#ESCAPE FROM LA MAP HOW TO#

Somebody can fact-check me on that one.) Anyway, Snake blows some shit up and mows down a few hundred bad guys.

#ESCAPE FROM LA MAP HOW TO#

(Actually, I’m not 100% sure Snake knows how to write.

All the characters want to kill Snake, or at least manipulate him but our hero ends up either kicking ass or taking names. Ill-placed comedy aside, Plissken fans probably know exactly what to expect from Escape from L.A.: Russell mumble-growls a few one-liners so quietly it makes Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name sound like a Chatty Kathy doll. More than any other dated aspect for Escape from L.A., this one does. Grier’s character is a trans woman, a fact the filmmakers try to mine for wrongheaded laughs. (Of all Fonda’s many roles, this one is probably the most blatant riff of his iconic turn in Easy Rider.) Finally, Snake enlists the help of Hershe (Pam Grier), an old associate from his adventures in Cleveland. Pipeline (Peter Fonda) is a fried, middle-aged surfer-dude who’s handy to guide Snake to the right waves at just right time, brah. odyssey, we also meet Talisma (Valeria Golino), a savvy young woman who seems a smidge too helpful for a mumbly guy named Snake. His character is a hybrid of those street dudes who hand out fliers for strip clubs and the guy in prison who can get you a pack of smokes and a rock hammer.Īlong this L.A. Fail, and our hero is deader than disco.īasically, Carpenter uses that sprawling canvas to paint his dishwatery landscape, replete with an assortment of grimy, desperate lowlifes: Map the Stars Eddie (Steve Buscemi) is a wormy, high-strung gofer who, as his name unambiguously suggests, has a map every degenerate celebrity left in Hollywood.

Anyway, if Plissken retrieves said tech, he and his leather jacket go free. Cuervo has used the president’s daughter to get ahold of some lethal tech that…blah, blah, blah.

Turns out, the president’s daughter has defected to the cause of Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface), an activist-gangster who feels like a cross between Che Guevara and a Die Hard villain. Plissken can walk the Sunset Strip, the president has a proposal, because of course he does. As the film opens, ol’ Snake has been sentenced to the hellscape that is Ventura Boulevard.īefore Lt. (We’d never let that kinda thing happen in real life…would we?) This cruel president has decreed that Los Angeles become a cordoned gulag, where all the spiritually unfit and undesirable can wallow in the shambling Babylon that Hollywood built. It seems that our country is in the grips of a moral warlord (Cliff Robertson) who rules with the combined zeal of an oily televangelist and a ruthless autocrat. finds Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) as the prisoner of an American police state. Set sixteen years after Escape New York–and I’ll assume you’ve experienced that cult classic before venturing further into this review– L.A. I’ve never described a film as fragrant, but there it is. also bears some of the burden of its predecessor: As a macabre sci-fi comedy, Carpenter’s opus is eccentric, wearying, and much too scuzzy for its own good. In delivering a film so visually ripe, legendary director John Carpenter aims to deliver a world where the fruits of human depravity have ripened to the point of rotting. It’s as if “post-apocalyptic” simply means a future where no one showers.Īll that description essentially functions as both compliment and insult.

As each grimy, soot-stained scene crept along, I could almost smell burning tires, sweat, and frothy malt liquor. If it were possible for certain films to have an odor, Escape from L.A.

Escape from la map