and I quickly saw that it had both John Carpenter and Kurt Russell named on the front cover. The movie in question was Escape from L.A. The cover featured a badass man in a black leather jacket with long hair and an eye patch. However, one afternoon I remember stopping after a different tape caught my eye. Even back then, I was an avid horror fan, so I often made a beeline right for that section. Put simply, it’s must-see stuff for fans of the director.When I was a kid, I remember going to the local video rental store every Friday and looking for a VHS to binge-watch over the weekend. Looking back at the “Escape” films, it’s impossible not to see the fingerprints of a real artist at work. In this era of overblown, CGI-enhanced Hollywood spectacle, Carpenter’s refreshingly stripped-down take on the modern action flick is a memento of a simpler time. It’s a fun bit of trivia for Carpenter heads (a category in which I will happily include myself) and it almost makes you want to go back and watch both films back-to-back. A point of comparison is also drawn between one of the original film’s more memorable supporting players - that would be the great Ernest Borgnine as the cheery, good-natured Cabby, a valet of sorts who takes a liking to Snake, and the fedora-wearing, fast-talking scumbag sidekick memorably embodied by a then-mostly-unknown Steve Buscemi in the sequel. Each film’s respective introduction to its vision of the dystopian future - ‘New York’ was released in 1981 with its action set in 1997, while ‘L.A.’ dropped into multiplexes in 1996 and took place in 2013 - are also pretty much the same. They are identical - no frills, just white text over a black screen with the signature sounds of Carpenter’s slinky synth score teasing what’s to come. It starts, of course, with the opening credits to each film. In a new video comparison piece, we are invited to examine the aesthetic similarities between Carpenter’s ‘Escape’ films, right down to the symmetrically identical framing of certain key shots. Not one to mess with a winning formula, Carpenter adhered rigidly to what worked in the original film when helming his follow-up - even going so far as to re-create some of the first film’s more thrilling sequences shot-for-shot, beat-for-beat, with a few minor modifications. READ MORE: Watch This 46-Minute Episode Of ‘The Director’s Chair’ With John Carpenter John Carpenter: It's 'Distressing' Fathom Screened 'The Thing' in Wrong Aspect Ratio, Poor Quality - Exclusiveġ0 LGBTQ Film and TV Creators on the Rise, from Jerrod Carmichael to Isabel Sandoval John Carpenter Applauds 'Let the Right One In' for Reinventing the Vampire Genre That film’s proper sequel, “ Escape from L.A.,” is also fun, and even if it doesn’t quite rank up there with “ Assault on Precinct 13,” “ The Fog,” or the director’s masterpiece, “ Halloween,” it’s certainly good stuff if you’re to go by the standards of latter-day Carpenter (“ Ghosts of Mars” anyone?). Carpenter’s vividly realized, eye-popping vision of an apocalyptic New York City, reimagined as a terrifying, gigantic prison crawling with homicidal crazies, was the ultimate personification of cool to my adolescent mind.
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