Halloween

I never saw John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) at a young, impressionable age so it never imprinted on my psyche like The Birds (1963), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Jaws (1975), which continue to this day to creep me out because they make me regress instantly to the little kid who saw them through fingers barely covering my eyes. That being said, Halloween is still an unsettling experience because Carpenter created such a well-crafted scare machine.

And he gets us right from the start as we see the world literally from the point-of-view of a young Michael Myers (Will Sandin) as he spies on older teenage sister Judith (Sandy Johnson). Dean Cundey’s flawless steadicam work creates a sense of unease as it glides smoothly through the Myers house. In a nice bit we even see Michael put on a mask before he brutally kills his sister. The real punch to the gut comes when Carpenter cuts from Michael’s P.O.V. to an omniscient angle as we see his parents arrive outside the house just as the boy emerges with a bloody knife. The mask is pulled off to see the slightly blank, slightly surprised expression on the child’s face. I don’t know how Carpenter got that expression from the boy, but it is a fantastically complex mix of emotions (or lack thereof) that plays across his face.

The film jumps from 1963 to 1978 and it’s a dark and stormy night as Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) drives to a psychiatric hospital in Smith’s Grove, Illinois to take Michael to another facility. There’s this great shot of several patients wandering the grounds in the middle of the night. What are they doing there? We’re barely able to ponder this when Michael suddenly appears, commandeers the car and like that he is on his way back home to Haddonfield.

I love how Carpenter is confident enough of a filmmaker, even this early on in his career, to show Michael (Nick Castle) in broad daylight, like the initial, over-the-shoulder shot of him observing Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she walks down the street. Every time he pops up, it is unsettling in the way he almost casually appears, like when Laurie spots him across the street from the school standing behind the station wagon he stole, almost defiantly as if daring her to call attention to his presence. And then, after a few looks, he disappears. Michael prowls the neighborhood in that car, driving by Laurie and her friends who seem blissfully unaware except for her who senses that something isn’t right. The creepiest shot of these daytime sequences is when Laurie and Annie (Nancy Kyes) see Michael down the street, standing by a hedge. There is something disconcerting about a killer like Michael being so brazenly visible during the day despite Loomis and the police looking for him.

The contributions of producer and co-writer Debra Hill can’t be underestimated enough as evident in the scene where Laurie and her friends, Annie and Lynda (P.J. Soles), walk and talk about boys and babysitting – mundane things that pretty much anyone can relate to and this humanizes these characters. We start to get to know them as their distinct personalities surface. They’re not just cardboard stereotypes to be senselessly killed off later on in the film. When it does happen their deaths have more of an impact because we’ve come to identify with these characters, even care about them. This is certainly the case with Laurie whom we spend the most time with and who comes across as the most sympathetic.

Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie just right. She’s not naïve or entirely innocent (we see her smoking a joint with Annie), but there is definitely something good about her. She lacks experience because of her youth and this fateful night is a coming-of-age of sorts for her, which Curtis conveys so well. There’s a nice exchange between Laurie and Annie as they drive around town. They talk about the upcoming school dance and Laurie admits that she doesn’t have the courage to ask someone even though she admits to liking a specific boy. This is a telling scene that sheds light on her character. Laurie may be something of a bookish wallflower (in these early scenes she always seems to be carrying around her school books), but she has aspirations to be more assertive. It is this wish fulfillment that gets us to empathize with her.

Donald Pleasence hits all the right notes as the obsessed Dr. Loomis. He is Ahab and Michael is his great white whale that he is compelled to pursue come hell or high water. Having spent years with Michael he knows just how evil the man is as he lays it out for Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers): “No reason, no conscience, no understanding. Even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.” And this is from Michael at six years of age! Loomis tried to help the boy for eight years and then realizing it was no use, spent another seven making sure Michael never left the institution because, as he puts it so well, “I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.” Pleasence delivers this beautifully written monologue brilliantly; transforming what could have so easily been perfunctory exposition dialogue into a chilling account of just what is stalking the tree-lined neighborhoods of Haddonfield. The veteran actor doesn’t oversell it, resisting the urge to go over the top with the role. When Loomis loses his cool it’s with good reason. This speech conveys all we need to know about Michael in the intervening years from ‘63 to ‘78, which was needlessly fleshed out in Rob Zombie’s remake. I also like how Pleasence shows that Loomis is scared of Michael because he knows how evil the man is and what he’s capable of. This helps humanize the good doctor. He’s not some stereotypical infallible hero, but someone trying to do the best he can under trying circumstances.

Carpenter and Hill tell us just enough to let our imagination run with it, allowing us to fill in the gaps ourselves and in doing so be active participants in the narrative – something that countless imitators, wannabes, and even subsequent sequels often failed to do, instead of spelling things out and upping the gory body count. In comparison, Carpenter’s Halloween is downright subtle, like when Michael kills a neighborhood dog. All we hear is the poor animal whine and then a shot of Michael gently dropping its limp body to the ground. There’s no need to rub our noses in it as Carpenter conveys all we need to know through an economy of style. Another haunting shot (one of many) is when a little boy named Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews), whom Laurie is babysitting, spots Michael across the street carrying Annie’s dead body around the front of a house at night. Perhaps it is the voyeuristic aspect that makes it so spooky or it’s the matter-of-fact way Michael goes about his business.

There are many reasons why Halloween still holds up after all these years. It’s more than being an expertly crafted, efficient scare machine. I think it also taps into some pretty primal fears that most of us can relate to – it took a ruthless serial killer and set him loose in an average, all-American suburb – symbols of safe haven in the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly, with this film they weren’t so safe anymore. As a result, Halloween helped spawn a whole slew of suburban slasher movies, but few, if any, have stood the test of time like Carpenter’s film.

Escape from L.A.

After making several career-defining classics in the 1980s, film director John Carpenter struggled to find his footing in the 1990s with the only memorable film being the sorely underrated In the Mouth of Madness (1995). The rest of his output from this decade ranges from fascinatingly flawed (Vampires) to downright mediocre (Village of the Damned). Somewhere in-between is Escape from L.A. (1996), the long-gestating sequel to Carpenter’s dystopian futuristic masterpiece Escape from New York (1981). It also marked the director’s return to a major studio after making the instantly forgettable Chevy Chase vanity project Memoirs of An Invisible Man (1992). Carpenter was coaxed back into the fold by his good friend Kurt Russell, who had always fondly regarded Escape’s protagonist Snake Plissken. The final result was a decidedly schizophrenic affair, an uneven hybrid of remake/sequel that failed to please fans of the original and mystified the uninitiated. One can see what Carpenter and co. were trying to do – satirize not just Los Angeles culture but also big budget blockbuster action films. Sadly, they weren’t very successful on either front, but the film does have its merits.

In 2000, a massive earthquake ravages the west coast causing the San Fernando Valley to flood, turning L.A. into an island. Crime has gotten so bad that, like New York City before it, L.A. has become a prison surrounded by a containment wall with the United States Army encamped around the island. Thirteen years later, notorious outlaw Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) has been captured yet again and is set to be “deported” to L.A. Like in Escape from New York, he is given another deal – go into the city and find Utopia (A.J. Langer), the President of the U.S.’ daughter who has become a brainwashed revolutionary of the oppressed courtesy of Cuervo Jones (George Corraface), leader of the biggest baddest gang in the city. More importantly, he convinced her to steal the President’s remote control to the “Sword of Damocles,” a collection of satellites that when activated can destroy electronics worldwide. Snake is enlisted to find the remote and bring it back before Jones can use it to trigger an allied invasion of third world nations from Central and South America. Oh yeah, and kill Utopia as well. Of course, there’s a catch. He has less than ten hours to live before a deadly virus causes his central nervous system to shut down. So, Snake goes in via a one-man submarine and crosses paths with all sorts of wild, eccentric denizens of L.A.

The problem that faces fans of Escape from New York going into Escape from L.A. are the inevitable comparisons, and let’s face it, the sequel fails on all fronts. The biggest problem is that instead of creating a new adventure from scratch, Escape from L.A.’s plot is almost literally a beat-for-beat retread of the first film. And so anyone with any kind of knowledge of it finds themselves sizing up the two in their minds. The first thing is the casting. Stacy Keach, who plays the exact same kind of character that Lee Van Cleef did in the first film, pales in comparison, as does Cliff Robertson who plays the President this time around instead of Donald Pleasence, and while Steve Buscemi is a gifted comic actor, he’s no Ernest Borgnine, and simply can’t fill his shoes playing the same kind of comic relief character. Furthermore, the Duke of New York, played so vividly by Isaac Hayes, is replaced by Cuervo Jones, a Che Guevara wannabe complete with a pimped out ride much like the Duke. He is played rather blandly by George Corraface. I’m sure he is a fine actor but was simply miscast in this film. One never feels that Jones is a figure to be feared, like the Duke in Escape from New York was, and why legions of gang members would bother to follow him. One never feels like Jones is a match for Snake and this diminishes the threat that our hero faces.

To add insult to injury, the cool gladiatorial match that Snake fights in a boxing ring in the first film is replaced by a basketball challenge where he must score ten points with each basket to be done in ten seconds with no misses or he’s dead. While this does show off Russell’s incredible athletic prowess, it is a pretty lame challenge for Snake to do. The actor carries the film and makes it semi-watchable through sheer force of will. It looks like he’s having a blast putting on the eye patch again. Despite being surrounded by wildly uneven quality from scene to scene, Russell’s performance is constantly excellent as he continues to play Snake as a gravelly-voiced badass who still hates authority figures of all kinds, whether it is the President or two-bit revolutionary Cuervo Jones.

To be fair, it isn’t the actors’ fault but rather the unimaginative screenplay written by Carpenter, producer Debra Hill and Russell. Nick Castle, Carpenter’s old University of Southern California buddy, helped write Escape from New York and his dark sense of humor, which elevated it from being just a straight-ahead action film to something more, is sorely missed in the sequel. And so, we get things like the rehash of the recurring joke in Escape from New York where everyone who meets Snake claims that they thought he was dead, which then gets tweaked in Escape from L.A. to the lame gag of everyone he runs into saying that they thought he was taller.

The script does succeed in updating the social commentary from the first film to reflect the times in which the sequel was made. The President of the U.S. is an ultra-conservative who sees himself ruling a “Moral America” and to this end bans things like tobacco, alcoholic beverages, red meat, firearms, cursing, non-Christian religions and so on. At one point in the film, Snake meets a woman who was deported to L.A. because she was a practicing Muslim in South Dakota. Carpenter is clearly commenting on the politically correct climate that had descended on America at the time the film was made. However, moments like that eerily foreshadow the distrust people had of those of the Muslim faith after 9/11. There is also an interesting argument made that despite the incredibly dangerous atmosphere, L.A. is the last place in the U.S. where one is free to act and do whatever they want. The rest of the country is run by a President who rules with a politically correct iron fist. Carpenter seems to be saying that when looked at it in that way is it really such a bad place? Most of the satirical jabs at L.A. culture work, especially the casting of Bruce Campbell as the grotesque Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, aided by plastic surgery disaster nurses who clearly have had too many implants and facelifts. Played with gusto by Campbell, the Surgeon General and his crew are a spot-on parody of L.A.’s sick fascination with staying forever young.

Escape from L.A.’s production design is excellent as Carpenter presents a burnt out, earthquake-ravaged city. There are some impressive visuals, like the stunning shot of the L.A. Freeway transformed into a graveyard of trashed and abandoned vehicles. There are also some amusing bits, like a wounded Snake hanging ten with Peter Fonda’s far-out surfer in a sequence that is simultaneously cheesy and cool as it alternates between good and badly rendered CGI scored to some groovy retro surf music. The sheer ridiculousness of it all, coupled with Fonda’s Zen surfer, transforms the sequence from downright silly to campy fun. I also like that Carpenter emphasizes the western genre aspects with Snake as the lone gunslinger going into a dangerous town. This is evident in scenes like when he dispatches four hapless gunmen via “Bangkok rules” scored to Ennio Morricone-esque music in a nice little homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

Ever since making Escape from New York, Kurt Russell never forgot the character of Snake Plissken. In the ‘80s, John Carpenter and Russell talked about how fun it would be to revisit the character but they had no story ideas other than it would be set in Los Angeles. At one point a draft was written in 1986 by Coleman Luck but was quickly rejected. After the one-two punch of the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 and then the Northridge earthquake of 1994, Russell contacted Carpenter and told him that he wanted to do a sequel to Escape from New York. According to the director, Russell’s initial idea was that the city was “the most outrageous place to live and yet none of us can leave … why don’t we leave? What’s keeping us here? And, we both realized that we’re all in denial.” The two men felt that out of those sentiments was a story they could tell. Carpenter’s agent suggested that the director and Russell write the screenplay themselves and then shop it around Hollywood as a big-budget film. Carpenter reunited with the film’s producer Debra Hill and he wrote the first draft in September 1994 while making Village of the Damned (1995) with help from her over eight months. Russell came in and tweaked not just the dialogue but also the film’s ending.

Carpenter, Hill and Russell shopped the script around Hollywood and sold it to Paramount Pictures in May 1995 thanks to then-head of the studio Sherry Lansing who was a big fan of Escape from New York and had actively pursued them for the script. It also didn’t hurt that Russell had just headlined surprise box office hit Stargate in 1995 making him a bankable international movie star. Their draft came in at a hefty 146 pages. Over time, both the length of the script and the proposed size of the budget were reduced. After the problems he had with 20th Century Fox over how they handled the distribution and promotion of Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Carpenter was understandably reluctant to work with another one but he was given more control over the final product with Escape from L.A. The only mandate they gave Carpenter and his collaborators was that most of the potential mainstream audience hadn’t seen the first film, “they didn’t know who Snake is,” Carpenter said in an interview, “so you’ve got to tell them who he is, what your world set-up is … but those who’ve seen the original can smile and say ‘Oh I see it. This is very familiar territory.’ They’re in on the joke.”

Just before principal photography began, Carpenter was worried that he wouldn’t be able to get back into the world he had helped create in Escape from New York but once it began he settled into a familiar groove. Escape from L.A. was shot mostly at night over 70 days during a very cold time in and around a lot of “desolate areas” in the city because the streets looked too nice. Carpenter remembers that it was “the coldest that I’ve been since filming The Thing … Night after night of it just wears you down.” Towards the end of principal photography, Russell had to divide his time between filming and promoting another one of his films, Executive Decision (1996). It was a punishing schedule as the actor did almost all of his own stunts while suffering from the flu.

Escape from L.A. received mixed to positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “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.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Peter Stack called it, “Dark, percussive and perversely fun.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, “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 … But Escape From L.A. is more enjoyable in a playful way.”

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “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.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden felt that the film was “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.”

I can remember being very disappointed with Escape from L.A. when I first saw it because it didn’t live up to the standards of Escape from New York. Seeing it again years later, I can’t completely hate it because one feels that Carpenter’s heart is in the right place. It’s just that he went about this sequel all-wrong. The remake/sequel approach rarely works (with notable exceptions being Evil Dead II and Desperado) and Carpenter tried to split the difference and ended up pleasing no one. The CGI is uneven at best, the bad guy is ineffectual and Snake is trivialized. We don’t want to see him throwing basketballs around and surfing – we want to see him be a badass. And yet, Carpenter wanted it both ways by having moments were Snake comes across as his old self, especially with the ending, while also having more playful moments. This is the film’s biggest problem: tonally it is all over the place. Is it a satire? Is it a serious sci-fi film with a message? The film doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries to be everything at once and feels scattered as a result. The biggest sin of all is wasting such a fantastic cast of cult/character actors. If I seem rather harsh on Escape from L.A. it’s only because the film had a lot to live up to. I do enjoy it and the film certainly isn’t the worst thing that Carpenter ever made but it is big letdown in comparison to Escape from New York. I can appreciate the notion that Escape from L.A. is a satirical commentary on the vanity and self-obsessed nature of L.A. in the mid-‘90s. This explains the excessiveness and often-ridiculous tone compared to the much darker, grimmer one of the original. I also feel that Carpenter was making fun of how bloated and over-the-top big budget action films had become. The best thing about Escape from L.A. is its message – the notion of beginning again, throwing everything out and starting over, echoing the ending of Escape from New York but going one step further as Snake returns the world to the brink. Welcome to the human race indeed.

NOTE: This post was partly inspired by Mr. Peel's take on the film over at his blog Mr. Peel's Sardine Liqueur as well as The Film Connoisseur's excellent review over at his blog.

SOURCES

Applebaum, Stephen. “Point Blank: John Carpenter.” Total Film. May 1997.

Beeler, Michael. “Earthquakes, Fires, Riots – Snake Plissken is in his Element.” Cinefantastique. July 1996.

Ferrante, Anthony C. “To Live and Die in Escape from L.A.” Fangoria. August 1996.

Golder, Dave. “L.A. Story.” SFX. March 1996.

Nathan, Ian. “Snake Charmer.” Empire. November 1996.

Shapiro. Marc. “Bad Man’s World.” Starlog. September 1996.

Escape from New York

John Carpenter is one of those rare filmmakers that entertains while also trying to say something about the society in which we live in. It is a tough balancing act that few can maintain but Carpenter's films make it look easy. From the special effects opus/remake drenched in paranoia of The Thing (1982) to the two-fisted diatribe against Reaganomics of They Live (1988), he hasn't been afraid to sandwich a thought-provoking message in between action sequences. In this respect, his films are much more than genre pictures; rather they critique the problems of contemporary society. And for its time, Escape From New York (1981) was no different. Carpenter's film examined the validity of the Presidency and the increase of crime and disguised it as a slick, futuristic race against time that was very prescient, going on to influence similarly-minded and looking films for years, including a fascinating sub-genre of Italian rip-offs.

Escape From New York is set in 1997 (?!) and crime in the United States has gotten so bad that Manhattan Island in New York City has become a maximum security prison with one simple rule: "Once you go in, you don't come out." One night, the President's plane is taken over by terrorists who crash it into the prison. The President escapes but quickly becomes a prisoner of the inmates led by the Duke (Isaac Hayes). It seems that the President is carrying a vital piece of information that is to be delivered to a historical summit in Hartford. Enter Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), an ex-soldier, now legendary fugitive who has been captured by the government and is scheduled to be transferred into the prison. Instead, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) offers him a deal: go into the prison, find the President, and bring him and the information back in exchange for a full pardon. Sounds easy, right? There's a catch: Snake only has 22 hours to do all this because by then the conference will be over and the world will be thrown into chaos. As an incentive he has two explosive charges lodged in his neck to keep him focused on the task at hand. And with this enticing opening, the film kicks into high gear as Snake enters the world's most dangerous prison to find the President and save the world.

Carpenter had just made Dark Star (1974) and no one wanted to hire him as a director so he shifted his focus to screenwriting. Inspired by the Charles Bronson film Death Wish (1974), Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay in 1974. He didn’t agree with the film’s philosophy but liked how it conveyed “the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make an SF film along these lines. He was also influenced by the Watergate scandal. "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the President. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it" because the general feeling was that “it was too violent, too scary, too weird.” And so the director went on to do other films with the intention of making Escape later. After the successes of Halloween (1978) and The Fog (1980), Carpenter was in a position to make a motion picture with a big budget. He decided to revive his Escape script. But something seemed to be missing. "This was basically a straight action film. And at one point I realized it really doesn't have this kind of crazy humor that people from New York would expect to see." So, he brought in Nick Castle, a friend from his film school days at University of Southern California. Castle invented the Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) character and came up with the film's humorous conclusion that offset the bleak tone of the film with a skewed sense of satire.

The film's setting proved to be another potential problem for Carpenter. It is apocalyptic in tone: a decaying, semi-destroyed version of New York City. How could Carpenter create this world on only a budget of $6 million (his biggest at the time)? As fate would have it, in 1977 there was a big fire in St. Louis that burnt out several blocks of the downtown area. Carpenter and his crew convinced the city to shut off the electricity to these blocks at night and then proceeded to transform the burnt out remains into a New York City of the future. They even found an exact replica of Grand Central Station that was deserted and unused. It was a tough, demanding shoot that Carpenter had never experienced before. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the Sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going the Sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange." This approach paid off, creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere of a futuristic film noir.

In addition, Carpenter shot parts of the film in Los Angeles and New York City. He and his film company were the first ones ever to be allowed to shoot on Liberty Island, at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let Carpenter have free run of the entire island. He remembers, “We were lucky. It wasn’t easy to get that initial permission. They’d had a bombing three months earlier, and were worried about trouble.” With Escape, the director created two distinct looks: “one is the police state, high tech, lots of neon, a United States dominated by underground computers. That was easy to shoot compared to the Manhattan Island prison sequences, which had few lights, mainly torch lights, like feudal England.”

The heart of Escape From New York lies in its main character: Snake Plissken. His cynical, world-weary attitude flies in the face of the earnest authorities who send him off to the save the world. Snake could care less. All that matters to him is "the next 60 seconds," as Kurt Russell commented in an interview. "Living for exactly that next minute is all there is." It is this kind of intensity that makes Snake such an interesting character. He is the ideal anti-hero ¬– intent on getting the job done and content on being left alone. Snake doesn't need anyone. Russell's performance clearly echoes Clint Eastwood's style of acting – the strong, silent type. Snake is a clever hybrid of The Man With No Name and Dirty Harry. It is an amusing riff on Eastwood's two most famous characters, which is only reinforced by the appearance of Lee Van Cleef (who appeared in a few films opposite Eastwood). It is to Russell's credit that he makes Snake a character you want to root for, that you want to see win at the end. There is something charismatic about Snake that makes you automatically want to like him. What is so great about the character is that Carpenter and co-screenwriter Nick Castle remain true to him throughout. They don’t saddle him with a love interest or dilute his intensity by having him crack the occasional joke. Snake remains an unrepentant badass, the proverbial fly in the ointment with a surly disregard for authority right up to the last shot of the film.

And to think that the studio did not want Carpenter to cast Russell in the role. Up until then the actor had done a string of Disney films as a youth and worked with Carpenter on a T.V. movie about Elvis Presley. The studio did not see Russell as a tough action hero. In fact, Charles Bronson expressed an interest in playing Snake (Tommy Lee Jones was also considered). However, by Carpenter’s own admission, “I was afraid of working with him. He was a big star and I was this little-shit nobody.” Fortunately, the filmmaker had faith in Russell and Escape From New York continued a long-standing relationship between the two men – both personal and professional – that continues to this day.

Escape From New York also features a strong supporting cast of character actors like veteran thespian Harry Dean Stanton as Brain, the smartest man in the prison, and Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, a hack who stayed in New York even after it changed into a prison. Let’s not forget Adrienne Barbeau as the Brain’s girlfriend Maggie and yet she is anything but that, as the talented actress plays her character as the tough-minded female equivalent of Snake. The film contains an eccentric assortment of characters each of who get their moment to shine and this only enhances the enjoyment of watching Escape. One of the best things about it is how these characters interact with Snake and how he views them. The supporting cast also fleshes out more of this fascinating world. They continually offer all sorts of tantalizing tidbits that allude to Snake's colorful past, to conditions in the prison and how the inmates have created their own world.

Of interest to fans of Escape From New York is a ten-minute sequence that was cut early on. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, in order to utilize their futuristic-looking rapid transit system, it shows Snake robbing a federal facility in the desert and getting caught, which explained why he was being sent to New York City. However, test audiences didn’t like it and Carpenter took the sequence out. He said, “I had high hopes for this sequence – it was an introduction to the world and an introduction to the characters. Unfortunately, the audience didn’t care for it.” In retrospect, this scene may have over-explained what was later alluded to in the initial conversation between Snake and Hauk but it does offer even more, albeit brief, tantalizing glimpses of the world that exists outside of the prison.

Escape from New York received mostly positive reviews when it was released. Newsweek magazine felt that Carpenter had 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.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “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.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "[The film] 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." However, the Chicago Reader’s Dave Kehr felt that the film, “fails to satisfy–it gives us too little of too much.”

First and foremost Escape From New York is a fast-paced action film that is never dull to watch. However, the film also contains a dark, satirical edge that never falters, even right up to the film's conclusion. One the most frustrating problems of most films are how they end. No one seems to know how to end a film without relying on tried and true clichés. Carpenter's film does not fall into this trap. Escape may be an action film but it also makes some very interesting comments about crime in the United States that are still relevant even today. One could argue that Carpenter's film is almost intended to be a warning. That if things get any worse, the world that is depicted in this film isn't that far off. It is these sobering thoughts that make Escape From New York as powerful and entertaining today as it was when it first hit the screens in 1981.

SOURCES

Boulenger, Gilles. John Carpenter: The Prince of Darkness. Silman-James Press. 2001.

Hogan, Richard. “Kurt Russell Rides a New Wave in Escape Film.” Circus. 1980.

Maronie, Samuel J. “On the Set with Escape from New York.” Starlog. April 1981.

Maronie, Samuel J. “From Forbidden Planet to Escape from New York: A Candid Conversation with SFX and Production Designer Joe Alves.” Starlog. May 1981.

Osborne, Robert. “On Location.” The Hollywood Reporter. October 24, 1980.

Yakir, Dan. “Escape Gives Us Liberty.” The New York Times. October 4, 1980.