"Escape From New York" - stupid film, but.... Classic or Dud?

Also, EFNY is total classic.

i say this sheerly as an observation and without misogynist or sexist intent -- Adrian Barbeau's breasts were a thing of jaw-dropping splendor.

god i love this movie
and john carpenter
i feel like i have rediscovered something and it's changing my life all over again
and i'm not even a 12-yr-old boy!

Personally I love Big Trouble in Little China, who's with me?

i think this is my spring/summer of john carpenter (realized i've never seen 'ghosts of mars' or 'vampires' all the way through, so, hm)

i think it will rule

ernest borgnine and i have the same birthday

Jeez, Rrobyn. I'm a Carpenter fan, but those are both terrible movies.

realize the parenthetical - they will be in context of greater carpenter + i have completist tendencies

Ah, I see. Well, enjoy the good ones, then!

Pliskin's tat is out of control.

this movie hasn't aged well IMHO

seeing it again after all these years, it looks ... and SOUNDS ... like an apocalyptic episode of "knight rider."

soundtrack may be best part.

^ what he said

Some day I might write a blog about how the ending of the sequel has caused it to endure in my memory FAR longer than the tons and tons of better movies out there. It's really an awesome 15 seconds.

what is actually on the tape?

Easily Adrian Barbau's finest hour.

ADRIENNE BARBEAU for the love of FIRE

and her finest hour is Swamp Thing obv

Some day I might write a blog about how the ending of the sequel has caused it to endure in my memory FAR longer than the tons and tons of better movies out there. It's really an awesome 15 seconds.

this is totally true!

Its aged really well, prob the best thing Carpenter ever did!

This movie hasn't aged as well as Big Trouble in Little China or Halloween, but its pretty good, considering.

And Adrienne Barbeau's breasts are amazing to behold.

And Isaac Hayes' car is amazing.

I think it's a part of many St. Louisan filmlovers' development to see this as a kid, just dig it like any other wacky movie, find out it was shot all downtown because downtown looks like a post-apocalyptic New York, rewatch it, and fall totally in love with it.

Seriously, I've known at least people who've gone through this cycle.

at least six people

Just watched this for the first time as a followup to doing BTILC the other night (see thread). It's...okay? Like, it cleaves so close to being the world's most generic dystopian craphole movie (I'm thinking of MST3k fave City Limits here), just a string of terrible cliches...but then there's this great supporting cast, who really do elevate the hell out of this: Lee Van Cleef is awesome, Ernest Borgnine is charming, Isaac Hayes is basically cool, and Harry Dean Stanton plays the sleazy treacherous guy like a sleazy treacherous guy who's had all the sleaze dried out of him in a few years of living in New York.

Soundtrack's sweet too. So I guess what didn't click for me was either the plot (great premise, but the episodes went up to 5 when they needed to go up to 11) or, sad to say, Kurt Russell, who looks and feels like he's cosplaying the character. Maybe it's just after watching BTILC, where he gets so much more material to work with, good lines, some jokes...here he just wheezes and grunts his way through the scenes. I still basically want to see him escape from New York but I'm not cheering when he does.

So, based on the above, should I keep following Russell & Carpenter down the Netflix rabbit hole? I get the impression Escape from LA is to be avoided at all costs...

yeah this film has a lot going for it but it manages to squander way too much of that. there's a lot of neat stuff that shows up and just kind of fizzles out b/c carpenter didn't seem to know what do with it, plot-wise. this is true of a bunch of other carpenter movies: they live (which like escape from n.y. has a climax that feels very rote), the thing (ditto)... not to mention the horrible crap he made in the 90s and 00s.

like walter hill (a more unusual and somewhat better director IMO), he peaked early.

assault/halloween vs. the driver/the warriors??

Eh, I don't think Carpenter peaked early. He had a pretty much 100% successful run of movies from Dark Star to at least Big Trouble, or maybe They Live. That's nearly 15 years and 10 or so movies. I think it's more accurate to say that after such a strong run, he fell hard.

The novel also clarifies that the president's plan for the cassette tape is not benevolent. Rather than presenting to the world a new energy source in the form of nuclear fusion (as claimed in the film), the tape actually reveals the successful development of a "fallout-free thermonuclear weapon, which would grant the US supremacy in the global conflict.

OK, but that doesn't come through in the film, at least not as far as I could discern.

Really, I think it's just a giant middle finger to everyone. Which is fine, it's just always bothered me.

Another example of why it's importabt to read up on things rather than believing everything you see on the telly!

This movie is perfect. Lotsa John Carpenter movies end with the end of the world.

but yeah as I said the movie doesn't reveal this but also imo gives us zero motivation to believe the nuclear fusion thing is legit xpost

This kinda gets foregrounded in the sequel where it’s much more clear that the US has a orbital doomsday weapon, and Snake just EMPs the planet(or at least the continent) to burn it all down.

Bit overdone that he stares at a single lit match as the screen fades to black, of course, but Carpenter was pretty much done as a director by that point and ready for his 420-24/7 & video games retirement for the following decades

I will say, seeing Carpenter & Sons playing music live in the pre-pandemic world(including Dave Davies’ son on guitar), you felt it HIT when they played that theme in front of the crowd

It's such a banger. Italo version o Assault On Precinct 13 my all time Carpenter fave tho.

Kurt Russell
Lee Van Cleef
Ernest Borgnine
Donald Pleasence
Isaac Hayes
Harry Dean Stanton
Adrienne Barbeau

Season Hubley as "Girl in Chock Full O' Nuts"

Farewell, Girl in Chock Full O' Nuts. We hardly knew ye.

Very weird and cool that this thread was revived today! I watched the first two Mad Maxes this weekend in preparation for a run through the glut of (mostly Italian) Maxploitation flicks that followed in their wake but then realized, what with titles like 1990: The Bronx Warriors and 2019: After the Fall of New York and, uh, y'know, Escape from the Bronx, that the release of Escape from New York was probably nearly as influential an '81 milestone as The Road Warrior on the post-apocalyptic mini-genre. So this one is on the docket (along with the earlier films of Cirio Santiago, who I only just realized contributed no fewer than four Mad Max-inspired films to our culture).

iirc Season Hubley was Kurt's girlfriend at the time

Lee Van Cleef's look in this scene, so good

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMGI0YzE1ZjUtZWE2Yy00NmQ5LThlMTgtZDFhOWRiNTE5MDkxXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUyNDk2ODc@._V1_.jpg

This film did have the same gritty, surreal atmosphere as The Warriors, an undisputed classic.

I like The Warriors more but I love both of them. I'm pretty much a sucker for dystopian New York movies of the '70s and early '80s, even lesser ones like Fort Apache the Bronx.

I hadn’t considered the idea of the tape recording as a threat. I like that interpretation. Even in the movie, where it’s not spelt out, you can easily read the President’s intended announcement as an implicit threat to China and the Soviets. That fits a lot better with what we see of this President and government.

As for the ending, Snake is ultimately just doing what he warned he was going to do the whole time, which is not to cooperate except under compulsion. It was their dumb mistake to assume they had more leverage over him than they did. He’s also not irrevocably dooming the world (nor irrevocably thwarting the U.S.’s plans for world domination, if you prefer that interpretation). They can probably create another copy of this nuclear fusion information, I assume? Maybe they couldn’t do it within 23 hours, for some reason? In any case, I figured the reason it was so important to get the President and tape in front of the cameras by that time is just that this is what the U.S. had announced (threatened) previously, and they need to project strength and competence. Snake’s basically just allowing them to screw themselves, and leaving it to them to clean up the mess.

I remember liking Escape from LA and find myself surprisingly not hostile to the idea of an "Old Man Snake" sequel.

I'd really like to find a book with something like this movie's style and approach to dystopian world-building. Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh seems like a possibility? The author wrote a Metal Gear novelization anyway.

To me the movie kind of reads like an 80s Wm. Gibson caper but like 20% more flamboyant?