Review of Escape from New York (1981) by Bill M — 15 Jun 2014

With the Carpenter/Russel movies at their best you know your gonna get, three things, awesomeness, a seriously cool synthesizer score by Carpenter, and of course the great Kurt Russel playing yet another icon of badassery, and here we have inarguably his most iconic, the impossibly manly Snake Plissken, a character so cool he influenced the character of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid series.

Escape From New York is the first of a trilogy of cult brilliance that would continue with "The Thing" and "Big Trouble In Little China", and it's a bleak, tough, remorseless kind of film, the whole tone is one of rugged unsentimental grittiness.

The prison island of Manhattan (circa an alternate 1997) is fantastically realized, with a giant wall surrounding the whole thing, streets strewn with smashed up, burning cars and planes, severed heads on pikes down Broadway, terrifying roaming "crazies" who will eat anything, and the whole city looking like a heroin addicted, squatters den, filthy, graffiti and rubble and garbage covered, a nightmare then.

That this is all physically crafted by the production team, with nary a smidgen of cgi is extremely impressive and gives the film that tactile feel that genre films of the 70's and 80's had. This film is fast, brilliantly paced, has a great story, an anti-hero for the ages, it's violent, thrilling, creepy, quotable, dark and ambitious in it's world building, it's also full of wonderful odd touches that only genre movies of this era could get away with, like the hilariously bizarre, cackling, shock haired lacky to the main villain "The Duke", or the aforementioned Dukes pimped up ride complete with chandeliers on the outside.

A cult, sci-fi masterpiece.