DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
“1997. New York City is a walled maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane. ” The ad for John Carpenter’s Escape From New York sets up the film’s premise perfectly and, on the way into the screening room, The Dauphin’s “I Love New York” button is met with knowing, ironic smiles.
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DRIVE-IN SATURDAY
What’s Green And Smells Like Pork?
Edouard Dauphin
“1997. New York City is a walled maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane. ” The ad for John Carpenter’s Escape From New York sets up the film’s premise perfectly and, on the way into the screening room, The Dauphin’s “I Love New York” button is met with knowing, ironic smiles. The publicists still frisk me down for weapons and explosives but I’m used to that.
Forget Frank Sinatra and Ed Koch —does anyone really love New York? Traveling to the movie, one has to endure 97 degrees heat, an airless subway car inhabited by Walkman body snatchers, the pleas of winos who look like a cross between Divine and Les Dudek and the screaming of a street crazy who sees a connection between the shooting of the Pope and the cancellation of The Toni Tennile Show
New York can be weird all right. But we who have been sentenced to live here like it in our own perverse ways . And so does John Carpenter, the director who found new uses for sharp instruments in Halloween and made us prefer dry ice to movies with The Fog. Carpenter
understands that living in New York means never having to say you’re sorry.
No apologies are needed with Escape, a brutal, funny comic strip of a movie that gives new meaning to the term “Urban Blight.” The Manhattan of 1997 isa desolate wasteland, peopled by psychopathic criminals who have turned the city’s skyscrapers into burned out shells and who prowl the streets with medieval weapons, stopping at nothing—and that includes cannibalism, jaywalking and liberating cases of Boy Howdy! from 7-Elevens before torching the entire store.
Into this penal Roach Motel (Inmates check in but they don’t check out.) crashlands the President of the United States, a pompous, lily-livered butterball played by Donald Pleasence. Since he is carrying a tape cassette vital to world survival (no, it’s not the new Iggy album), the government is anxious to rescue him. They enlist the services of Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a World War III hero facing a life sentence on Manhattan Island for a gold heist. With his sneer, tattooed chest and eye patch, Kurt’s come a long way from Disney epics like Superdad and The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit.
Before the Administration intervenes, Snake is only minutes away from his own imprisonment. Snarling his way through the central command post on Liberty Island, last stop before being dumped on Manhattan, he doesn’t even flinch when he sees the official sign that says: “You now have an option to terminate and be cremated on the premises. ” That’s funny—I saw the same sign over the front door of CBGB’s one time when Lester Bangs was playing there.
Snake is promised a pardon if he can deliver the Prez alive within 24 hours. To keep him honest, the authorities implant in his neck micro-explosives that will go off in one day unless medically neutralized. “That’s so you don’t decide to keep going,” says operations officer Lee Van Cleef, , “for instance, to Canada.” The CREEM contingent in the screening room laughed themselves silly at that one.
Snake pilots a super-glider onto the roof of the “old” World Trade Center and descends on foot to ground level Manhattan. He quickly learns the rules of the island: Anything goes. The real crazies live in the subway (nothing new there). And supreme power rests with the Duke of New York, a mad, sadistic baldy with a facial tic played by Mr. Hot Buttered Soul himself, Isaac Hayes.) Well, Isaac, anything’s better than guesting on Celebrity Secrets.
Isaaic is demanding amnesty for everyone in Manhattan in return for the Chief Executive, which is a bit like asking Russia to give up all its nuclear weapons in exchange for Ozzy Osbourne. Hoping to wrest the prexy out of the Duke’s clutches, Snake teams up with Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), an egghead demolitions expert who lives, natch', in the public library; Maggie, his girlfriend, played by Adrienne Barbeau, who packs a pretty good pair of bombs under her sweater; and Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) who proves that even if 1997 New York is a hellish nightmare, at least you can get a taxi.
What follows is stylish, outlandish and suspenseful, and while you may not care whether a tub o’lard U.S. president gets rescued (I certainly didn’t), you may find yourself rooting for Spake in his race against time. And marveling at how Adrienne can run around for an hour without popping out of her top. Talk about special effects.
See Escape From New York and watch for the sequel—Escape From The Windsor Tunnel.
