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Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton,
Adrienne Barbeau
Writer:
John Carpenter, Nick Castle
If anything qualifies as "guilty pleasure," surely it's John Carpenter's
Escape From New York. I mean, there really isn't too much redeeming
value to the movie. There's a hokey post-apocalyptic premise. There's
"special" effects that make my daughter's Legos look real. And acting
that's so overboard, you could've named a movie after it (which Kurt Russell
eventually did).
But, man, what fun!
It's the year 1997, and crime has risen so heavily, the government decided
to just wall off New York city and make it a maximum security prison. Well,
remember the movie was made in the '80s, so 1997 did seem a long way off
back then.
For some strange reason, the President decides to fly over the prison and crash
land there. Of course, he does so while on his way to the most important
peace conference in the history of the world. (Is the American electorate really
this stupid?) Since most trips into New York are one-way, it takes the
likes of Snake Plissken to bust Mr. President out.
It's all so cheesy, so lame, so hokey, you can't enjoy Escape
From New York unless you take it as tongue-in-cheek as Carpenter
and crew did. Not exactly a spoof, but sort of a
wink-wink-nudge-nudge elbow-in-the-side of the action hero.
Unfortunately some of the guilty pleasure behind this hilarious movie
gets tainted by the poor quality of the DVD. This is probably the worse
anamorphic transfer I've yet seen - no visible compression artifacts, but
one horrible looking picture anyway. The darks are way too dark, and
the colors just aren't there. And the focus is so blurry in
places, I had trouble seeing the characters' faces. What a disappointment!
And while it's nowhere near as disastrous as the image quality, the
soundtrack's still nothing to write home about. A basic Pro Logic
surround encoding, it worked well with Carpenter's funky techno music,
but the dialogue ended up a bit spotty here and there.
MGM really lagged at getting this movie onto DVD. And to be honest,
I expected at least a 5.1 surround remix. I don't know what took
so long in creating a bare-bones disc like this---and one that looks
so bad. Okay, it's not a total loss, with a good movie and an anamorphic
transfer. But unless the price hits rock bottom on this baby, I
can only say to rent it and hope that MGM decides on a redo before
the world really does come to an end.
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