Film Blog: Escape from L.A.

John Carpenter's "Escape from L.A." is one of the cheesiest movies I have ever seen, and I loved it!  There are so many cultural and movie references in Carpenter's film, I'm not sure if I even caught all of them - but the overload added a familiarity that made "Escape from L.A." thoroughly enjoyable despite the predictable plot and weak dialog.

Since moving to Los Angeles, I have a new appreciation for movies poking fun at the City of Angels - but I suppose I have that soft spot for movies about any place I've live ("Super Troopers" when I lived in Vermont; "Canadian Bacon" after living in Canada; and any number of movies about Boston.)

            The premise for this movie was typical many post-apocalyptic, disaster movies: The Big One had finally come, and for some reason this had turned society on-end causing the United States to turn into a dictator-military state, and Los Angeles to sink into the moral demise that it had always been heading towards.  I find this cultural stereotype interesting as my personal experience with Los Angeles is that most people are nice and accepting to a fault, or the most self-centered people I have ever met.  It seems to be a city of extremes, and I rarely find a middle ground.

There are a variety of other cultural stereotypes that this movie pokes fun at, from the brief foray into Beverly Hills - Bruce Campbell's cameo as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills nearly made me fall out of my seat laughing, as did the premise that the entire area had turned into a Frankenstein-esque laboratory, harvesting body parts to support the rich and famous as the cost of their extravagant plastic surgery had finally caught up with them.

Other L.A. references included the brief time in Koreatown; that one part of the 101 that is always backed up - even at the slowest of times; and even the short lived female side-kick whose "moral crime" was being Muslim in the mid-west (this movie was made before 911 and I can't help but of Caprenter's foreshadowing of future cultural-religious tensions).

I also couldn't help but notice the main villain, Cuervo Jones' (Georges Corraface) resemblance to Che Guevara, infamous South American revolutionary.  Jones, with the U.S.'s dictator/president's rebellious daughter in tow, acts out a combination Thunderdome and Roman coliseum, forcing our main hero, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) to play basketball for his life.  Of course (similar to Mad Max) no one has ever survived this challenge.  And of course, Russell does.  Not knowing what to do with this, Corraface orders him killed anyway (like any good villain) and so begins the last act of the movie, and the build to the climax of any good disaster movie: the chase to the end.

Of course everything works out, in a way.  The virus was a fake (obviously, it's stated several times and Russell has no apparent symptoms), and Russell manages to save the girl and the world by destroying technology and sending mankind back to a pre-technological society.  Lights out on the industrial era, and on any future for another in this series?  Or maybe Carpenter's next installment will include dinosaurs?