Escape From New York

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Mark Bubien reviews

Escape From New York
Distributed by
MGM

    Cover

  • Cert: R
  • Cat.no: 1001186
  • Running time: 99 minutes
  • Year: 1981
  • Pressing: 2000
  • Region(s): 1, NTSC
  • Chapters: 32 plus extras
  • Sound: Dolby Surround
  • Languages: English
  • Subtitles: Spanish, French
  • Widescreen: 2.35:1 (Side A), 1.33:1 (Side B)
  • 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
  • Macrovision: Yes
  • Disc Format: DVD 5
  • Price: $19.98
  • Extras: Theatrical Trailer

    Director:

      John Carpenter

    Cast:

      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.

FILM CONTENT
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS


OVERALL
Review copyright © Mark Bubien, 2000. E-mail Mark Bubien

Check out Mark’s homepage: www.storybytes.com.

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