freedom in return for his knowledge of the underworld and his criminal skills to locate and free the President. Snake reluctantly agrees but Hauk, taking no chances of a double-cross, injects two tiny capsules into Snake's bloodstream which will explode and kill him if they are not neutralized within 24 hours - which is the time Snake has to complete his mission.

Snake is well known to the shady fraternity in Manhattan, including Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) who agrees to lead him to the gang boss, "Duke" (Isaac Hayes), who is holding the President. Locating and freeing the President is one thing, getting him out of Manhattan with the Duke in his cohorts in hot pursuit is another - especially with the fast approach of the 24-hour deadline.

Escape From New York was directed by John Carpenter, who also co-authored the screenplay. Carpenter is one of America's leading young directors, who showed that a fine new talent had emerged when he came up with Assault on Precinct 13. He followed with that chiller Halloween and after a successful spell on TV, he returned to movies to direct, co-script and write the music for The Fog which was a great box-office success.

In the role of Snake, the toughie who decides to aid the law, Kurt Russell has come a long way since his days as a child actor in the 'sixties. He appeared in The Absentminded Professor in 1960 and followed this with many others, chiefly for Disney. He achieved stardom in Elvis - The Movie, which was also directed by John Carpenter. Kurt's wife, Season Hubley appeared with him as Priscilla Presley and incidentally is with him again in Escape From New York as the girl in the cafeteria, Chock Full o' Nuts - or what remains of it.

Those two veteran stars, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine, each make telling contributions to the story. Van Cleef's police chief has an air of toughness that brooks no quibbling about ethics when he's after his man. Borgnine ekes out some sort of living as a Cabbie, his cab as ramshackle as the drabness surrounding him. Another veteran performer is Donald Pleasence who has made numerous appearances in every type of movies. Here we see him as a much put-upon President who has to be rescued if world stability is to be maintained.

Escape From New York (Cert AA from Barber International) is a well-made thriller with a highly professional cast directed with a confident touch. The special effects are as convincing as they are chilling, sets like the run-down Madison Square Garden interior being completely believable. The film certainly doesn't "preach", but it cannot help conveying a warning of what might happen should law and order break down in towns and cities and violence take over.


Photoplay (Oct/1981/UK) By M.S.


A peek into the 'not-so-distant' future when the crime rate in the States has risen so drastically that the whole of Manhattan Island, New York, has been turned into a prison. Virtually inescapable and totally isolated, the prisoners divide into gangs and are left to their own devices. Into this squalid, horrifying place crashes the plane carrying the President of the United States. He is taken hostage by the Duke of New York (played by soul balladeer Isaac Hayes) who demands the release of all the in-mates.

Enter hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a courageous war veteran (he fought at the battle of Leningrad) turned master criminal. He's offered a reprieve if he can rescue the President within 24 hours. Just in case he tries to escape himself, explosive capsules are injected into his blood stream which will go off in 24 hours unless neutralised. Gripping stuff indeed.

All from director John Carpenter and his co-writer Nick Castle, a lifelong buddy of Carpenter's who played the killer in Halloween.

Carpenter's wife, Adrienne Barbeau, who made her film debut in The Fog, plays one of the prisoners as does Kurt Russen's wife Season Hubley. The couple met and married while working on Carpenter's Elvis The Movie.

CARPENTER'S movie is tailor-made for 1981 with so much civil strife about. All the prisoners dress in punkesque pirate fusion, prowling the run-down streets, dodging the over-turned cars, killing, mobbing and terrorising their fellow inmates.

Kurt Russell plays Snake with a mean look, gruff whisper, patched eye and a lot of muscle.

As Snake is waiting to be transported to the prison a voice comes over the tannoy announcing that the shuttle will leave for the prison in two hours during which time the prisoners may be cremated on the premises if they so desire.

The problems of trying to film a deserted New York proved a difficult task and Carpenter had to resort to models which look decidedly unrealistic. Luckily they're only used for the first ten minutes or so.

A thoroughly enjoyable futuristic story from John Carpenter, the man who has given us so many movie thrills.


Questar (Oct/1981/US)


John Carpenter's "repertory company" has just issued its first science-fiction-oriented film, and as with Carpenter's The Fog, Escape From New York exemplifies a curious reversal on MPAA rating mores: It is a picture of "PG" con­tent hiding behind the audience draw prompted by an "R" rating.

Escape's anti-hero is one Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell ), a criminal dragooned into rescuing the President from Manhattan Island - now a maximum security prison for the losers of a civil war with the United States Police Force circa 1997. Producer Debra Hill calls Escape an "action comedy" - this unlikely classification being about the only way to gracefully excuse the mishandling of such a dynamic basic story concept. Lack of talent as a rationale is out; Carpenter is no incompetent. Yet his approach to this material seems terribly naive, making his action predictable and his comedy (as such) forced and misleading. The forcefulness of his scenario - the futuristic prison-island - is not backed up with anything substantial, plotwise, except a lot of busywork serial action.

Story has never been Carpenter's strong point. He admits Halloween was nailed together from a two-word story concept ("babysitter murders"), while The Fog never really embellished beyond its own ghost-story teaser. The problem is inflation of economically basic and sinewy story-hooks to such a girth that their inherent defects become too big to ignore.

In Escape, the hard conflicts among central characters one would expect to result from the brutal reality presented just don't exist. The hinted-at showdown between Snake and Hauk (Lee Van Cleef as the facist police official who pressgangs Snake into the rescue) never really happens, and the one between Snake and the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes, recalling the name of the pub frequented by Clockwork Orange's droogs, as Manhattan's baddest gang overlord), when its not being handled by subordinates, is cut short by sadistic intervention on the part of the President (Donald Pleasence). The triad of opposed wills and power among Snake, Hauk, and the Duke does not spark; what drives them to their differing (yet not dissimilar) callings remains unknown, irrelevant, in fact, to the story of the title. The actual Escape From New York is what this film is about, and it pursues that end alone, with Mission: Impossible singlemindedness. It is a mechanical sort of narrative, dwelling on how ends are accomplished, while entirely bypassing motivation, the why.

By ignoring the duties of honor - or retribution - that would drive such characters, Carpenter falls short of the Sergio Leone idiom he has chosen to emulate in Escape. The formidable presence of Van Cleef, and the imposition of a Clint Eastwood rasp on Snake's voice, seem more spaghetti parody than hommage. Ironically, Carpenter already describes his forthcoming actual western, El Diablo, as a "gothic."

Mechanically, then, it is no surprise when an entire company of peripheral players is blatantly set up for a countdown/bumpoff that betrays itself as mere action spicing for the climactic escape we knew Snake would make all along. Much point is made of the suicidal impossibility of crossing New York's wreckage-and-mine-studded 69th Street Bridge to freedom, but the comicbook bloodbath that follows defies every rule established in advance. The death of Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) would be tragic if it weren't so offhandedly jokey (his cab breezes through two direct mine hits to be blown cleanly in half by a third, which all escapees save him survive). His demise is reduced to the byproduct of a Keystone Kops bit; and what deterrent do those mines represent if it takes three to stop a car? Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), keeper of a map of the mines' location only he can read, blunders into one. And Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau), the only peripheral still alive at this point, milks a sixshooter for at least ten slugs in true Western style when she blows away the Duke's pimpmobile, which has chased them at high speed unimpeded by the same mines Cabbie was only able to dodge using the map. Snake and the President are still running on the bridge blindly, but the mines, having served their purpose by snuffing everyone extraneous, are no longer lethal.

The snapshot of Snake's personality offered after all the cliff-hanging nonsense is what Escape should have been about. His minor, though personal, triumph implies that life for him in the USPD's police state is no different than squatting by a garbage campfire in a Manhattan sewer. He is oddly compassionate (thankfully, he doesn't waste every crook in sight ala The Ultimate Warrior), yet unsympathetic to the crude comradeship Hauk offers later; they are, like their namesakes, eternally opposed predators. But this is a parting shot, not the film's central concern.

Smoothing Escape's plot drawbacks are conviction-laden performances, sterling model work, and Carpenter's most driving and textured musical score ever. He also forments several successful running gags about Snake's Marvel Comics name, and dubs a pair of the film's resident whackos after fellow genre filmmakers - "Romero" (George) is the Duke's demented, spacepunk hatchetman, while "Cronenberg" (David) is the doctor who injects head-explosives into Snake's main arteries. The inspired casting of character-types Borgnine and Van Cleef are due to the always-pleasing genre savvy Carpenter consciously injects into each of his films. Often, his own craftsmanship makes slipping past the subsidiary illogic of his misfired premise easy (like why the immense silencer on Snake's Ingram gun doesn't work, or whether a one-eyed man would have the depth perception necessary to land a glider atop the World Trade Center in the dark).


Starburst (Oct/1981/UK) By Phil Edwards


The year is 1997 and Manhattan Island has been turned into a maximum security jail. The bridges to the island have been either sealed or are mined. The good guys are keeping the bad guys locked up in the biggest prison in the world.

The president of the USA is on a desperate flight to a meeting which will decide the fate of the world, with Russia and China on the brink of the apocalyptic confrontation. His plane is taken over by terrorists in mid-flight and is crashed into Manhattan Prison. Big problem. How to get the Prez out in time for the meeting.

This is the basic premise of John Carpenter's latest film and right away I'll say that it is his most assured work, full of the kind of touches one has come to expect from this most independent (outside of David Cronenberg) of film makers. However Escape From New York is also the most frustratingly disappointing of John Carpenter's features, but I'll get to that in a bit.

With the President down among the ruins of humanity the cops fly in their Dolby helicopters. They are met by a super-weirdo, Romero (Frank Doubleday), who presents them with one of the president's fingers and the news that the man is being held by the Duke of New York. Further instructions will follow.

Police Commissioner Hauk, played by Lee Van Cleef in his best reptilian manner, remembers that Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is on his way to Manhattan Prison. Snake is a heavy dude. Not only was he a hotshot pilot in the last big bang, he's also a black belt in karate, hasn't watched for about six years and wears an eye patch. Snake gets his name from a rather large cobra which is tattooed on his stomach. As this decoration grows up from the waist band of his combat pants it's likely that Snake has other outstanding attributes. But this is a AA certificate movie (and review) so we'll leave that there. He's also equipped with a delivery that reminded me of a young Marlon Brando - "Call me Sssnnake" he hisses several times.

Snake gets the job with the promise of a free pardon, but just to make sure he stays in line a couple of explosive charges are implanted in his neck - by a character called Dr. Cronenberg no less. He's got 20 hours to get the Prez out, and if he doesn't then the mini bombs will go off, blowing Snake's arteries out of his neck. Pretty inventive stuff, thanks to the script of Carpenter and Nick Castle, who of course played The Shape in John's Halloween.

Enough of the plot, you all want something left for your money. Escape is like an outrageous comic strip, though finding a comparison to Snake Plissken in comicdom is a little difficult. Carpenter tells us just enough about this good apple gone bad to make us like him enough to feel some kind of identification, though not in the same way as Indiana Jones in Raiders, for example. A more fitting comparison would be with Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" from the Dollars movies of the Sixties. A totally amoral hero. Just right for the bleak Eighties.

Carpenter has peopled Escape with some fascinating characters. There's Brain played by the excellent Harry Dean Stanton. All nervous energy, Brain has always lived on his wits and is obviously the smartest man in the prison, living in the remains of the New York Public Library, an oil well pump casually installed in the massive apartment he shares with Maggie played by the delectable Adrienne Barbeau.

Isaac Hayes makes a pretty good job of the Duke of New York, at once threatening and somehow likeable. Duke drives around in an armoured Cadillac, fitted out with chandeliers for headlamps. Fun, but not really that much different from some of the outrageous autos one sees in New York today.

The President is played by Donald Pleasence, an odd bit of casting that really works. Poor old Donald is treated terribly. Beaten up, finger sliced off, used for target practice, dressed up in a long blond wig and generally humiliated. Bu the manages to come out at the end OK, in time to show himself as just another creepy Prez. But Snake has thought of this and his final retribution on the ungrateful man is complete. It's also one of the best gags in the movie.

Escape from New York looks terrific, thanks to the production design of Joe Alves. It's about time somebody recognised the talents of this artist. Alves was responsible for Jaws and, most spectacularly, Close Encounters. Aided by Carpenter's usual cinematographer Dean Cundey, Alves presents the ruins of Manhattan Island as a tribal wasteland.

The film is also a big special effects movie, although most of the spectacular effects were executed in a tiny area in Roger Corman's effects facility in California. There are several incredibly artificial model shots which despite - or because of - their very phoniness imbue the film with much of its atmosphere. The flight into New York by glider and the landing on top of the derelict Trade Towers is masterfully handled. A thrilling combination of computer graphics and model work.

As with all Carpenter films there are some well staged set pieces involving action and stunts. Once down in the human jungle, Snake meets all kinds of weirdoes and gangs. Perhaps the most frightening are the Crazies - another tip of the hat to Romero The Crazies live in the deserted subways and the sequence in which they emerge through the sewer covers and up through the floorboards of crumbling buildings ­ anybody who has suffered at the hands of Chock Full O'Nuts will get a laugh - is genuinely creepy.

Likewise, a gladitorial battle in which a badly wounded Snake slugs it out with spiked baseball clubs with a mountain of a man to the bloodthirsty cheers of Duke's gang is well staged, though if keeping the audience a trifle distant. The climax of that particular battle is nasty to be sure but once again a comic violence element is there to defuse it.

So what's disappointing about Escape From New York? I liked the film a lot. It demonstrates Carpenter's growing ability to handle increasingly bigger budgets and bigger casts. Like The Fog it shows that the director is in control of complicated effects sequences. It bodes well for Carpenter's next film, a remake of Hawks' The Thing. From all reports Billy Lancaster's script is tough, hard and terrifying. l can't wait for that one.

But there were times during Escape when I wanted to scream at the screen. The truth is that Carpenter, with this film, blows more opportunities to wind up suspense than he takes up. The sequence with the Crazies is, as I've already said, really quite frightening. However it ultimately goes nowhere. It builds and builds with hairsbreadth escapes and stunts and ends with a totally defused pay off.

The same thing happens in the final chase sequence. All the bridges leading off the island are supposedly impassable, except for one for which Brain has a map showing the location of the mines. With the seconds ticking away for Snake the chase gets underway. Sure, mines go off and there is some heated screaming about heading left and right and people die. But somehow it just doesn't carry any suspense. You just don't care when people meet their bloody deaths ­ people that Carpenter has carefully built up into rounded, likeable characters.

Likewise the final confrontation between Snake and Duke. It should have been terrifying, real edge of the seat suspense. Of course you know that Snake win win, he's too interesting a character to die after so much hard work. The sequence just doesn't hang together. It's clumsily staged and badly edited.

As much as I liked the film it has given me a doubt about Carpenter's ability to write and direct endings for his films. The doubt started with Halloween. At the time the climax seemed suitable. In retrospect, I'm not sure. The doubt was compounded by The Fog. Like Escape that film just ran out of steam. The tacked-on ending showed through. The best pans of The Fog were at the beginning of the film. The sequence on the fishing boat held a claustrophobic horror as did the scene in which Adrienne Barbeau was attacked by the ghosts atop the lighthouse.

And so it is with Escape From New York. The film just runs out of excitement. The opening is well-staged. Various set pieces are put together in a masterful fashion. Images, like the Crazies rising from the underground, the superb throwaway shot of a disembodied head stuck on a parking meter, the single flash of a figure in the supposedly-deserted Trade Centre, the somehow touching sequence of prisoners putting on a drag vaudeville show in the ruins of a theatre are all terrifically evocative of a desolate futureworld. It's almost wasted with the badly-staged last ten minutes of the film.

Do see Escape From New York. Carpenter is an important talent. It is a pleasurable if sometimes frustrating experience to watch that talent grow and mature. With Escape he has almost thrown off the ghost of his inspiration Howard Hawks. There is little of Hawks in Escape, apart from one running gag. But there is also little of that cloying movie consciousness which so often intruded into Carpenter's films in the past.

Like David Cronenberg, Carpenter is an emerging artist. Their films have nothing in common other than that they are two people who fought in their own ways to make the type of film they wanted.

The Brood, not Scanners, was Cronenberg's breakthrough film. In the same way Escape From New York is John Carpenter's. Sixty per cent a perfectly realised film. It's my guess that The Thing will add to that.


The Movie (Nov/1981/UK) By Philip Strick


John Carpenter's Escape From New York is the most elaborate illustration yet of the siege theme that recurs through the director's work. The black monoliths of the Manhattan skyscrapers, dark and (from a distance) seemingly lifeless, are like the ultimate beleaguered enclosure of the twentieth century, set about with military-style patrols, searchlights, radar, minefields and the unceasing buzz of helicopters laden with formidable weaponry. The urban prison - a concrete trap complete with its muggers, its unmoving carpet of traffic pumping out noise and pollution, its over-population by day, its uncanny emptiness by night - is a familiar image to thousands of city-dwellers. For most of them, their environment already has elements of detention and punishment, and Carpenter's idea must sound echoes of familiarity if not of whole-hearted recognition.

The echoes also come, of course, from cinema itself. Street-gang movies like The Warriors (1979); the sidewalk-vendetta stories That originated in Thirties gangster films and made their way, via The Godfather (1972), to horrific desperado­on-the-rampage films like Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976) and Fingers (1978); even one-man­versus-the-whole-town dramas like The Phenix City Story (1955) and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978) - all have prepared the movies for a portrait or the city as evil entity.

But there is more than one side to the siege presented in Escape From New York. Once the President has been stolen into the dark heart of New York, it is his colleagues outside the city who are under pressure. They too are in a trap, marked by the seconds ticking by, which will destroy them unless it is sprung. The film is, in fact, constructed around a series of no-way­out situations - Manhattan itself ('Once you go in.' announces a voice at the start of the film, 'you don't come out'); the capture of the President (shut like some prehistoric embryo into the egg of his survival pod); the predicament of the Police Commissioner ('One more step,' hisses the kidnapper, waving a severed Presidential finger, 'and he dies'), which he promptly inflicts on Snake Plissken by pumping him with explosives that will detonate if the mission is not accomplished; and the global time-limit hanging over them all.

Snake's adventures are in serial cliff-hanger style, one dead-end after another. He is trapped by a horde of 'crazies' in a desperate shoot-out; his getaway car is backed into a street blockade by gangs with a taste for decapitation; he finds himself in a boxing ring with a giant (resembling Flash Gordon's enemy, the Emperor Ming), while a vast audience demands his blood; and finally he hangs spotlit halfway up a wall, clear target for the killer just beneath him. And since he is portrayed as a mumbling, grumbling, eye-patched mercenary Snake makes no special demands on the spectator's sympathy; nor does the cowering, ineffectual President at his side. The only reason for willing his escape is the modest hope that international catastrophe can thereby be averted, although it is by no means clear how the vital cassette tape, once recovered, is going to be able to achieve this (it is a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, in fact ­ an otherwise irrelevant pretext for issues more central to the story).

The whole concept resembles yet another cinematic tradition, that of the detached band of hired gun-slingers playing one political faction against another and walking blandly away from the resultant holocaust at the end. The presence of Lee Van Cleef as the police commissioner, and his long-distance partnership with Snake, with whom he finally sides against the Establishment, has strong affinities with Sergio Leone's tales of invincible gunmen versus terrorized towns - films which starred Clint Eastwood. Leave them to destroy themselves, runs the message, and ride with a whole skin into the sunset.

A story like many others then, but does it, in Carpenter's hands, have anything new to offer? With its pace and drive, Escape From New York gives the strong impression of a film-maker in a hurry, experimenting with ideas, situations, characters, images. What could have been the definitive exploration of what one science-fiction writer has termed 'The Coming Destruction of the United States", the logical next step in post-Vietnam paranoia and anti-authoritarian gunplay in the glittering arena of high technology becomes instead a quirky, back-street, fast, furious and hell-bent for somewhere else. Carpenter's destination, once he has achieved his first target as the prolific creator of commercial successes, will be some very fine films indeed. Until then, the cinema will have to settle tor lively, spectacular compromises like Escape From New York.


Chicago Tribune (1981/US) By Gene Siskel


In Superman II the President of the United States ultimately triumphs over foreign invaders; in Escape from New York the President repels a series of attack from a bunch of minorities - blacks, Hispanics, street crazies.

What's going on here? Seems like a revival of the Right.

But that may be taking both films too seriously, because Escape from New York is as much of a comic book story as is Superman II. In fact, Escape is a bam-zoom-off melodrama filled with quaint broadbrush characters who speak in shorthand. It's the latest feature from John Carpenter, best-known as the director of the horror classic Halloween.

Escape is a futuristic thriller that wisely is long on thrills and short on futurism. Most science-fiction films flip-flop that equation and wind up being boring essays on the human condition. Not so with Escape.

The intriguing premise of the film is that in the year 1997 New York City has been turned into a prison facility to accommodate the nation's ever-increasing criminal population. A 50-foot wall has been built around all five boroughs. Arriving prisoners are given a choice before they enter: Cremation or incarceration.

If they chose to enter New York - a hideously grubby place that looks remarkably like today's bombed-out South Bronx - they will not be placed in conventional jail cells. On the contrary, prisoners are free to roam the city at will. The only thing they have to fear is each other. Packs of starving inmates roam litter-strewn streets like mad dogs, killing and eating the slow, the weak, and the infirm.

Whereas the gang-fight film The Warriors presented one long street battle, Escape from New York lays a story on top of its mayhem. As the film opens, an unidentified radical group has hijacked Air Force One, the President's plane, and is about to send it careening into a Manhattan skyscraper. The President (English actor Donald Pleasence) manages to jettison himself away from the crash, but he winds up being taken captive by a vicious gang leader known as the Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes). The Duke lives in deserted Grand Central Station, manufactures fuel, and rides around in a boat-sized white Cadillac with gaudy chandeliers instead of headlights. His chief lieutenant looks like a cross between a punk rocker and the Bride of Frankenstein.

Aware of some of what's happened, the President's aides are in a dither. The chief executive was on his way to Cambridge, Mass., to participate in a crucial summit conference on nuclear weapons with the Chinese and Russians; his delay or-shudder at the thought! - his death could spell the end of the world.

But into every bad movie situation a good guy must fall, and into the maddening mess of Escape from New York falls the character of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, the onetime Disney comedy star who has since grown into adult roles, including Elvis Presley in the recent, celebrated TV film). Plissken is a hard-as-nails type, a disaffected Vietnam veteran who is down on authority, including that of the President.

Plissken, a one-time war hero, apparently has fallen on hard times, and is to be sent to the New York prison. But... if he can save the life of the President in the next 22 hours, then New York's nasty Police Commissioner (Lee Van Cleef, who continues to wear a ring in his ear) will grant him a pardon.

And so, in short order, it's Plissken versus the street crazies.

Along the way, Plissken meets a whacked-out cab driver (Ernest Borgnine, not overacting for a change), a warped wizard (Harry Dean Stanton, a fabulous character actor), and a buxom gun moll (Adrienne Barbeau, who is a terrible actress. If she ever buttoned her blouse for a role, she'd probably forget her lines).

Escape is not without its faults. Many of its special effects are cheap looking. A windswept jet is particularly flimsy, and some of the mockups of New York are quite obvious for these days of special effects wizardry. Also, the film is pleasantly blood-free until, inexplicably, the last two shoot-outs.

But the main thrust of the story conquers all of the faults, even an obvious ending with a nonsensical twist. We root for this guy Plissken to storm the city and save the President (even though the President is played by an Englishman, which is strange because the President, by law, must be a native-born American).

That's just a quibble, however. Escape from New York is yet another entertaining action film in what continues to be the most remarkable summer season of movies I've encountered.
 


Escape From L.A.


Austin Chronicle (Aug 09/1996/US) By Marc Savlov


It's been 15 years since Carpenter's futuristic cowboy-noir archetype Snake Plissken (Russell) unpenned the President from the New York City Maximum Security Prison, but then as Snake himself liked to note, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Of course, there have been a few minor revisions to the United States since then: The "Big One" finally hit California, decimating Los Angeles and leaving the city and its environs less than landlocked, Donald Pleasance's position as President has been filled by the bible-thumping histrionics of an apparently de-lobed Cliff Robertson, and the resultant political climate has left the country a theocratic police state. Citizens convicted of moral crimes (pre-marital sex, smoking, eating red meat, voting Democratic, etc.) are packed off to the island of Los Angeles where they are left to fend for themselves against the roving gangs and genuine psychotics that litter the island like so much post-quake detritus. On top of all this, the President's daughter, Utopia, has turned seditious, absconding with a "black box" weapons system and hijacking Air Force One to L.A. where she's joined forces with rebel leader Cuervo Jones (Corraface). Tough break. Enter Snake Plissken, newly captured by the United States Police Force. Given a choice between death in 10 hours via a particularly virulent form of neurotoxin, or going along with the President's plan to recapture the stolen weapon and kill Utopia, the ever-perspicacious Plissken opts for the latter and Escape from L.A. is off like a shot. For those who have seen Carpenter's original film, nothing much has really changed - different coast, different MacGuffin, but still an almost identical story line. Once in Los Angeles, Snake makes his way through the various ruined tourist attractions toward his rendezvous with Utopia and Cuervo. Along the way, he meets up with a number of the local flora and fauna, among them Steve Buscemi as the conniving "Map to the Stars" Eddie, rival ganglord Hershe (Grier), and the (literally) twisted Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Sam Raimi regular Campbell). Still, familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt, and fans of the New York leg of the Snake saga will slip back into the desperado's world with a comfortable grin. Carpenter keeps the pace moving at roughly the speed of sound, and his dark wry wit is evident throughout. Above it all, though, is Russell's inimitably sexy Snake, so unchanged between films it seems as though it's only been a long Labor-Day weekend since the A-Number-One Duke of New York got his. To be brutally honest, the City of Angels doesn't completely pack the gritty punch that the Big Apple did, but then Green Day aren't the Ramones, either. Suffice to say, Plissken's jaunt westward is true to Carpenter's (and producer/co-writer Debra Hill's) original spirit. Loud, rollicking, alternately ultra-violent and hilarious, Escape from L.A. is Snake redux, and what more do you need, really?


Chicago Sun Times (Aug 09/1996/US) By Roger Ebert


John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is a go-for-broke action extravaganza that satirizes the genre at the same time it's exploiting it. It's a dark vision of a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles - leveled by a massive earthquake, cut off from the mainland by a flooded San Fernando Valley, and converted into a prison camp for the nation's undesirables.

Against this backdrop Carpenter launches a special-effects fantasy that reaches heights so absurd that there's a giddy delight in the outrage. He generates heedlessness and joy in scenes such as the one where the hero surfs on a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard and leaps onto the back of a speeding convertible. It's as if he gave himself license to dream up anything - to play without a net. This is the kind of movie Independence Day could have been if it hadn't played it safe.

The production reunites Carpenter with actor Kurt Russell and producer Debra Hill, who also made his Escape From New York (1981). They wrote the script together (reportedly starting right after the 1994 earthquake), and it combines adventure elements with a bizarre gallery of characters and potshots at satirical targets such as plastic surgery, theme parks, agents and the imperial presidency.

As the movie opens in the year 2013, "Los Angeles Island" is no longer part of the United States, but a one-way destination for "immorals and undesirables," who are offered an option at the deportation office: They can choose instant electrocution instead. The island is controlled by Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), a Latino revolutionary who has a big disco ball mounted on the trunk of his convertible. The United States is ruled by a president for life (Cliff Robertson), who has moved the capital to his hometown of Lynchburg, Va. Now his rebellious daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer) has hijacked Air Force Three and fled to Los Angeles with the precious black box that contains the codes controlling the globe's energy-transmission satellites.

The president and his chief henchman (Stacy Keach) need to get that black box back. So they track down outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), who saved an earlier president from the prison city of New York. His assignment: Go in, get the box, kill the girl and return within 10 hours, before he dies of a virus that they've helpfully infected him with, as an added inspiration.

Movies like this depend on special effects, costumes and set design to create their worlds out of scratch, and Escape From L.A. is wall-to-wall with the landmarks of a post-earthquake L.A. We see the Chinese theater, the Hollywood Bowl and a beached ocean liner, and the showdown takes place in an amusement park intended, I think, to suggest Disneyland's Main Street USA. Snake finds his way through the deadly wilderness with a series of guides, including Pipeline (Peter Fonda), a has-been surfer; Taslima (Valeria Golino), a beautiful but doomed street person; Map-to-the-Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi), who is the "guy to see" about anything, and the exotic Hershe (Pam Grier), a transsexual who once befriended Snake back in Cleveland, where he/she was known as Carjack.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and Snake has been supplied with that indispensable device for all action thrillers, a digital readout that tells him how much time he has left to live. At the end, when Snake has only 20 minutes to find Cuervo Jones, grab the black box and seize the daughter, Hershe suggests they get to Pasadena in a hurry by using hang-gliders. Whose heart is so stony it can resist the sight of Kurt Russell and Pam Grier swooping down from the sky, automatic weapons blazing, in an attack on Disneyland? Who, for that matter, can resist some of the other stops along the way, including Snake's encounter with a colony of "surgical failures," who have had one plastic surgery too many, and can survive only by obtaining a steady supply of fresh body parts? Or by the sight of San Fernando Valley used-car signs peeking above the waves? Or by a chase scene which involves motorcycles, cars, trucks, horses, machine-guns and boleros? Escape From L.A. took some courage for Carpenter, Russell and Hill to make; they had to hope that moviegoers would accept a special effects picture with a satiric sense of humor. Yes, there are laughs in Independence Day, but they're fairly obvious and don't sting. Escape From L.A. has fun with the whole concept of pictures like itself. It goes deliberately and cheerfully over the top, anchored by Russell's monosyllabic performance, which makes Clint Eastwood sound like Gabby Hayes.

Futuristic Los Angeles fantasies have uneven histories at the box office; neither Blade Runner nor Strange Days did all that well in their initial theatrical releases. But Escape From L.A. has such manic energy, such a weird, cockeyed vision, that it may work on some moviegoers as satire and on others as the real thing. That could lead to some interesting audience reactions. John Carpenter as a filmmaker has been all over the map, from the superb (Halloween) to the weirdly offbeat (Christine, Starman) to the dreary (Village of the Damned). This time he simply tears the map up; the implications of his final scene are breathtaking. Good for him.


Deseret News (Aug 09/1996/US) By Chris Hicks


The anti-hero is back.

Forget the sensitive macho men of the '90s, a la Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser, who tells Vanessa Williams that it's what's in here (pointing to his chest) that counts.

Kurt Russell's Snake Plisskin just wants an Uzi and some smokes. And if a bad guy gets in his way, he gets popped. No apologies.

John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. seems purposely designed as a retro-hero piece, a throwback to the era of Dirty Harry - or, more specifically, that other Clint Eastwood series, the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels.

Plisskin may wear an eye-patch, have a snake-tattoo on his stomach and swagger around while garbed in leather, but there's no escaping his Eastwood roots when he speaks in that gravelly growl or postures himself to face-off a half-dozen gunmen or mutters a dark quip after blowing them all away.

Escape from L.A. is a sequel to the 1981 Carpenter-Russell collaboration, Escape from New York. Or, maybe it's a remake, since the story is a carbon copy, despite the coastal switch.

This time, it's 2013 and an earthquake has dislodged Los Angeles from the rest of the country, making it a prison-island (for "prostitutes, atheists and runaways").

Meanwhile, mainland America, under the right-wing religious-fanatic rule of a new president (Cliff Robertson), has become ridiculously strict. And if you break the rules - no smoking, no cussing, no sex outside of marriage, no red meat, etc. - you are banished to Los Angeles.

The plot revolves around a stolen disc, which is, of course, vital to national - and international - security. It's in the possession of a terrorist in Los Angeles, Cuervo Jones (George Corraface, made up to look like Che Guevara), who got it from the president's rebellious daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer). (She decries her father's rule as a "corrupt theocracy.")

Plisskin is brought in by the country's chief cop (Stacy Keach) to retrieve the disc (the president's daughter is expendable), and a suspenseful deadline is provided by a designer virus that will kill him if he doesn't return within nine hours.

But getting there is all the fun, as Carpenter takes advantage of a bigger budget this time around, which allows for some enjoyably ridiculous effects - ranging from the devastation of Los Angeles to the re-creation of familiar (now bombed-out) L.A. landmarks to a pair of surfers (Russell and Peter Fonda) riding a tidal wave along-side the freeway.

Fonda's character, the ultimate burned-out surfer, is a riot, as are Bruce Campbell (under heavy make-up) as the "surgeon general" (who performs butchery in the name of plastic surgery), Pam Grier as a sex-changed crime kingpin, Valeria Golino as a damsel-in-distress (in an Elvira getup) and especially Steve Buscemi as a wacked-out, fast-talking agent to local mobsters.

The comedy is what makes Escape from L.A. work as well as it does. Sure, it's loony and crazed, and, predictably, religion is one of the more frequently skewered targets here, but the satirical punch, the wacked-out characters and the crazy look of the film, along with all the assured performances, make this Carpenter's best work in years.


Los Angeles Times (Aug 09/1996/US) By Kevin Thomas


With much humor and high adventure, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. brilliantly imagines a Dante-esque vision of the City of Angels 17 years from now as a hell on Earth, all but destroyed - and made an island - by a 9.6 earthquake in 1998.

Amid endless vistas of ruins - think Berlin at the end of World War II - the Chinese Theater, the Capitol Records building, a wing of the Beverly Hills Hotel and other damaged landmarks still stand to let us know where we are. Inspired, meticulously detailed production design in turn serves as a background for a provocative high-octane action thriller that reunites Carpenter with producer Debra Hill and Kurt Russell, who jointly wrote this spectacular, superior sequel to their rousing 1981 Escape From New York, which, by the way, was set in 1997.

As an island, L.A. has become the ideal dumping ground not only for criminals but anyone deemed not conforming to the rigid dictates of the fascist regime of the U.S. President for Life (Cliff Robertson), a leader of the extreme religious right voted into power when he predicted that an Armageddon would in fact destroy our Sodom and Gomorrah by the sea.

But now Robertson's unhappy daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer) has stolen her father's Black Box with its mysterious power to destroy the universe and has linked up with Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), a Che Guevara look-alike described as a member of Peru's Shining Path who is now the much-feared undisputed ruler of what's left of L.A. What to do but maneuver that legendary one-eyed, leather-clad gunfighter Snake Plissken (Russell) into retrieving that box from the ferociously dangerous urban jungle L.A. has become. After all, it was Snake who 15 years earlier had managed to retrieve our kidnapped president from a Manhattan that had been turned into a fortress-prison for society's worst miscreants.

At the top of his game, Carpenter and his cohorts boldly tap into the twin strains of paranoia gripping the present-day American society, suggesting that we face one or the other of two of our worst nightmares coming true. They suggest that liberals fear a fascistic Moral Majority-style takeover - it's not for nothing that Robertson's president has moved the government to Lynchburg, Va. - whereas conservatives fear a Latino invasion from the South of the Border. Snake, therefore, becomes the man in the middle with whom most of us identify.

Carpenter sucks us into the tension created by these opposing forces so gradually we're not aware of it because he's created so many occasions for laughter. He pokes fun at mystifyingly complex future technology and disarmingly pokes fun at the idea that he's brought back Snake, that parody of swaggering macho, in the first place in what is so baldly a reworking of the earlier picture.

In 2013 L.A., Snake, who has arrived via mini-sub and ordered to "put ashore at Cahuenga Pass," encounters numerous colorful characters. None is funnier than Peter Fonda as a hippie surfer waiting for that aftershock-driven Really Big Wave; none more colorful than a perfectly cast Steve Buscemi as Map to the Stars Eddie, the eternal conniver, the man to see for anything and everything, who switches loyalties between Snake and the ferocious Cuervo with the speed of lightning.

Vaguely identified in the first film as a war hero turned robber for reasons unclear, Snake gets a key assist from an old pal, then called Carjack but now the just-as-tough yet glamorous and sexy transsexual Hershe (pronounced Hershey), played by Pam Grier. He also gets help from Valeria Golino's Taslima, who explains that her only crime is that she was a Muslim in South Dakota. Sending off Snake on his journey is Stacy Keach's smart, ruthless military aide to Robertson.

Golino's remark is but one of many that allow us to perceive, allegorically, in the L.A. of the future, the city of the present, filled with "people without hope, without a country." Nearing the end of his odyssey Snake has good reason to observe that "the more things change the more they remain the same."

Carpenter, cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe, production designer Lawrence G. Paull and the usual huge roster of special-effects experts have done a superlative job of making a scary future come alive. Snake's mission takes place at night, at once more economical than shooting in daylight and more appropriate to the film's dark vision of the future. Much light comes from fires set in oil drums, which is what's happening every night in downtown's skid row area, and Paull carefully interweaves actual locations with sets, including a standing small-town set at Universal, dressed as a ruined theme park - and allowing a funny dig at such Disney operations. Carpenter himself composed, with Shirley Walker, the film's tear-it-up score.

Buscemi, Fonda, Robertson, Grier and many others get to make vivid impressions, but of course it's Russell who must carry this swiftly paced picture. As rugged as ever and attractively weathered, he does so with ease. As Snake he resists the pitfall of self-parody, bringing a bemused seen-it-all weariness to a barrage of nonstop action. Less surly than he was 15 years ago, he leaves us feeling that we wouldn't mind seeing him yet again.


New York Times (Aug 09/1996/US) By Stephen Holden


If the government deported all its "immoral" citizens to Los Angeles Island after a millennial earthquake severed the city from the mainland, who would be the person you might be most likely to meet there, wearing a wet suit, clutching a surfboard and waiting to ride the next tsunami?

Why, Peter Fonda of course!

And what would the star of psychedelic adventure movies like The Trip and Easy Rider exclaim if there were a sudden downpour? "Acid rain!"

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A., the long-in-coming sequel to his 1981 movie Escape From New York, is filled with such Hollywood in-jokes. These sardonic moments go a long way toward keeping afloat a hopelessly choppy adventure spoof that doesn't even to try to match the ghoulish surrealism of its forerunner.

The sequel wants mostly to play it for laughs while serving up a series of silly comic-book stunts. When dishing out its Hollywood humor, it succeeds in being frothily diverting. Given this frame of mind, who else could possibly play the grim, Bible-thumping president of a politically correct fascist Christian state but Cliff Robertson, the hero of the real-life Hollywood expose "Indecent Exposure"?

Since the millennium, the capital of the country has been relocated to Lynchburg, Va., and the government has outlawed cursing, smoking, drinking and red meat. Los Angeles may be hellish, but at least, explains one exiled character, there you can still wear a fur coat.

For good comic measure, the movie also throws in Pam Grier as a transsexual Los Angeles overlord, and Steve Buscemi as the ultimate, fast-talking, double-dealing, sleazy Hollywood agent, a slimeball with the unfortunate name of Map to the Stars Eddie.

Kurt Russell is back, of course, a few pounds heavier than he was in Escape From New York but still in good shape, as Snake Plissken, the stubbly-faced indestructible warrior with an eye patch, a reptilian tattoo and a voice that never rises above a gravelly whisper.

In this episode, Snake is forcibly recruited by the president to retrieve a doomsday device that has fallen into the hands of Third World invaders headquartered in Los Angeles. The enemy leader, Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), is a Peruvian terrorist and Che Guevara look-alike who drives around in a limousine with a row of baby dolls perched under the windshield and an illuminated disco ball on the back.

Cuervo has captured the deadly device, a black box that can shut down all the power on the planet, by intercepting the president's rebel daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer), on a virtual-reality trip and turning her into a revolutionary. Snake is informed he has only a few hours to get back the box or he will succumb to a hideous designer virus that has been implanted in his body through a hand scratch.

Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes.

In its funniest concept, the post-millennial Beverly Hills is peopled entirely by "surgical failures," those who have undergone so much cosmetic surgery that they have all become Michael Jackson-like oddities and worse.

Anyone who ventures into the area is promptly captured and whisked to the former Beverly Hills Hotel, now a filthy hospital run by a fright-masked chief surgeon and his blood-spattered assistants, who tie up the prisoners and extract their body parts for further surgery.

As the head of the place examines the body of a fresh female captive and touches her breasts, he exclaims, "My God, they're real!"

But for the most part, the film's horror-movie vision of Los Angeles is surprisingly unimaginative. More than anything else, the place suggests a giant outdoor tattoo parlor crossed with an automobile junkyard.


Orlando Sentinel (Aug 09/1996/US) By Jay Boyar


Thinking back over the movies that have come out in the last 15 years, I would not have seized on Escape From New York as an ideal candidate for sequelization.

For one thing, the 1981 action flick is a draggy old thing - rather quaint by today's Independence Day standards, but of interest mainly to its inexplicable cult following. For another, as I recall the story, it leaves the distinct impression that the world will shortly come to an end.

Nobody asked what I thought, however. So we now have John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (which opens today).

As in the first film, the hero is Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an eyepatch-wearing, Eastwoodesque outlaw who is offered a full pardon to take on a dangerous assignment. Snake must infiltrate Los Angeles and retrieve a deadly "black box" that has been stolen by the president's renegade daughter.

Escape From New York was mainly set on Manhattan in 1997. The sequel is mainly set in Los Angeles in the year 2013, after an earthquake has separated L.A. from the United States.

The newly formed island has been declared by this country's government to be a place for criminal exiles. And considering how very repressive the government is in 2013, anyone who'd go to see an R-rated movie like this one would probably qualify for deportation.

The first part of the title is there to assure the first film's cult following that the original director is back on board. John Carpenter directed the sequel, which he co-wrote with Russell and Debra Hill, who also co-produced it.

The filmmakers attempt satire, but they don't develop their ideas. We're told, for example, that the government has turned the country into a fascist state in which freedom no longer exists. But then the idea goes nowhere.

For the most part, Carpenter and Co. also miss their chance to spoof contemporary Los Angeles.

It's an amusing indictment of show business that the weaselly agent character played by Steve Buscemi has just the right personality to survive on the lawless island. And there's a funny, chilling scene featuring the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell), a plastic surgeon who harvests the facial features of living people for face lifts.

More typical, however, is the filmmakers' decision to set a major confrontation at a Disneylandlike theme park and then do nothing with it. (In fact, the witty trailers for the film are more successfully satirical than the film itself is.)

Such failed attempts at satire aside, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is basically a routine action picture. The cast includes Cliff Robertson and A.J. Langer as the president and his daughter; Stacy Keach and Michelle Forbes as two of the president's operatives; and Pam Grier, Valeria Golino and George Corraface as L.A. residents.

Peter Fonda pops up a couple of times as an aging hippie. But if there was a point to his scenes - other than to underline the fact that Fonda starred in Easy Rider in 1969 - I'm afraid it was just too subtle for me to grasp.

New York. L.A. What next? Escape From Orlando?

Now that Carpenter has dealt with both coasts, I'm hoping that he'll give this franchise a rest. If he comes out with a third installment some 15 years hence, I don't want to be there.

Guess it's never too soon to plan an escape.


San Francisco Chronicle (Aug 09/1996/US) By Peter Stack


Dark, percussive and perversely fun, Escape From L.A. puts Kurt Russell as hard-nosed outlaw hero Snake Plissken right where he belongs - in the ruins of Hollywood, where bravado on a Harley or a surfboard can be a tool for survival.

The intense and visually savvy futuristic action adventure, opening today at theaters throughout the Bay Area, is a sequel to Escape From New York and a high point in director John Carpenter's ragged career of turning out cheap-trick movies.

Carpenter's best idea was to hire visionary production designer Lawrence G. Paull (Blade Runner) to create a dystopian rock 'n' roll Los Angeles circa 2013, after a catastrophic earthquake.

In the movie's opening scenes, Los Angeles cracks up big time. It becomes an island of rubble in the middle of a huge bay with Malibu at one end and Orange County at the other. The San Fernando Valley is a sea filled with sharks and the ruins of old freeways and collapsed apartment complexes. Compared with the spare-looking Escape From New York, this Escape looks like a Brueghel painting - dense, meaty, strangely beautiful. The filmmakers credit the 1994 Northridge quake as an inspiration.

Isolated from the rest of the United States, Los Angeles has become the ultimate federal penitentiary, a handy dump used by a repressive government, whose president, played by a wild-eyed Cliff Robertson, is a right-wing religious fanatic. Smoking, eating red meat and having sex outside marriage are considered sins against the state. And everybody had better pray, a lot, because a political climate of strict moralism holds sway.

In enacting this tale, flinty hero Russell, who's done up like a '70s rock idol, and veteran frightmeister Carpenter get to beat up on Southern California. They play on familiar symbols - the Hollywood sign, Mulholland Drive, the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Ventura Freeway, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl, even Sunset and Doheny.

They turn Hollywood Boulevard into a nightmare of prostitutes and human vipers and make Sunset Boulevard a drive through hell. Peter Fonda is a long-board surfer living solely for the big rides on post-earthquake tsunamis. Russell hangs ten on one such wave as it crests on Wilshire Boulevard - it's a great, gnarly moment set against a backdrop of a city that Godzilla seems to have stepped on, sparing only the lowrider gangs.

Underneath the film's "hey dude" attitude, Escape From L.A. is surprisingly effective in picturing a former nirvana clenched in the twisted rubble of its own excess. The City of Angels has become the perfect prison for kooks, yet the film also shows us a somehow familiar America of kooks in high places, preening and self-righteous, ruthless as rats.

The movie is so cleverly entrenched in its sardonic style that Russell's toughest act must have been keeping a straight face. And yet the desperado action hero, given nine hours to live by the cuckoo president, manages to maintain a heroic sobriety and calm. Russell, with his retro long hair and his signature cobra tattoo, is a singleminded, heavily armed and unflinching warrior, whether commandeering a speeding truck or landing by bat-winged hang glider in the Happy Kingdom - a reference, of course, to Disneyland. By no coincidence, the gliders look a lot like the flying monkeys from Oz.

A setup familiar from the first Escape movie fuels the plot. Snake is infected with a deadly dose of something - in this case, a virus - that government officials say they'll deactivate if he completes his death-defying mission.

The president wants Snake to recover a black box containing a doomsday device that has found its way into the Los Angeles penitentiary via the president's rebellious daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer). She has taken up with a South American revolutionary (George Corraface) who's plotting to have the "Third World" invade the United States.

Snake is the ultimate loner, of course. The president and his minions (including Stacy Keach and Michelle Forbes) would just as soon see him dead once the black box is safely returned. And all the time, he has to contend with the murderous, hellish spectacle of Los Angeles.

Although Snake is in every frame, the film is also filled with other great characters, among them Steve Buscemi (Fargo) as a slimy hustler named "Map to the Stars" Eddie, and Bruce Campbell as the surgeon general of Beverly Hills, working fiendishly to make people out of body parts. His clinic is the half-ruined Beverly Hills Hotel.

Valeria Golino shows up as the one potential love interest for Snake (Carpenter's curvaceous ex, Adrienne Barbeau, is conspicuously absent from the film). But Snake, too busy saving his own skin, doesn't bite.


San Francisco Examiner (Aug 09/1996/US) By Barbara Shulgasser


John Carpenter and Kurt Russell liked collaborating on Escape From New York so much that they just had to make Escape From L.A. 15 years later. They could have waited a little longer.

Although the script, written by Carpenter, Russell and Debra Hill, strains to keep tongue embedded in cheek, too often it reads exactly like the kind of violent, idiotic action pictures it seeks to mock.

Russell plays Snake Plissken, a renegade who made it out of the New York of the nasty future and has now been captured by the evil president of the United States (Cliff Robertson) for a grisly mission on the prison island of Los Angeles. (It broke off from the mainland after a major earthquake.)

The United States has been turned into a republic of moral rectitude. Smoking, red meat and religion are against the law. The exiles - dissidents, criminals and "immorals" - on the island of L.A. are being roused into revolutionary fervor by a mad South American leader named Cuervo Jones (George Corraface).

The president's misguided daughter has stolen a code that gives Cuervo use of a doomsday device. Snake is told he's been contaminated with a deadly illness for which he will only be given an antidote if he goes to L.A. to recover the device and kill the daughter.

The few pleasures of this film include brief appearances by Steve Buscemi, who plays a sniveling con man, and Pam Grier, who plays a transvestite called Hershe. Peter Fonda, Stacy Keach and Valeria Golino enter and exit quickly, too. Bruce Campbell, under a load of funny makeup, plays the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, whose chief function is to harvest surgically untouched body parts (from kidnap victims) to be sewn onto his plastic surgery patients.

Russell milks his role for all its cartoonish juices and whispers most of Snake's lines, as if to indicate seething fires just barely contained beneath the surface. You may find yourself wishing that he'd speak up.



Washington Post (Aug 09/1996/US) By Desson Howe


In the bleak, cultish Escape From New York, made in 1981, the Manhattan of the future (well, 1997) as transformed into a gotham-size prison for criminals. When the American president (Donald Pleasence) was kidnapped and held by punks in the city, government forces dispatched "Snake" Plissken (played by Kurt Russell), an eye patch-wearing tough guy to spring the Chief Executive.

Escape From LA, which reunites Russell with director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill, takes up the story 16 years after the New York escapade. The president (Cliff Robertson), a religious demagogue who operates from his home base in, uh, Lynchburg, Va., has forced America into a puritanical police state: no smokes, no red meat, no sex without marriage.

Snake, still wearing the patch and the brown leather jacket, is summoned again by dark-suited government powers. It seems the president's renegade daughter, Utopia (AJ Langer), has stolen the key to a doomsday device and escaped to Los Angeles. The city, surrounded by a natural moat (thanks to a devastating earthquake), has become a de facto holding cell for angry dissidents, including Utopia's warlord-boyfriend, Cuervo Jones (George Corraface).

Snake refuses to retrieve the key until the president informs him that he has been infected with a fatal virus. He has nine hours to live. If he completes the mission in time, the government will give him an instant cure. In his trash-mythic quest, Snake meets an amusing, post-apocalyptic queue of helpers, including Utopia; an aging surfer-dude called Pipeline (Peter Fonda); a savvy survivor called Taslima (Valeria Golino); and Hershe (Pam Grier), an old male friend of Snake's who is now a female friend. Snake is also befriended by a shady character called Map to the Stars Eddie (the ubiquitous, but delightful Steve Buscemi), who claims to have the inside dope on Cuervo.

Compared to Escape From New York, the weapons are bigger and the violence is more extensive, although it's toned down by today's excessive standards. There are also greater special effects this time, involving holograms and nuclear-powered submarines. But Escape From LA is more enjoyable in a playful way. The movie takes not-so-subtle digs at the Christian Right, Hollywood's obsession with plastic surgery, and Walt Disney. And in the special effects department, Snake and hippie friend Pipeline surf on the crest of a tsunami all the way down Wilshire Boulevard.

Escape From LA also replicates many of the elements from its predecessor. In the first film, for instance, a disembodied voice informs prisoners heading out to the Manhattan prison that they have "the option to terminate and be cremated on the premises." That sentiment is picked up again, as convicts headed for Los Angeles are given this message: "You now have the option to repent for your sins and be electrocuted on the premises." The more things change, it seems, the more they remain the same.


Washington Post (Aug 09/1996/US) By Esther Iverem


The success of the summer blockbuster Independence Day has proven that a lot of Americans will pay money to see their cities in rubble. The prospect of such destruction haunts us, fascinates us. It is still our ultimate terror-fantasy.

Using this fascination as a jumping-off point, Escape From LA tries but fails to be an action-hero flick or even a parody of one. Instead, in this sequel to 1981's Escape From New York, Kurt Russell stars as the antihero Snake Plissken, who believes only in himself. Its ridiculous and depressing scenes tell us that real Americans are squeezed between a corrupt and crazy federal government and a criminal, immoral and usually dark population of city dwellers. Americans must shoot, knife and beat their way to freedom. If necessary, they must bring on Armageddon. This film could serve as an anthem for the militia movement.

Just as in Escape From New York, when the entire island of Manhattan is turned into a maximum-security prison, Escape From LA turns Los Angeles into an island prison after an earthquake breaks it off from the rest of the continental United States. Downtown skyscrapers, freeways and Universal Studios are under water. Much of what remains is rubble or is about to be rendered so by aftershocks.

Los Angeles is the place where the government, headed by an evangelical president, sends those considered criminal, immoral and generally unfit for society. The film hints that not everybody is a dangerous criminal - one Muslim woman is sent there after her Midwestern town outlaws her religion. But the lawless streets are crowded with prostitutes, killers and all kinds of people up to no good. Living in this urban hell is punishment enough for the inmates who freely roam the streets.

Plissken's mission is to go into LA, find the president's daughter Utopia (AJ Langer) and retrieve highly classified equipment - which has the potential to destroy the planet - that she has stolen. Utopia has taken up with Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), a South American revolutionary leader who heads the city-prison's army. Plissken does not work for the government willingly. After eluding the authorities for years, he has been captured. Government agents have injected a ticking viral time bomb into his body and, just as in New York, he must complete his mission in time to receive a lifesaving antidote.

As he goes on his bad-boy rounds, the action is only mildly entertaining. Some of the best scenes come when director John Carpenter (who also wrote the script along with Debra Hill and Russell) makes use of the bizarre Los Angeles landscape. In one, Plissken is taken into a Beverly Hills hospital operated both for and by people who are "surgical failures" - they've had too many transplants and face lifts and don't quite look human. Peter Fonda makes a great surfer dude, Pam Grier does odd duty as a feared power broker living aboard an abandoned cruise ship and Steve Buscemi does a good job as a weasel who, even in this LA, sells maps to stars' homes.

Sometimes it seems the two Escape movies want us to laugh at Plissken. Everyone thinks he's dead. He's shorter than everyone expects. He speaks in a gruff whisper that sounds more like he has the flu than like he's tough. And his eye patch would seem to render his peripheral vision less then action-hero perfect.

But as yet another Rambo-type drama is set up - the lone white man with a big gun and a big mission, thrown among the dark heathens - some of us might have a hard time laughing.


Variety (Aug 12/1996/US) By Todd McCarthy


A cartoonish, cheesy and surprisingly campy apocalyptic actioner, John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is spiked with a number of funny and anarchic ideas, but doesn't begin to pull them together into a coherent whole. Designed principally to return Kurt Russell's violence-prone Snake character to the screen after a 15-year layoff and to gain maximum mileage out of the public's delight in seeing the worst possible fate visited upon SoCal, this serving of sloppy seconds will score its biggest hit with teenage boys. Paramount should look to make a quick getaway with as much B.O. booty as possible from potent openings, as staying power looks meager.

When last seen, Snake was spiriting the U.S. prez out of a New York City that was an armed fortress controlled by convicts and loonies, circa 1998. Westward migration being what it is, by 2013 all the degenerates are in L.A., part of which has broken off from the mainland courtesy of a 9.8 earthquake in the year 2000.

In fact, five-minute expositional prologue is packed with enough juicy info and described incident that one wishes Carpenter had shot that and dispensed with the aftermath. In somewhat facetious fashion, the audience is informed that , in the wake of the quake, the nation's undesirables have all been sequestered on L.A. Island as a means of purifying the new "moral" United States, which is lorded over by a Gestapo-like U.S. Police Force and ruled by right-wing religious hypocrite Cliff Robertson, who has declared himself President for Life.

But the prexy's goody-goody daughter has suddenly seen through her old man, absconded with his top-secret "black box" and joined forces with gangster revolutionary Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), who is about to lead a massive uprising of the dispossessed and the merely unwashed against the fascistic Establishment. Former war hero and full-time bad boy Snake Plissken is pulled out of mothballs to retrieve the black box and, while he's at it, eliminate the president's turncoat sprig.

Pic's first sort-of-groovy sequence has Snake being spirited in a mini-submarine from prison to the island. Along the way, he passes just above various familiar, but submerged, freeways and city landmarks, most notably Universal Studios, but the geography underwater makes no more sense than it eventually does above ground. Snake's odyssey could have been much more amusing had it been specifically rooted on the map.

As it is, upon landing, Snake first meets an old surf bum (Peter Fonda), who lies in wait of the awesome wave he just knows will roll in when another big earthquake hits. When his forecast is fulfilled, Snake is there to ride it in with him, but, like the underwater journey, the trip is too short, and too tacky visually, to make the hoped-for major impact.

Stealing into Hollywood in the most realistic section of the film, Snake maneuvers through assorted skinheads, hookers and leather-clad scenesters in his effort to track down Cuervo, which he must do before some injected poison takes hold in eight hours. He comes close, but is instead captured and taken to the L.A. Coliseum to star in an updated Roman-style life-and-death contest.

This sequence sums up in a nutshell what's wrong with the picture. To deliver its full conceptual potential, the stadium should have been jammed with 100,000 crazed former Raiders fans clamoring for Snake blood. Instead, what looks to be about 35 bikers hoping for a little beer money are spread thinly around part of the stands. Where is digital magic when we really need it? A great portion of the crowd at the Ben-Hur chariot race was an illusion, but no one noticed. Why such a poor turnout here?

After a tough victory in the arena and further skirmishes elsewhere, Snake gets his hands on both the president's daughter and the black box; latter turns out to be a control mechanism capable of shutting down all electronic power on Earth. After a final confrontation between Snake and the duplicitous president, the fate of the world is left in Snake's hands, and anarchic ending reps one of the film's few genuine gratifications.

With eye patch firmly in place and tongue partly in cheek, Russell hoarse-whispers his way through the picture, knocking off a seemingly limitless supply of bad apples along the way. If not for him, this would be a B movie all the way. Effort appears as though it was done very much on the cheap, with the countless matte shots, mock-ups, models, haphazard special effects and dingy lighting schemes bringing to mind the look of late-'60s Euro co-productions. Visually, item is much closer to the 1981 Escape From New York than to effects-oriented pics being done today.

Nocturnal setting, uneven tone, abrasive score and only fitfully successful attempts at humor create a generally grim atmosphere, occasionally leavened by goofy ideas and flashes of explosive action. Aside from Russell, no one is onscreen for very long, although appearances of note are put in by Steve Buscemi as Cuervo's fast-talking, two-faced agent and blaxploitation stalwart Pam Grier, her voice somehow altered to portray a renegade transsexual gang leader.


Tucson Weekly (Aug 15/1996/US) By Stacy Richter


Escape From L.A., the latest from John Carpenter (The Thing, Halloween, etc.), is utterly without any redeeming moral values in the conventional sense. True to the title, it's pure escapist schlock in the grand tradition of the B-movie. It's got all the drive-in movie goodies: bizarre characters, over-the-top acting, cheesy special effects, slutty costumes and gallons of blood. The only thing this movie wants is for us to have a good time without guilt, and since the heat has immobilized the intellect of most Tucsonans anyway, why resist? Yes, it's a vapid, cheesy movie with plot holes you could drive a truck through. Yes, it's exciting and funny and sort of great.

Escape From L.A. is a reprise of Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York: To call it a sequel wouldn't make much sense, since the two are so alike. In Escape from New York, Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell, all young and buff) is sent into New York in the futuristic hell of 1997. The rotten Big Apple has been converted to a penal colony without keepers or guards; prisoners are dumped there and left to their own wicked devices. Snake, a criminal himself, is sent on a suicide mission to rescue the President, whose plane has crashed there.

Escape From L.A. works with the same elements but shuffles them around: It's the 21st century and the Big One has plunged some of California into the ocean, leaving L.A. an island. Moral degeneracy, rather than crime, qualifies even children for incarceration on the island. (These crimes, never directly specified, seem to include smoking cigarettes, eating beef and being Muslim.) Kurt Russell, grizzled and buff, goes on a suicide mission to retrieve a doomsday device hijacked by the President's flake of a daughter, Utopia (A.J. Langer). Similarities abound. In the first Escape, Snake is injected with timed intravenous explosives. In the second, he's injected with a timed virus. In both, the baddest bad guy drives a funny car with a disco ball, sinful prisoners sport eighties punk rock attire, and portions of dialogue are repeated word for word.

All this leaves Escape From L.A. with a major dilemma: If it's so close to prequel, what's the point? The answer seems to be, there is no point. Escape From L.A. is gloriously pointless. It's completely redundant. There's very little difference between renting Escape From New York and going to the theater to see Escape From L.A. My guess is that John Carpenter figured he could capture a whole new generation of viewers who weren't out of diapers the first time around.

That's not to say there aren't differences between the two versions. The first Escape capitalizes on the Cold War fear of nuclear apocalypse. The second is lighter and more ironic--it capitalizes on the fear of ecological degradation and the dangers of militant non-smokers. The first has gritty sets of a decaying New York. The second has a party atmosphere, with glittery sets of the decaying Santa Monica freeway, half-dead vampiric Californians craving plastic surgery and aging surfers riding tsunamis.

As dumb and enjoyable as Escape From L.A. is, the truth is, Escape From New York is a better movie. It's darker, bleaker, and has the force of originality to propel it. Escape From L.A. lacks tension - it lifts Snake to the level of superhero so we know he'll never get hurt, and the fear of moralistic non-smokers can never, ever equal the shared societal dread of the Cold War era. Carpenter's true talent is his ability to frighten, and he abandons it in Escape From L.A. in favor of shlocky style and humor.

But it almost doesn't matter. Escape From L.A. is so energetic and goofy that only the most die-hard fan of the eighties post-apocalyptic genre is going to get nostalgic for Carpenter's sinister side. All the rest of us have to do is work on enjoying the gratuitous leather bikinis, exploding cars and fountains of fake blood.


Weekly Alibi (Aug 21/1996/US) By Devin D. O'Leary


From Evil Dead to Evil Dead II. From El Mariachi to Desperado. Low budget filmmakers seem to possess this burning desire to top themselves. Now it's John Carpenter's turn to transform his 1981 cult hit Escape From New York into a big budget, big studio romp. The result is a kinetic, star-packed cinematic smorgasbord serving up equal measures of action and amusement.

It's been 16 years since Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) rescued the American President from the island prison of New York City. Things have not gone well in the interim. Seems "The Big One" finally arrived and transformed Los Angeles into a crumbling aftershock-ridden island. As coincidence would have it, the massive earthquake that shook down L.A. was predicted by a Bible-thumping presidential candidate (Cliff Robertson). Needless to say, the candidate won by a landslide, and America has been converted into a nightmare of fundamentalism and repression. The Island of Los Angeles now serves as the world's largest prison camp, housing thousands of criminals, dissidents and illegal immigrants.

As our story begins, poor Snake Plissken has been arrested again and is sent to prison - with one caveat. If Snake can locate the President's rebellious daughter and recover a mysterious military device she has stolen, he'll receive a full pardon. As an extra incentive, Snake is injected with a designer virus that will kill him in 24 hours unless he completes his mission. Nothing like a little race against the clock to up the ante. So off to the island of L.A. goes Snake for your basic (anti-)hero's journey.

Yes, the story is essentially a revamp of the original, but don't think you'll be seeing some warmed-over clone of Escape From New York. Director/co-writer Carpenter completely unleashes his imagination with this one and lets it run around like a hyperactive 10-year-old. We're treated to such over-the-top action as Kurt Russell surfing a tsunami down Wilshire Boulevard and such gonzo sights as a climactic hang glider and machine gun fight in a Disneyland-type amusement park.

The satire runs heavy in this one, folks. Whereas 15 years ago, New York City served as the perfect template for our vision of a dystopian future, Los Angeles has now supplanted it as our idea of the Sodom and Gomorrah of tomorrow. Carpenter and company manage to poke fun at gangs, fundamentalism, plastic surgery, organized sports, theme parks and most of all, themselves. When Snake Plissken arrives in prison wearing the exact same urban camouflage and brown bomber jacket we saw him sport back in 1981, one prison official remarks that he "looks so retro."

Mix Carpenter's energetic direction and witty script, Kurt Russell's winking self-parody and a star-stuffed cameo cast (Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda, Bruce Campbell, Pam Grier) and you've got a sure-fire hit. From Halloween to The Thing to Starman, John Carpenter has always been one of Hollywood's most consistent genre directors; it's about time he got back on the box office bandwagon. If only the summer's other action hits had half of this film's charm. It's the perfect summer "Escape."



Entertainment Weekly (Aug 23/1996/US) By Owen Gleiberman


Mad Max and the Planet of the Apes sequels may have paved the way for it, but John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) was the first movie to look at the not-too-distant future of American life and see a junk pile, an urban dream falling apart. Even the hero was falling apart: Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken wore an eye patch and a burnout scowl. The film was too crudely made to qualify as a "vision" (that would come later, with Blade Runner and RoboCop), but what kept you watching was the novelty of the premise -  Manhattan as an entropic sci-fi comic-book hell.

By now, that decaying-future image pops up once a month or so (most recent version: Barb Wire). Carpenter, though, hasn't lost his sense of timing.
John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. comes along at the perfect moment to honor the passing of the torch from New York to Los Angeles as America’s official Capital of the Apocalypse.

Once again, Snake has to enter a sprawling urban prison zone and, with a deadly virus implanted in his blood, carry out a suicide mission. I have no idea why Russell is doing a brazen Clint Eastwood impersonation, but I do know that no one who looks this good need croak out his lines in this steely a whisper. Carpenter's L.A. suggests a Bosnian refugee camp outfitted by Frederick's of Hollywood. Every so often, we get to feast our eyes upon a trashed landmark - cheesy B-movie mock-ups of the Capitol Records tower and the Beverly Hills Hotel lying in ruins. Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide. Among Snake's more amusing pit stops: a gladiatorial basketball game in the L.A. Coliseum and a cosmetics emporium run by the "Surgeon General of Beverly Hills."
C+ 


Sci-Fi Universe (Sep/1996/US) By Robert Meyer Burnett



At the conclusion of l981's beloved Escape from New York, Kurt Russell's battered Snake Plissken walks over to Donald Pleasence's recently liberated President of the United States and asks. "We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. l just wanted to know how you felt about it?" After listening disappointedly to the President's obviously canned response, Snake realizes his own cynicism is well-founded and he opts to destroy a tape containing a weapons formula that's hoped will bring an end to global conflict. But Snake did offer the President a choice before delivering his coup de grace, establishing himself as an honorable man, despite his scrappy, survive-at-all-costs persona. This moment displayed characterization and maturity seldom seen in a low-budget action film, which is why Escape From New York and the character of Snake Plissken remain high points in both director John Carpenter's career and modern genre cinema history.

As an unabashed Carpenter afficionado, believing him to be one of the great genre directors of all time. I desperately hoped the much-anticipated (for sixteen years!) sequel to Escape would not only prove a worthy successor to the original film, but also bring John Carpenter long-overdue respect from critical, box-office and popular quarters, forever eliminating his "cult" director status. So, full of perhaps too much expectation, l snuck in to an advance screening of Escape From L.A. on the Paramount lot, where, with a house packed with obvious industry types, I witnessed an admittedly unfinished work print of the film.

As I awaited the film's unspooling, it quickly became apparent to me that everyone in the theatre (even the jaded professionals) was pulling for the film's success. Everyone in attendance wanted it to be great; no one more so then myself. Unfortunately, and with a sadness usually reserved for the passing of a loved one, I must report that Escape From L.A. proved not just another crushing summer disappointment, but perhaps the most unsatisfying film of Carpenter's two-decade-plus oeuvre

After a humorous and effective opening sequence detailing the destruction of Los Angeles in the "big one," the rise to power of a fanatically right-wing President and America's transformation into a puritan nation, the film quickly develops its greatest flaw: its utter failure to credible establish very universe in which it takes place. Unlike the first film's wonderfully realized New York milieu, which utilized a combination of actual locations (mostly St. Louis and Los Angeles) and a carefully chosen combination of matte and miniature work (under the supervision of James Cameron, no less). Escape From L.A.'s complete over-reliance on cheesy computer­ generated effect5 and unconvincing composite work constantly draw attention to themselves, detracting from the audience's ability to accept the film's premise.

Additionally, while the story itself is almost identical to the original film's plot, it makes little sense, barely hanging together at all. As Snake's life-clock ticks down 10 his own personal annihilation, the denizens of Los Angeles are supposedly preparing to participate in a coordinated Third World invasion of the United States. How they plan to accomplish this feat is never explained. Meanwhile, the world of Los Angeles and the relationships of the characters residing in it simply aren't clear. Who are these people, and how is power inside of Los Angeles distributed (Why do people live in such fear of the Duke of LA., Cuervo Jones? Snake's initial foray into Los Angeles, after surviving a mildly interesting submarine ride through the ruins of the San Fernando Valley and a mud slide about as scary as Splash Mountain, becomes rather promising as he walks amidst the grungy extras choking Hollywood Boulevard in a colorful, hellish splash of society run amok. Then, however, it seems as if the production suddenly ran out of money, as the flow of extras dries up when Snake reaches Sunset Blvd for a rather unsatisfying cycle chase.

The film does hawe its moments. Bruce Campbell, almost unrecognizable as the Plastic Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, has a great time with his role. Unfortunately, just when he begins to get scary, his character quickly drops out of sight, never to be heard from again. Another effective moment, evocative of Carpenter's second feature Assault on Precinct 13 (which, rather then EFNY, should have served as EFLA's inspiration, comes as Snake runs afoul of the Korean Dragons while trying to navigate down a choked Interstate 5.

Like Escape From L.A.'s beat-for-beat rehash of the first film's plotline, Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken walks, talks and even looks exactly like he did sixteen years ago. Some kind of character development desperately is needed here. What's happened to him in the intervening years? No one, not even Snake Plissken, can't have at least some of time's relentless passage.

The original film's larger-than-life secondary characters are also sorely missed. With the exception of Pam Grier in the Harry Dean Stanton role as Carjack Mallone, a former buddy of Snake's before he sold him out and had a sex change, and the wonderful Valerie Golino as a babe caught after dark in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time (in the only sequence that taps into the hellishness of life today in the City of Angels), Escape From L.A.'s cast of lowlifes and misfits never comes to life. Stacey Keach, playing Lee Van Cleef's role, never seems to know what to do with himself, projecting none of the menacingly grudging respect Snake Plissken deserves. Michelle Forbes, Star Trek's Ensign Ro, usually a hot spicy salsa number in her own right, seems wooden and one-note. Steve Buscemi as Map to the Stars Eddie, isn't given one funny line. Aside from his initial appearance (humorous only because of the baggage he carries in the pop cultural zeitgeist), Mr. Pink adds surprisingly little to the film. As Cuervo Jones, the film's heavy, George Corraface brings none of the over-the-top histrionics Isaac Hayes so wonderfully brought to his Duke of New York.

The greatest disappointment, however, comes from Peter Fonda's Pipeline, L.A.'s resident sage surfer. Pipeline requires the manic intensity of, say, Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, but Fonda instead sleepwalks his way through the role, barely managing a credible "far out."

The film's climax, a hang glider attack on Cuervo Jones's headquarters in the ruins of the former Happy Kingdom, while an inspired idea, comes off instead as incoherent. Aside from utilizing the gliders to bypass traffic, why are they using them to attack a horde of gun-toting thugs able to pick them off simply by shooting up? How are gliders able to maneuver in an enclosed space? Where does Map to the Stars Eddie disappear to - a ride on the Matterhorn perhaps? Even the editing during this sequence, sluggish through most of the film, makes little sense here. Shots follow shots for no reason, generating absolutely no tension and very little suspense, traits Carpenter usually creates with his eyes closed. And the opportunities for parody inherent in the setting (a thinly veiled Disneyland) are totally squandered, as Carpenter only pays lip service to the film's apparent liberal agenda of examining an America overrun by Ralph Reed wannabes.

As much as it pains me lo admit it - especially after the absolute glee l fell while viewing In the Mouth of Madness - John Carpenter needs to rediscover the innovative passion clearly on display in his earlier works. Simply put, he needs a vacation. But make no mistake, I want him to come back. And while Escape From L.A.'s failure will hardly diminish my love of Escape From New York, I still feel the same sadness at the tremendous unrealized potential I witnessed here that I experienced when viewing Return of the Jedi and Generations for the first time, films which, previous to Escape From L.A., were the greatest disappointments of my genre cinema-going life.



New Statesman (Sep 20/1996/UK) By Boyd Tonkin


As Independence Day has proved in spades, Americans just love to trash their towns. Ever since the Founding Fathers taught the rebels to worship sturdy farmers with ten acres and a gun, native art has often treated any settlement bigger than a village (or a suburb) as Sodom and Gomorrah incarnate.

John Carpenter - whose fierce and funny genre films have teased the hang-ups of his compatriots for 20 years - first touched on his urban angst with Escape from New York. In 1981 he imagined the Manhattan of 1997 as a barbaric penal colony run by (of all people) soul magnate Isaac Hayes. Well, 1997 is just around the corner. New York boasts a plummeting crime rate, street awash with firm-but-fair beat cops and a Republican mayor who hosts admiring visits from British Labour bigwigs. A Republican mayor? Now we're really talking science fiction.

Carpenter, of course, knows very well that his business involves myth and not prediction. The aliens, demons and urban scum of his reliable stylish films sometimes wobble between sending up all-American paranoia and giving it another whirl. That certainly goes for Escape from L.A., which transplants his 1981 premise to the Pacific coast 2013. It mixes hi-tech Armageddon in the Blade Runner mould, mockery of the pious right and PC left alike, and honest-to-badness action scenes sporting mammoth sidearms and plenty of bangs for your buck. Carpenter aims for spectacle with lemony twist of satire. And few punters will complain by the time that Kurt Russell shuts down the entire planet so he can light a fag at last. Some people (I'm told) will know just how he feels.

As in Escape from New York, Russell plays the villainous hired gun Snake Plissken - a gravel-voiced berserker who makes Arnie look like Aled Jones. After the Big One (in AD 2000, natch), the post-quake city of LA has turned into a lawless island gulag. In its debris live the "moral criminals" expelled from non-smoking, church-going mainland USA. Snake's mission is to rescue the errant daughter of a righteous president - Cliff Robertson as a snarling, hatchet-featured bigot - and so earn the antidote to a fatal designer virus that the Feds have thoughtfully injected into him.

Armed with a Secret Weapon (the same one, oddly, as in Goldeneye), young Utopia - AJ Langer - has holed  up on the "island of the damned" with a Latino warlord played by George Corraface as a Che Guevara lookalike. We can tell that Utopia has decided to party with the street people because she forsakes her prissy pink suits for leather hot pants. In fact, LA's reversion to the Dark Ages has (as in Blade Runner) meant a sales boom for the Leather Manufacturers of America. The two films share a designer, Lawrence Paull, who strews the nocturnal sets with his trademark roadside braziers, punkish wreckage and a general air of grungy bazaar. Dystopia, did someone say? I've seen worse at London's Camden Lock on Sunday afternoon.

Amid these flame-lit ruins Snake meets a menagerie of exotic local fauna. There's Steve Buscemi as the pallid tout with a Hollywood hustler's line in patter; Pam Grier as a sassy transvestite mobster - half Tina Turner, half Ice T - and Bruce Campbell, a demented cosmetic surgeon who runs his body-parts workshop on KwikFit principles. Oh, and Peter Fonda does a little night-time surfing whenever a tsunami rips down Wilshire Boulevard.

Carpenter crafts all of them as sulphurous cartoons of LA types today, not in 2013. But then he has to hurry, Russell into the next heavy-metal showdown. So the mischief and the mayhem seldom coincide - except in one glorious shot through the "Hollywood" sign, looking down on the vast bonfires below. "Why, this is hell, nor are we out of it," as Mephistopheles (that well-known casting agent) once remarked.

We never quite grasp how the mainland has fallen prey to such a toxic blend of Pat Buchanan and Jane Fonda. With Snake spitting dialogue along the lines of "Don't piss me off or I'll pull the plug." neither will anyone care. (They do. He does.) Carpenter gives a fine lurid spin to the puritan fantasy of a shattered metropolis, complete with blasted freeways and toppled tower-blocks skulking on the ocean floor like images from JG Ballard. "Devine retribution," snaps the Pres. At least "a girl can still wear a fur coat if she wants to," says one of Russell's short-lived sidekicks.

The satire never really moves beyond animal hides and nicotine jokes. Stuck at that level, this spirited hybrid of Judge Dredd and The Handmaid's Tale can't deliver the Big One for John Carpenter. All the same, it should set some teacups rattling in the smug, smoke-free conventicles that stretch from sea to shining sea. 



Sunday Telegraph (Sep 28/1996/UK) By Chris Peachment


It has been 16 years since John Carpenter's
Escape from New York, which has become a late-night video favourite for impressionable girls, but hardly anything has changed for his belated sequel, Escape from LA (15). Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken certainly hasn't changed his clothes since then. The designer stubble is still intact, and the voice still sounds like a rusty band-saw. Curiously his eye-patch does seem to have shifted from the right to the left eye, but the old line in insolent banter and the serious problem with authority are still the same.

The plot is a shameless re-tread too. This time it is Los Angeles that has been turned into a prison for all those dissidents who don't like the idea of living in an America which has been declared a no-smoking zone, where red meat and sex outside marriage have been banned, and the President (Cliff Robertson) is a crazed fundamentalist. Into this hellish region Snake must venture in order to rescue the President's daughter, who has done a Patty Hearst and decamped with a doomsday machine into the arms of the chief criminal. And, as in all the best thrillers, time is running out. Snake has been injected with a deadly virus, just to ensure his return for the antidote.

There are plenty of nice touches in the film. Sunset Boulevard is a wrecked car dump, the LA Coliseum has become an execution ground, and Snake even gets to surf a huge wave down the length of Wilshire Boulevard accompanied by old hippy Peter Fonda. In the original film, Snake was always greeted with, "I thought you were dead." This time around it is, "I thought you'd be taller." But that is all the film really amounts to - a series of good moments strung together without much sense of purpose. The action film has come a long way in 10 years, and we now expect aliens blowing up Washington in full close-up. Had this film come out 14 years ago, it would probably still be a late-night video treat, rather than looking a mite tired.


Empire (Oct/1996/UK) By Kim Newman


In 1981, John Carpenter, then a hot director whose track record included Dark Star, Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween, made Escape From New York, a futuristic action movie starring Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, an eyepatch-sporting, dirtbag hero. Now a decade and a half later, Carpenter has slipped to DTV disappointments such as Village Of The Damned while Russell has never quite graduated from star to superstar.

Along with producer Debra Hill, the pair have got back together to knock together a screenplay for a sequel. And in so doing, they have come up with lots of neat ideas and characters, but still fall back on the same old, far from original plot.

An earthquake has turned Los Angeles into an island where President Cliff Robertson dumps the nation's undesirables. However, LA's Che Guevara wannabe supremo, Cuervo Jones (Corraface) has got hold of a remote control unit that can shut off all the machines in the world.

The fascist Christian regime again calls on the still shaggy, still unshaven Russell to retrieve the macguffin. Given that a fair budget has been allowed, it's a shame that the whole thing seems such a scrappy dull-witted spectacle, with extras standing around in the dark as Snake breezes past on mini-sub, bike, helicopter or surfboard.

The stupidity of the plot can be gauged from the sequence in which the one-eyes Plissken saves his life by demonstrating his basketball skills (close one eye and try to shoot some hoops for further elucidation). There are promising characters played by decent actors - Stacy Keach as head cop, Peter Fonda as a surfer dude, Bruce Campbell as a plastic surgeon, Buscemi as a triple-crosser, Pam Grier as a transvestite - but no one has anything to do except trade insults with Snake and get left behind by the film's race to go nowhere fast. In 1981, Escape From New York seemed like Carpenter's least interesting film; now, Escape From L.A. makes it seem a masterpiece.  


Select (Oct/1996/UK) By Clark Collis


john Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is really for Those People Who Loved Escape From New York More Than Life Itself And Want To See It Re-Made With A Much Bigger Budget. Of course, the irony here is that (a) virtually no one went to see the first one and (b) despite being handed
$40m, Carpenter has made a movie that actually looks far cheaper than the first one. Apart from that it's business as usual. Kurt Russell is sent off to a post-apocalyptic wasteland and gets into scrapes while looking rather surly. Carpenterheads should be more than satisfied, although everyone else will think that they've bought themselves a day pass to hell. The worrying thing, though, is that, should be some miracle Escape From L.A. become a massive success, then it will conclusively prove that Hollywood really can flog us any cold rubbish that it fancies.


Sight & Sound (Oct/1996/UK) By Philip Strick


2013 A.D. Los Angeles has become an island, abandoned to its own lawlessness by the rest of the US which is ruled by a fundamentalist President. Controlled by ruthless South American revolutionary Cuervo Jones, the LA penal colony is joined by the President's runaway daughter, Utopia, who brings with her the controlling device for a satellite weapon that could shut down the entire planet. Assigned to recover the device and eliminate Utopia is the infamous outlaw Snake Plissken, whose reward will be a full pardon and the antidote to a fatal virus with which he has been secretly infected.

Plissken reaches the island and makes his way down Sunset Boulevard. When Jones drives by, Plissken commandeers a bike to follow him but gets delayed by four of Jones' men. He refuses guidance to Jones' headquarters offered by 'Map to the Stars' Eddie. When Snake pauses to rescue a girl, Taslima, from mysterious cowled figures, they capture him as well. They are taken to the laboratory of the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, who wants their body parts, but Plissken breaks free and escapes with Taslima. She is later killed by a stray bullet.

Jones threatens to activate the satellite system unless he is provided with a helicopter. Meanwhile, Plissken falls into Jones' hands and is forced to play a basketball game at the LA Coliseum in order to stay alive. An earthquake hits and Plissken escapes, closely followed by Utopia with the satellite controls. Eddie shoots Plissken in the leg and makes off with the device, but with the help of a surfing fanatic, Pipeline, Plissken rides a tsunami wave down Wilshire Boulevard and catches up with him.

Plissken Finds a former associate, Carjack, now called Hershe and persuades her to help him capture the helicopter being sent to collect Jones. As it lands there is a monumental battle in which Jones and Eddie destroy each other but Plissken manages to airlift Utopia to the mainland. Awaiting them, Malloy reveals that the "fatal virus" was actually harmless, while the President straps Utopia to an electric chair and gets ready to unleash satellite firepower at all the US's enemies. Plissken, however, has retained the genuine control tape and shuts down the planet's power sources, saving Utopia from electrocution.

"Sounds familiar," murmurs the one-eyed Snake in his habitual Eastwood monotone, and much of the point of Escape from L.A. is that it shamelessly copies the Plissken predicament of 15 years ago in Escape from New York. Not much has changed: the president is still an arrogant coward, the country's city-sized primary prison still has all the supplies it needs to maintain a state of enthusiastic anarchy, and there is still one inmate so untamable that he has to be kept in a different prison, making him conveniently available for special projects. When a piece of equipment falls into the wrong hands, there is still no specially-trained undercover unit available to get it back. There is only one grimy, growling, grumpy old Snake, eye-patch and stubble miraculously unimpaired by the passing years, willing to infiltrate enemy lines because the latest designer drug will otherwise shut him down in the next few hours.

Although claimed by Kurt Russell as his favourite role, Snake makes poor company. While his contempt for the New Moral America, with its ranting evangelistic leader and black-armoured police troops, appears not unreasonable, the exact nature of a career so monstrous that the entire underworld is in awe of him is left disturbingly unspecified. Serial killer? Great train robber? Chain smoker (cigarettes are now banned)? How would he actually spend his freedom if he had any? Belying his name, he has no time to waste on charm, although he automatically comes to the rescue of women in distress only to walk away when they're out of danger. Snake's main purpose seems solely to survive in situations where survival is unlikely, an often remarkable achievement which serves only to deepen his perpetual scowl.

Substituting Stacey Keach for Lee Van Cleef, the ubiquitous Steve Buscemi for Ernest Borgnine, and Che Guevara lookalike George Corraface for Isaac Hayes, Escape from L.A. is the weaker for having found no clear equivalent to the Harry Dean Stanton/Adrienne Barbeau partnership in the earlier film. Clumsily handled as that was, it conveyed a pathos, even an illusion of purpose, that the new audience throws aside except, perhaps, in the case of the wistful surfer (a wholly self-absorbed Peter Fonda) briefly riding his dreams on the edge of the action. Intended, of course, as nothing more significant than a subversive romp for Plissken admirers, the film is welter of in-jokes, out-jokes, allusions and references, sprinkled lightly with great special effects. At this level, exercising indulgent goodwill, we may cheer the glimpse of Paul Bartel, the running gag "I though you'd be taller" (last time it was "I though you were dead"), the glee with which Carpenter has reduced identifiable bits of Los Angeles to ruins, and the happy invention of the Surgeon General, cosmetic specialist of Beverly Hills, with his desperate band of clients whose face lifts are coming apart at the seams.

Indicative of what it might have been, the earthquake opening - while inevitably in the shadows of Independence Day as all disasters must now be - is appealingly cataclysmic, and there is a glimpse of the submersible gliding among drowned buildings that suggest a much classier mood and pace. What the films lacks is certainly not the sparkle of unusual images but any sense of confidence about what to do with them. Even the wonderfully ridiculous spectacle of a tidal wave pursuing a car down Wilshire Boulevard fails to dissipate the film's drudging quality. As happens disappointingly often in John Carpenter's later work, an increasing tedium suggests that while variations on themes of siege and evasion are no end of fun for him to think up, the business of filming them is something of a chore.



Starburst (Oct/1996/UK) By Alan Jones


They say a picture paints a thousand words. But Escape from L.A. is CRAP. And as for the description 'sequel', what a nerve! I feel a new dictionary definition is in order to describe this manufactured mess of meaningless machismo. A shambolic big budget (complete with egos) remake of the far superior Escape from New York, this actionless, humourless, tedious, paceless, empty vessel of worn-out ideas is the worst John Carpenter movie since - well, the last John Carpenter movie.

Escape from L.A. is far too late, much too predictable and, I fear the final nail in John Carpenter's creative coffin. Beginning like Earthquake (showing the cheesy devastation making L.A. a future island) and ending up as Flash Gordon (with the goodies hang-gliding into the baddies' den), this is one Hollywood tour not worth taking. It's an endless parade of of uninspired a unimaginative set-pieces played out amongst the ruins of Beverly Hills and Mulholland Drive, charting Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell's) search for a doomsday device stolen by the American President's daughter and given to the Castro-like revolutionary head (George Corraface) of the tarnished City of Angels.

Snake has been injected with a slow-acting deadly virus to blackmail him into cruising the streets of fire where he meets surfer dude (Peter Fonda, still mining his Easy Rider persona), 'Map to the Stars' Eddie (Steve Buscemi, in fine weaselly form), the flesh merchant Surgeon General (Bruce Campbell) and former comrade sex-change Hershe (a dubbed Pam Grier). None of the formless episodes under-employing this gallery of gritty grotesques adds up to much, and the tidal wave surf down Wilshire Boulevard - and the gladiatorial basketball match to the death plumb - new depths of brainless stupidity.

With Russell's styrofoam Schwarzenegger - complete with Clint Eastwood rasp, grating as never before - Carpenter's charmless monstrosity takes itself far too seriously for its own good. The lack of humour, black or otherwise - aside from the witty face-lift zombie section - is only one of the misguided creative choices Carpenter (together with his co-writer/co-producer team of Russell and Debra Hill) has seen fit to derail this potentially fun franchise. But then the special effects work begs many awkward questions too. How did those awful matte paintings got past the planning stages? Who's responsible for those terrible CGIs, like the mini-sub and helicopter blades? Why are all the explosions so boring? In fact, what was everyone thinking when they shot this 'microwaved Mad Max'?'

Inept and unexciting to a quite shocking degree, Escape from L.A. is routine even by Carpenter's low standards of late. It hardly cuts together as a cohesive whole - just watch the Yawnville rope-around-the-helicopter sequence for how not to edit action - and... Oh, why bother going on? You get the picture. It's just just a shame Carpenter did.