Escape from New York

REVIEW
Danger After Dark: 4 Stars
“Call me Snake…” John Carpenter’s place in genre cinema history is assured though the quintet of films he directed during his 1976-82 career peak: Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and of course, Escape From New York, a futuristic action classic (well, 1997 was the future back in ’81, remember…) which has gone on to become a cult favorite that really should be Carpenter’s singular greatest influence on American pop culture (alas, Snake has been bested by a sociopath with a big knife and a William Shatner mask). Now MGM has reissued Escape in a special-edition DVD with two commentary tracks (the Carpenter-Kurt Russell audio commentary has already been cited as a classic) and the full deleted opening sequence illustrating how Snake arrived in incarceration.
You all know the story by now—New York City has been walled off as a maximum security prison, and Snake (Russell) must infiltrate the burg to rescue the President (“President of what?”) amidst a coterie of convicts. So why has Escape not only endured, but perhaps even improved over the past two decades? Is it the urban-paranoia reactionary wish fulfillment fantasy involved in seeing NYC isolated and abandoned to the criminal element? Could it be that the film’s nightmarish view of metropolitan decay and isolation looks all too familiar to those of us who live in America’s big cities? Or is it just that the film has some of the greatest quotable action movie dialogue and the most memorable cast of any genre film of that decade: Russell, Adrienne Barbeau, Donald Pleasance, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef (!), Harry Dean Stanton (!!), and Isaac Hayes (!!!). Whatever the reason, Escape from New York remains an essential addition to any genre film buff’s library, and it makes a great future apocalypse double-bill with The Omega Man.