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

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.

I'd even go so far as In The Mouth of Madness, with the mis-step of Memoirs of an Invisible Man in between that and They Live. After that, though, ugh.

Mouth of Madness is okaaaay, and then yeah, massive drop after that. They Live is the last 'can be watched and enjoyed many times' Carpenter.

I didn't learn my lesson until paying to see Escape from LA *AND* Vampires in the theater...I was such a fangirl I kept hoping it would get better. But it really, really didn't. *cries*

Also Vampires is the reason I hate James Woods to this day.

banning amateurist...damn no ban button. banning alex in nyc in retrospect too for being such a dope.

banning me for what? i didn't say all his '80s films suck. some of them are pretty damn good, if flawed. big trouble is probably the best of the lot. but they do seem like a dropoff to me from assault/halloween which are unfuckwithable.

actually i think i was just taking alex's thread title and first post out on you. he's not around, i have to ban someone!

plus, i love this movie.

Pissed that Netflix has this streaming in pan and scan.

and i really like later walter hill movies too. trespass, wild bill, last man standing, crossroads, johnny handsome, streets of fire, red heat, extreme prejudice.

i'm actually more of a fan of streets of fire than i am of the 48 hours movies. though the first 48 hours is good.

though my fave three came out three years in a row: warriors, long riders, and southern comfort.

and speaking of walter hill, would watch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_to_the_Head

banning alex in nyc in retrospect too for being such a dope.

Why don't you go gargle with a bag of your own filth?

ALEX!

If an eyepatch and camo pants is wrong, I don't want it to be right.

this is the weakest of the Carpenter/Russell troika but it is still great. Carpenter had an amazing 15 year run - Josh in Chicago otm about that. Even stuff like the Fog and They Live are loads of fun.

oof i should have known better than to summon the grouch.

lol

this is kind've the second worst thread title ever

http://countycrestpallets.com/images/netco-pbx-callback-essex.png

watching this now - so many plot elements lifted from neuromancer!

oh wait according to wiki it's the other way around

I WAS ABOUT TO SAY

gibson has acknowledged the film's influence iirc

this thread title fucking infuriates me btw