ESCAPE FROM L. A.
                       A film review by Scott Renshaw
                        Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw

Starring:  John Carpenter, Stacy Keach, George Corraface, A. J. Langer,
Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson, Valeria Golino, Peter Fonda, Pam Grier.
Screenplay:  John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Kurt Russell.
Director:  John Carpenter.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

     "Snake is Back" proclaim the posters for ESCAPE FROM L. A., and from
multiplexes across the nation, I can hear the answering cry of, "Who?"
Let's face it, this isn't exactly Indiana Jones we're talking about --
Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken last graced theater screens fifteen years
ago in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, when a significant percentage of today's
action film audience was somewhere between puberty and mastering solid
food, and that film was not what one would call a classic of the genre.
But Russell is a born again action hero after the success of STARGATE and
EXECUTIVE DECISION, so he has once again donned the eye-patch (as well as
the titles of co-writer and co-producer) for another futuristic adventure.
The result is an attempt at self-satire which comes off as a tiresome
exercise in pyrotechnics and cheap blue screen effects.

     In ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Snake was forced to rescue the President of
the United States after Air Force 1 crashes inside a prison colony which
once was Manhattan.  This time around, the location is Los Angeles, broken
off from the continent after a massive earthquake and turned into a
dumping round for undesirables by a morally authoritarian President (Cliff
Robertson).  But it isn't the president Snake needs to find; instead, it
is the First Daughter (A. J. Langer), who has stolen an experimental
weapon in an act of defiance.  She intends to bring it to Cuervo Jones
(George Corraface), an international criminal who rules Los Angeles and
plans to invade the U.S.  Snake is made an offer he can't refuse:  bring
back the weapon in ten hours, or die of a designer virus introduced into
his blood.

     It is a good thing Carpenter, Russell and company waited so long
between NEW YORK and L. A., because even those who actually saw the first
film probably have forgotten enough not to notice that ESCAPE FROM L. A.
is virtually a point-for-point remake of the original.  In New York, Snake
meets Brain (Harry Dean Stanton), a former running buddy who once left
Snake high and dry and whom Snake insists on calling by his real name; in
L. A., Snake meets Hershe (Pam Grier), a transsexual former running buddy
who once left Snake high and dry and whom Snake insists on calling by
his/her real name.  NEW YORK had snake on a time clock before something
introduced into his body kills him; ditto for L. A.  Both find Snake
chatting with a sympathetic woman who is promptly blown away, and both find
snake in an athletic contest for the amusement of the villains.  The
number of duplicated details is quite astonishing, actually.  At least
everyone involved did their homework.

     The twist they try to place on ESCAPE FROM L. A. is that it is
supposed to be funnier, almost a parody of the original.  I say "supposed
to" because John Carpenter may be one of the most humorless directors of
the last twenty years, taking even bizarre material like BIG TROUBLE IN
LITTLE CHINA and deadening it with his brooding style.  His idea of a joke
in ESCAPE FROM L. A. is showing every possible Southern California
landmark (Hey, it's Universal Studios!...Hey, it's the Queen Mary!) or
making a quick reference to every possible stereotype of Los Angeles
living, and to show that he isn't taking anything seriously with some
low-tech special effects, including a computer-generated submarine voyage
which makes TRON look positively state-of-the-art.  A few of the gags are
clever, like a shot at L. A.'s front-running sports fans; others can't
find a comfortable place between gruesome and silly, like a gang of
cosmetic surgery victims always in search of fresh body parts.  ESCAPE
FROM NEW YORK was overly somber, but it was lean and efficient and quite
good at creating its desolate urban landscape.  ESCAPE FROM L. A. finds
Carpenter making scattershot attempts at humor, and the experience is like
being tickled by a robot.

     There are a few simple pleasures to be found in the performances,
including Kurt Russell's laconic Snake.  It's one of the best (if
unintentional) jokes that despite the fact that everyone in the world
seems to know who Snake Plissken is, he has probably been able to escape
capture because he has no discernible personality.  Russell does a guttural
Clint Eastwood impression, and makes a solid anti-hero.  Steve Buscemi
also has fun as Cuervo's sniveling assistant Maps-of-the-Stars'-Homes
Eddie, and Bruce Campbell makes an almost unrecognizable appearance as the
Surgeon General of Beverly Hills.  Mostly, though, ESCAPE FROM L. A. is a
collection of fragments and missed opportunities where it is expected that
a multitude of sins will be hidden by big fireballs (motorcycles tend to
explode as though hit by nuclear warheads upon contact with the ground in
a John Carpenter film).  Snake may be back, but he doesn't have much to
say, and what he does have to say has been said before.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 California splits:  3.

--
Scott Renshaw 
Stanford University
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw

                               ESCAPE FROM L.A.
                       A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
                        Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp


CAPSULE: A giddy, wild sci-fi farce that keys in on a ROBOCOP-style view of
the future and contains more laughs than you might expect.

The original ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was a halfway-serious futuristic thriller
that turned Manhattan Island into a giant maximum security prison, and then
dumped the President of the United States into it. To rescue him, we had
one-eyed Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, who up until then had a roster
mostly of Disney movies), and the combination of fairly unique ingredients
made the movie a long-standing pulp-SF-and-fratboy favorite.

ESCAPE FROM L.A. is not simply a sequel, but a sly self-parody that has
endless fun inverting the same conventions it seems born to exploit. There
are some scenes that are just impossible to take straight: how about Peter
Fonda teaching Snake how to catch a tube in what looks like the
post-apocalypse version of Big Sur? Or a basketball game to the death? Or a
plastic surgery clinic filled with Beverly Hills zombies?

The plot is the thinnest of excuses onto which to graft one weirdly
hilarious sequence after another. The President (a far-right lunatic)
drafts Plissken for a mission: rescue his daughter, who's absconded with
the control block for a doomsday device. She's hijacked Air Force Three and
sent it screaming right into the heart of L.A. -- which in this world, has
not only been forcibly seperated from the rest of the country by an
earthquake, but is a dumping ground for "undesirables" (i.e., anyone who
would look even slightly out of place in a Norman Rockwell painting). You
have the choice of deportation or electrocution at the border. They also
have a nifty little coercion for Snake: a fast-breeding disease that will
kill him in eight hours unless he gets back to them with the goods. Nice of
them to think of everything.

We're in overdrive right from the start. Snake is jammed into a one-man sub
and shot at L.A., and skims across all manner of submerged and trashed
landmarks. If you live in the area, you're guaranteed a few laughs at
seeing your least favorite eyesores in ruins. (The biggest eyesore of all
is at the very end of the movie, along with a line of dialogue that will
convulse all comers. I am not ruining that one.)

EFLA is almost like a slightly bigger-budgeted version of the kinds of SF
movies that used to come out more often, like REPO MAN and ANDROID. While
EFLA isn't nearly as much of a real cult item as the former or as
emotionally involving as the latter, it's nice to see that John Carpenter
still has a good soupcon of the anarchist/indie-producer spirit in him. The
last scene in the movie should be a clear indication of that -- it leaves
us wide open for endless possibilities. Like, say, ESCAPE FROM PLANET
EARTH. Heh heh heh.

Three out of four eyepatches.
____________________________________________________________________________
syegul@ix.netcom.com                                       EFNet IRC: GinRei
http://serdar.home.ml.org                          another worldly device...
____________________________________________________________________________

Escape from L.A. (1996)

Starring Kurt Russell, A.J. Langer, Steve Buscemi, Georges Corraface,
Pam Grier, and Cliff Robertson.

Review by Laurence Mixson (jarls@datasync.com)

** out of ****

Escape from L.A. is like a xerox copy of something. When viewed at a
distance, or by people who haven't seen the original, it looks okay. But
when examined close-up by those who dealt with the first one, the flaws
and imperfections are gaping.

Escape from L.A. follows the return of Snake Plissken, who Kurt Russell
first brought to the screen 16 years ago in Escape from New York. Back
then, Kurt was trying to break away from his Disney-status in a raw,
unconvential film, directed and written by one of my favorite
directors(if you're a regular reader of my reviews, you'll know, my
favorite directors are Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, John Carpenter,
James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Speilberg, and Kevin Smith.) 

Snake Plissken is the classic anti-hero, a guy who breaks the rules but
won't kill innocent people and eventually winds up going on heroic
missions. His two distinguishing features are his eye-patch and the
snake tattoo on his chest. Oh yeah, and those cool threads: black combat
boots, tight leather pants and a vest. As a matter of fact, he's kind of
like a biker, only smaller and with less hair. And no hawg.

Escape from New York took place in 1997, when Manhatten Island had been
turned into a maximum security prison where all of the US criminals were
dropped. Snake, a recently-convicted criminal headed for New York, opted
to go in and save the President, who had been kidnapped after an
emergency landing there, in return for a full pardon. Then again, he
didn't have much of a choice. The doctors implanted him with a poison
before he went that would detonate in a certain time period, and only
administered the antidote until he had safely rescued the President.
What set the film apart back then was that it wasn't your typical action
flick. Shot on grungy sets with B-lists stars and a relatively low
budget, it had a grainy, film-noir feel to it. Unfortunately, Escape
from L.A. doesn't try too hard to recapture that feeling.

Like I said earlier, Escape from L.A. is like a copy of Escape from
N.Y., right down to the plot. Except this time, it's set in the year
2013, when an earthquake has seperated L.A. from the rest of California.
For some reason or another, L.A. has also been turned into a huge
dumping bin for America's scuzziest criminals. Also, America isn't the
America we know and love anymore; it's now a virtual dictatorship, run
by a President-for-Life(Robertson), who oversees the US in an amusing
extreme-right wing fashion: There's now no cursing, drinking, smoking,
violence, red meat, etc. 

It turns out that the President's daughter, Utopia(Langer)has helped
hi-jacked Air Force 3 and crashed it in L.A., and is holding The
Doomsday Device, which, with one press, will shut down all of the
earth's power. So the government thinks to itself, "Hmm, we need someone
who can go in, get the device, and get back out. Let's see, Plissken did
the same exact thing in New York 16 years earlier, so why don't we use
him?" Fortunately for the government, and the plot of this movie, Snake
Plissken has committed some sort of crime and can, in return for a full
pardon, go in and attempt to get the Doomsday Device and the President's
daughter(so the President, a real strict parent, can execute her). Of
course, they've once again injected him with a virus. And bad
one-liners.

Anyway, the movie never picks up, even when Snake hits L.A. It looks a
lot like New York, only the buildings are shorter. And they're more
people. And, for some reason, the special effects are really, really
bad. You'd think with a big release like this, they'd give it a decent
FX budget. Of course, knowing John Carpenter, he could be using the bad
FX to give the movie a more campy feel, which it definitely revels in.
But if that's what he intended, it sure doesn't work. 

Not that this movie is totally bad. I did give it **. There are lots of
amusements and high points. Like, for example, at the L.A. Deportation
Center, where people who are going to be sent to L.A. have the option of
being electrocuted instead. Or the scene in which Snake is kidnapped to
be the donor of parts to people who've had one plastic-surgery too
many(this scene has Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead film in a cameo as a mad
doctor). Steve Bescumi is good in his role as Map-to-the-Stars Eddie, as
is Pam Grier, playing a trannsexual who Snake used to hang out with and
was called Carjack. Now he, uh she, uh, IT is known as Hershe Las
Palmas. It's just too bad that these few small moments of humor and
wittiness don't make up for the serious defaults this movie has, like a
boring villain named Cuervo Jones(Corraface), bad FX, and a horrible
ending that not only rips off the first one, but does it poorly and
carries it on WAY too long. Plus there's that feeling I kept getting
while watching it that I was basically watching the 1981 movie, except
with a few plot changes and a general dumbing-down of the script.  

I do save a little hope for this series, however. A line that's been
used both in the ads for Escape from L.A. and in the movie itself is,
"He survived Cincinatti. He escaped from New York. Now he must
face...L.A." I seriously hope this is hinting at sequel set in
Cincinatti BEFORE Escape from New York. Because I know that, just like
Chasing Amy did with Kevin Scott's New Jersey trilogy, the third film
can overcome the deficiencies of the second film and recapture the magic
from the first.