August 9, 1996

John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM L.A. is a movie that I still like, but (kind of like THE FRIGHTENERS) not as much as I did at the time. Come to think of it maybe part of that was that Carpenter had been, up to that point, almost entirely a video experience for me. When I saw BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in the theater I was too young to be aware of who the director was. ESCAPE FROM L.A. was the first time I was purposely watching a John Carpenter film on the big screen, excited to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, his theme music blasting through the then-state-of-the-art THX sound system.

But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.

Okay, the c.g. complaint, I still get that. There are shots that look bad for the time, and that was 30 years ago. On the other hand, I’d guess it’s around 30 seconds of screen time, and lit murkily enough that it doesn’t look as shiny and ridiculous as most of the similarly budgeted stuff from the same era. One of those shots is underwater at night. What I found interesting on this viewing was that as the movie ages it looks and feels much more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK than it seemed to at the time, when it felt too current. The arc of time is starting to merge them.

The concessions to 1996 studio filmmaking are, in my opinion, small. The main one is that it has an alternative/industrial rock type soundtrack featuring Stabbing Westward, Tool, Butthole Surfers, Sugar Ray, Ministry, Deftones, others. Somehow Tori Amos is on there? I have no clue where. The only one I remembered was “The One” by Rob Zombie, because it plays during the end credits and we used to fight over who got to clean that theater. I correctly remembered the lyrics “run baby run baby run away, run baby run escape L.A.,” but in my memories it had a more ass-kicking guitar riff.

The other songs are buried, playing briefly from cars shooting at each other on Mulholland Drive, for example. They’re not intrusive at all. To me the musical experience of the movie is the score by Carpenter in collaboration with Shirley Walker, the composer of Batman: The Animated Series. I bought the CD at the time, still listen to it and think it ranks high among his musical works. The original synth theme for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a classic, and the more rockin remake here with drums and guitars is too. I also like the idea of the score getting bigger and more orchestral as the movie goes along, though admittedly I prefer the more stripped down, electronic/industrial sounding themes.

Part of why I enjoy this is that it’s such a can’t-miss format: stoic badass outlaw is brought in by the authorities to go on a dangerous mission, he tells them to fuck off, they force him to do it anyway, he suits up with a bunch of weapons, goes in in a mini-submarine, succeeds (and uses the various weapons) and then finds a bigger and better way to tell them to fuck off. With Russell being fifteen years more weathered than the first time he played Snake Plissken he does an even better Clint Eastwood, and the addition of a leather duster doesn’t hurt. Even before we see him we get to hear him talked about on the news as “the most notorious outlaw in United States history,” convicted of 27 moral crimes.

I forgot that the script is credited to Carpenter, Debra Hill and Russell. His only writing credit! I dug out my July ’96 issue of Cinefantastique, where Hill explains that the plan was for Carpenter to write it, but during story conferences he’d say, “Well, why don’t you write this scene? You know, it’s your idea,” and “Then Kurt would go off, come up with ideas and come back with like ten pages of scenes and dialogue and stuff like that. John, at some points, worked as an editor to basically put it all together… Kurt and I enhanced it or helped him focus in on some scenes that he didn’t write.”

The future satire they came up with is pretty good shit. The Big One separated a chunk of L.A. from the mainland, theocratic president Cliff Robertson (RENAISSANCE MAN) declared it a punishment from God and walled off L.A. as a place to deport people for “moral crimes.” So instead of dangerous criminals like in the first one these are “people undesirable or unfit to live in the new moral America,” also described as “prostitutes, atheists, runaways… trash.” I personally don’t think the idea of a right wing government banning red meat ever made sense (our most supposedly health conscious fascist RFK Jr. famously eats roadkill), but otherwise this enforced-so-called-morality that seemed like it was looking back at the Reagan ‘80s does sadly seem kinda like what we have today.

The part that really jumped out at me this time is the United States Police Force, formed because, as narrator Kathleen Blanchard tells us, Los Angeles was “ravaged by crime and immorality.” They are described as an army, they drive tanks, they guard around the island to make sure deported Americans can never come back. Of course, the media sides with them to the point that you watch Prime News on “Police Channel,” taped by a circle of cops holding cameras. Literally their perspective.

In sort of a Patti Hearst type move, the president’s daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS) has turned revolutionary and stolen a super weapon called The Sword of Damocles before her dad could use it to disable the electronics in all the other countries. She’s gone to L.A. to give it to her boyfriend, the Peruvian militant Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY), who is organizing a united third world attack on the U.S.

They tell Snake they’ve infected him with a designer virus that will kill him in ten hours unless he retrieves the device and kills Utopia. During this introduction there are many great moments, but my favorites are when Snake disgustedly asks the president of the United States who he is and when he asks his handlers if they’ll be the ones administering the antidote and the moment they say no he sprays them with a machine gun. They turn out to be holograms, but it was worth a try.

As in the original he has to travel across the landscape, meet a series of colorful characters, have some close calls. I like how the type of street people you’d see in ‘80s movies about Hollywood Boulevard are now hanging out in a wasteland of rubble. He briefly encounters a skinhead who I don’t think I ever realized was Robert Carradine (ORCA). He steals a motorcycle and climbs across vehicles in a parade like a guy in a western would a train or a stagecoach. He wins a gunfight dishonorably. He gets abducted by Cuervo’s men and dragged right past some gladiatorial combat to the more deadly spectacle of a timed basketball shooting game to the death. 10 second shot clock, can’t miss a shot, any wrong move you get executed, no 3-pointers, make 10 points. Though Snake doesn’t dribble so well he improbably makes every shot and wins. I’d love to see him in a one-on-one with ALIEN: RESURRECTION era Ripley. Or Prince. Or Bugs Bunny.

There’s a rule that if it’s the ‘90s and you’re making a cool, bigger budget part 2 about a grimacing badass gunfighter who doesn’t talk that much, you gotta get Steve Buscemi in there to do some jibber-jabbering on the side. I thought his Maps to the Stars Eddie was kind of the same as his character in DESPERADO, so I forgot he’d be less trustworthy. Snake also meets Taslima (Valeria Golino, BIG TOP PEE-WEE), a tough lady deported for being a Muslim. She seems like a good female lead until she gets sniped out of nowhere half a second after saying L.A. isn’t so bad.

My wife complains that “there’s always gotta be a cult” in post apocalypse movies and shows, but this has a funny version of that trope when the hooded figures turn out to be Mar-a-Lago-faced rich people (special makeup effects: Rick Baker) abducting subjects for the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell, MANIAC COP 2) to pirate fresh body parts from. That’s another thing people were mad about in ’96: we were so excited for Bruce Campbell to be in this and when it turned out to be just one scene where he doesn’t do any Ash type humor some people couldn’t get over it. Seems so silly now.

The other icon we were excited for was Pam Grier, trying to make up for the disappointment of ORIGINAL GANGSTAS earlier in the summer. It had been three years since her previous movie, which was POSSE, and of course this was the year before JACKIE BROWN, so her being in a John Carpenter movie was an event. I was a little nervous to revisit because I remembered her character Hershe was trans, with a lowered voice and Snake having previously known her as a man named Carjack Malone. Okay, Hershe’s trans-ness is definitely supposed to be weird, and I’m suddenly realizing that her name is a play on feminine pronouns, but I think for ’96 she’s not too offensive. Snake doesn’t really give a fuck about the change, she is a capable character, we’re supposed to like her, and I do. Snake does dead name her once, but not maliciously, and she corrects him.

As I alluded to earlier, and as the poster proudly displays, there’s a part where Snake surfs. He’s with with Pipeline (Peter Fonda, DON’T LOOK BACK) when a tsunami hits, so he hops on, and he’s a natural at it. To me it plays like he’s never done it before but he’s just so capable he figures out how to do it. The wave carries him right next to Maps to the Stars Eddie, driving a convertible, looking over at him in disbelief. Then Snake jumps onto his car. The whole thing looks goofy like something out of SIN CITY, but because Snake is so serious it plays as deadpan. I’m sorry, I love it.

To me the movie gets a little tiresome as it builds to the climax. I like the idea that Disneyland (under new management and renamed Happy Kingdom By the Sea) still exists and is the location of a gang battle, but both legality and budget prevent them from making a very convincing post-earthquake Disneyland. That’s despite having BLADE RUNNER production designer Lawrence G. Paull building it on the Universal backlot. The idea of battling on gliders is cool, but what they’re able to do with that FX and stunt wise is fairly limited. (No disrespect to the great stunt coordinator Jeff Imada, who gets plenty of good stunts in here.)

You know, last time I saw this I didn’t know about Jamaa Fanaka’s STREET WARS (1991), which also has gangs flying over L.A. on gliders, not to mention a trans woman gang leader. I wonder if Carpenter knew about that movie? I can’t assume he did. Most people don’t.

I’m sorry to pick on a guy, but I think the #1 weakness of the movie is the casting of Corraface as Cuervo Jones. He’s not inept or anything but he just does not have the magnetism to make this a fun villain. He’s just a generic dude in a beret. I’ve seen this movie at least five or six times and I’ve seen an entire movie starring him as Christopher Columbus but there is zero chance I could pick him out in a lineup on purpose. Even without comparing him to Isaac Hayes as the King of New York in the first film, it’s just obvious that this needs to be a more entertaining character for the movie to really sing. I was thinking it was kinda surprising Danny Trejo wasn’t in the cast, and then I realized he would be one of the many people who could’ve greatly improved the movie by playing Cuervo.

Fortunately we do have President Robertson and his enforcer Commander Mac Malloy (Stacy Keach, ROAD GAMES) to focus our hatred toward. I like seeing Michelle Forbes as the stern Lieutenant Brazen – my wife knows her from Star Trek: The Next Generation but to me she’ll always be from Homicide: Life on the Street and KALIFORNIA. I noticed Paul Bartel in one shot. I noticed the late James Lew hanging around. I did not notice Breckin Meyer (who apparently plays one of the surfers).

The movie does recover from the muddled climax, because the ending is legendary. Snake is sympathetic toward Utopia, saves her life instead of killing her, and uses the device to turn off the world’s electricity. I don’t know if a protagonist has ever ended a movie on a bigger fuck you. Then he enjoys a cigarette. Pretty good movie, all things considered.

ESCAPE FROM L.A. is another movie that made less than its budget at the box office. There’s always gonna be people like me coming back to it, so I kinda doubt it lost money in the long run, but the conventional wisdom is that the box office failure stopped Carpenter from doing a third movie he’d discussed as ESCAPE FROM EARTH. I know that’s what he’s said, but to be honest, even if this had done AVATAR numbers I don’t know that he would’ve jumped to do another one. He gives exactly the same amount of fucks as Plissken, and that’s why we love him.

tie-ins:

Marvel Comics released a one-issue The Adventures of Snake Plissken comic, but that was way back in January, so maybe unrelated. It was set between ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and the Cleveland incident referenced as backstory in this movie.

An ESCAPE FROM L.A. video game was announced, but unfortunately cancelled. That would’ve been cool, or at least funny.

In 2000 McFarlane Toys’ ‘Movie Maniacs’ line released a figure of Snake from ESCAPE FROM L.A.

note: BASQUIAT also came out August 9th. I revisited that in 2024 and enjoyed it. It has since come out from Criterion, with a new black and white version (which I have not seen).