It’s odd that two 80s cult classics got sequels/remakes in the 90s. As much as I love Terminator 2, it does revisit topics and scenes from the first one, perhaps too much for comfort. John Carpenter’s Escape from LA does the same, changing the setting from the gloomy New York to a now devastated, formerly sunny Los Angeles.

Snake Plissken is captured. Forced to rescue someone or die from an injected countdown macguffin. He meets “out there” stereotypical characters that may betray him. The ones that stick with him die in an explosion/ball of fire.

As Biff would say in Back to the Future 2: “there’s something very familiar about this”. Even the theme tune gets punched up, just like Brad Fiedel’s theme got a few nip and tucks here and there.

Strangely enough, I do love Escape from LA. A lot. It was the first John Carpenter movie I watched in the cinemas, as the previous ones either didn’t make it to Mexico or I got nixed at the entry. Even better: saw it for free on a premiere, thanks to a magazine in Mexico that gave away tickets. Shame I couldn’t keep the nifty courtesy ticket, it was pretty cool.

The effects are terrible, even for 90s standards. There’s too many leaps in logic, and Plissken only gets away due to the bumbling (or hubris) of the antagonists. But dang it, I had a ball with this movie. The score is great, and the soundtrack introduced me to Stabbing Westward with their sexy, doom-laden Dawn. It helps that the trailer had Snake being sassy as heck, while White Zombie’s The One blasts.

Kudos to John Carpenter. He never cared about box office and mostly did stuff for his own amusement. Sometimes people get his humour, like in They Live, sometimes it flies over their head. I love the social commentary and eerie political commentary acumen. He saw where we were going as a society.

-Sam J. Valdés López