Everyone’s in peak form for this treasurable pop entertainment, a paradigm of pulp movie making. Even writer/director John Carpenter’s typically repetitive score feels right on target. Made for a relative pittance (six mill), the tight budget undoubtedly helped rather than hurt, triggering imagination & vitality, with wit & charm in its playful scale-model trickery and proudly low-tech effects. It’s 1997 (NOW as the screen tells us) and much decorated/now disgraced military vet Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell in excelsis) is about to start a sentence in Manhattan’s top-security prison facility . . . it’s the entire island! Once you’re on it, you never get off. Only possibility, POTUS Donald Pleasence (the real 1997 saw Bill Clinton in office) has just ejected from a hijacked plane* and landed inside the island prison. Snake’s mission: Save the Prez and get-out-of-jail-free. The rest, a series of escapes from vicious gangs and death traps with tasty co-stars like Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau joining in the hunt. All ridiculously satisfying.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *That terrorist commandeered plane weirdly prescient of 9/11.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Scroll three posts down to ROAD HOUSE and LINK to a NYTimes discussion of ‘good’ bad films. Check the Comments in that article and you’ll find ESCAPE mentioned again and again as the ‘perfect’ Good Bad movie. What are these people thinking? There’s nothing Bad about this quirky masterpiece. Bad because it has a small budget? Bad because it’s an actioner? Because it’s genre? Because the F/X is fanciful? Similarly, ESCAPE is also no Guilty Pleasure. What’s to be Guilty about a minor masterpiece built out of distressed materials? More like a miracle; a miracle of moxie.
DOUBLE-BILL: In a lesson Hollywood never seems to learn, ESCAPE FROM L.A./’96 cost ten times as much and was about a third as good.
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