ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996) (Scream Factory Collector's Edition Blu-ray Review)

JOHN CARPENTER'S ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996)

Label: Scream Factory
Region Code: A
Rating: R
Duration: 100 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, Steve Buscemi, Stacy Keach, Peter Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Valeria Golino, Pam Grier, Bruce Campbell, Georges Corraface, Michelle Forbes

Synopsis: Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) takes on Los Angeles after a 9.6 earthquake decimates the city. His job: wade through L.A.'s ruined landmarks to retrieve a doomsday device. Don't miss the excitement as Snake surfs Wilshire Blvd., shoots hoops at the Coliseum, dive bombs the Happy Kingdom theme park, and mixes it up with a wild assortment of friends and foes including Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Campbell, Peter Fonda, George Corraface, Cliff Robertson and Pam Grier. Escape from L.A. is a "go-for-broke action extravaganza" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)!

Back in '96 I was stoked for a re-teaming of director John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13) and actor Kurt Russell (Big Trouble in Little China), having been a big-time fan of their pairings in The Thing and Escape from New York (1981). At the time his film was released I was a bit out of touch with horror and had been more into arthouse and foreign films, I think I was of the mindset that 90's horror was a bit anemic and just couldn't compete (and I was right) with the stuff I grew up on in the late-70s and '80s. Sure, there were bright spots in the nineties with stuff like Richard Stanley's riff on Terminator with Hardware (1991) and it's follow-up Dust Devil (1992), but I hadn't yet seen Scream (1996) or Guillermo del Toro's Mimic (1997), the genre seemed stunted. I didn't dive headfirst back into horror until '99 when we got that sweet wave of millennial horror. That said, I was actually excited for this film, Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1994) just a few years earlier was awesome, and a the idea of re-teaming the director and actor to revive one of the coolest anti-heroes of the '80s was promising stuff, so I was at the theater the day this hit the cinema.

It was great to see Russell channeling the anti-authoritarian cool of Snake Plissken once more, but I would be lying if I didn't admit I was not only disappointed by film, I hated it. The main beef initially was how much of a slave it was to the original film, it hit all the same beats, it felt uninspired and lazy.

The other issue I had with it was how bad the digital effects were, and while most digital effects in movies were bad in the mid-to-late 90's these were bad even my the norms of the era. everything was too-cleanly rendered with no texturing or shading, with maybe the worst offender being when Snake takes a mini-sub for a spin from the mainland to the island of L.A., along the way skirting the submerged Universal Studios theme park where a shit-looking digital shark tries to take a bit out of Snake's sub, a clumsy nod to Jaws no doubt. The entire 5-min scene is digitally rendered and looks a bit worse that a first generation PlayStation cut scene. Then there's a scene of Snake surfing a tsunami down Wiltshire Boulevard and leaping onto a moving car, don't get me wrong, I love me some campy action but when combined with the bad digital FX and dated '90s aesthetic it just didn't come together in a very satisfying way.

The main baddie of the film is named Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface) who is basically a Che Guevara knock-off, who captures Snake and forces him to play a timed game of basketball to save his life ...WTF!?! Carpenter and his co-writers had fifteen years to come up with something cool and this is the best they could come up with?

Something I did enjoy was all the cool actors that show up in various roles, we have Steve Buescemi (Ghost World) as Map of the Star Eddie, Pam Grier (Foxy Brown) who completely wasted as transgender gang-leader Hershe Las Palmas, Cliff Robertson (Obsession) as a religious zealot POTUS, Peter Fonda (Easy Rider) as an aging apocalyptic surfer-dude, Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead 2) as The Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, plus Stacey Keach (Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke) as Commander Malloy. All of the characters are basically analogs for characters from the first film. It's fun in a 'hey, look who that is' sort of way but no one has got any meat on their plate, though Cambell's is probably my favorite of the bunch, appearing a deranged plastic-surgery doc, lampooning L.A. stereotypes with some cool make-up effects at least.

Like I said, I totally hated it the first time I saw it, and I still don't love it, but as I am getting soft with age it has grown on me a bit, but not a lot. It's still a trainwreck of a film that was lazily written and totally scarred by some bad digital effects. Even the 90's metal soundtrack, which at the time I liked quite a bit, featuring 90's stalwarts White Zombie, Toadies, Ministry and Butthole Surfers among others, sounds severely dated. Carpenter scored this one too but I couldn't even hum a bar of it for you right now after watching it twice today, other than to say it has more of a western They Live (1988) vibe than the original film, which is still an outstanding platter of synth driven atmosphere.

It's not great, but watching it today I did have fun with it, I've long let my hostilities toward it slide and can actually have a good time watching this and enjoying it in a 'let's get the band back together' sort of way. I don't think Plissken's dialogue (co-written by Kurt Russell) is that great, but I did love hearing Russell deliver his lines with that gravelly-cool inflection, and even Carpenter's typical anti-authoritarian themes are fun if ham-fistedly delivered.

   



Audio/Video: Escape from L.A. (1996) arrives on Collector's Edition Blu-ray from Scream Factory with a new 4K scan of the original camera negative, framed in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Originally landing on Blu-ray in 2010 from Paramount the new edition is a bit darker than the previous version, this probably being a bit more accurate to the theatrical than the slightly over-bright Paramount release, which exposed way too much of the digital FX. Grain throughout is filmic looking, the colors are nicely saturated, skin tones looks natural, and the blacks are solid, it's a good-looking scan. Pleasing fine detail comes through in clothing textures and the stubby facial features of our anti-hero, but the increased resolution also draws attention to the iffy
looking digital renderings, everything's a bit too smooth, there's no shading, the lighting is off, the less of it seen the better off. There's a screenshot comparison of the Paramount and Scream Factory releases at the bottom of this review. 

Audio comes by way of an English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with optional English subtitles. It's got some nice oomph too it. The dialogue and score are clean and crisply delivered with plenty of low-end, the John Carpenter score and 90's metal soundtrack (White Zombie, Butthole Surfers, Toadies, Ministry, Tool) sounds terrific.

Onto the extras I will start by saying I am disappointed we did not get a new commentary from Carpenter/Russell or an interview with either. I am sure Scream Factory attempted it, and Justin Beahm's Revered Entertainment offer up plenty of new bonus content for the fans. The special features kick-off with 'A Little Bit Off Beat – an interview with actor Stacy Keach' where the actor talks about working with producer Sandy King on Walter Hill's The Long Riders, before working of Body Bags (1993) with Carpenter, and then getting cast in Escape from L.A., describing Carpenter as a skilled technician who knew where to put the camera. He gets into his character Malloy and how he played it, as well as touching on his knee replacement surgery and the legacy of the film.

'Beverly Hills Workshed – an audio interview with Bruce Campbell' is a telephone interview with the Evil Dead star who talks about what it was like working with Carpenter, describing him as a bossy guy who knew what he wanted. He gets into his character The Surgeon general of Beverly Hills, and the Rick Baker make-up for the character which took five hours to apply, and the difficulty of removing it at the end of the day. He talks about working with Kurt Russell and how having been a child actor nothing fazed him, he was a mellow guy, and that he was straight forward. He also tells a fun story of how Russell's kid was a fan of the Evil Dead films, and how he requested that Campbell recite a flubbed line from it.

'Part of the Family – an interview with Peter Jason' is a 26-min interview with Peter Jason who begins with catching the acting bug in college, pursuing it as a career with the begrudging approval of his family. Getting cast in Rio Bravo (1959) without having to screen test, and being cast in Prince of Darkness (1987) after working with Sandy King on The Long Riders (1980), and then becoming part of the Carpenter family. He relays a story of working double-duty on Village of the Damned (1995) as an assistant caterer, dailies driver, baby wrangler, and second unit set and office P.A. after he expressed interest in being a producer to Carpenter, which set him straight from that career path in short order. He also talks about helping to get Russell's son Wyatt Russell (Overlord) a part in the film as a featured extra, he's a great storyteller and I love it when we get an interview with him.  
   

'Miss A Shot, Get A Shot – an interview with George Corraface' is a 15-min conversation with the bilingual actor of stage and screen who has worked on Greek, French, German and and Spanish films, and how that sort of drifting from one country to another probably worked against establishing himself as a more know actor at the time, but that he had great experiences working that way. He touches on working with Christopher Columbus on The Discovery, and describing the lively audition for Escape from L.A., and creating the character of Cuervo Jones, based on Che Guevara, and ending with his views on what the legacy of the film is.

'One Eye is Better Than None – an interview with special effects artist Jim McPherson' who begins by talking briefly about his background as a puppet sculptor, moving from the East Coast to the West, and working with Rick Baker, which is how he came to work on Escape from L.A., and how excited he was to work on a film featuring Peter Fonda and Pam Grier. He gets into some issues regarding wardrobe and make-up appliances on-set, and into the legacy of the film, and how the plastic surgery disaster make-up have held up.

Maybe the most interesting for me of all the extras was 'The Renderman – an interview with visual effects artist David Jones, who for 19-min gets into the creation of the digitally rendered special effects of the film, which are not well remembered by most fans, myself, included. He begins my telling how he went from Michigan to L.A., sleeping on the couch of his lawyer sister, and then landing a gig at Disney's Buena Vista Special Effects, who worked on this film. He's very candid saying that there was a bit too much digital stuff in it, that he wasn't as skilled as he is today, and how they don't really hold op all that well. He gets into the digital sub and the whole underwater sub-journey from the mainland to the island of L.A., and the surfing scene, admitting that they "overreached madly".

The disc is buttoned-up with a theatrical trailers, several TV spots and a gallery of stills, promotional images, lobby cards, press book and movie posters. 

  

Special Features:
- NEW 4K film scan from the original negative
- NEW A Little Bit Off Beat – an interview with actor Stacy Keach (8 min)
- NEW Beverly Hills Workshed – an audio interview with Bruce Campbell (9 min)
- NEW Part of the Family – an interview with Peter Jason (26 min)
- NEW Miss A Shot, Get A Shot – an interview with George Corraface (15 min)
- NEW One Eye is Better Than None – an interview with special effects artist Jim Mc Pherson (18 min)
- NEW The Renderman – an interview with visual effects artist David Jones (19 min)
- Theatrical Trailer (2 min)
- TV Spots (2 min)
- Still Gallery (8 min)

Escape From L.A. (1996) is not great watch but it has grown on me, and while I cannot give it a high recommend, I do give Scream Factory high marks for the transfer and the new extras, I am stoked to see it added to Scream Factory's Collector's Edition series, it's a fun bit of Carpenter junk food..

Top: Paramount Blu-ray (2010)

Bottom: Scream Factory (2020)