The even greater (sorry, Ernest) Harry Dean Stanton is Brain, the Duke’s pet intellectual and an old frenemy of Snake’s.
#METAL GEAR SNAKE ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK DRIVER#
In addition to the above, the great Ernest Borgnine shows up as Cabbie, a taxi driver who appears to have been living in New York since before it was walled off and drives his cab around listening to showtunes. Call Me SnakeĮscape From New York has a truly stacked cast of B-movie legends. And so Snake, a one-eyed, laconic, lupine killer who clearly gives zero fucks about any other human being, must fight his way through the gangs, crazies, and cannibals of New York in order to save a world he just cannot stand. To keep him in line, they stick two microscopic bombs in his carotid arteries – if he doesn’t get the job done in 24 hours, pop go the neck pipes. Needing the President alive for vital peace talks with China and the USSR as World War III is currently raging offscreen, Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef, and the cast only gets better from here) hatches on a plan – pressgang former Special Forces killing machine and current outlaw legend Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) into a one-man rescue mission. He’s quickly captured by the warlord who controls Manhattan inside the walls – The Duke of New York (Isaac Hayes, never better). The premise is sketched and quickly by the above voiceover (an audio-only cameo from Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis) as Escape From New York begins, and then we’re plunged into the action as Airforce One goes down over the island prison of Manhattan – with the President (Donald Pleasance, because Carpenter loves his stock company) on board. The rules are simple: Once you go in, you don’t come out.” There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. The once-great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. “In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. Bad Old New York in the Dark Future of 1997 From Dark Star to Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and even lighter fare like Big Trouble in Little China and Starman, Carpenter has shouted this ethos, but never louder than he did in Escape From New York, released 40 years ago on July 10, 1981. The best you can hope to do is carve your own path, cut yourself a little slack ( in the Subgenius sense), and live another day. Authority figures are hapless buffoons on a good day and sociopaths on the median.
The game is rigged, the dealers are in on it. If there’s a thematic constant to Carpenter’s body of work, it’s that the system is incompetent at best, actively malevolent at worst. The call him the Master of Horror, but that’s a misnomer (though, hey – he made Halloween and The Thing, so point taken). With that in mind, for my money John Carpenter remains the most punk director of all time. You can build beaucoup strawmen from that basic material and plenty of them have been marching in our cities the past few weekends like the absolute bell-ends they are, but the fundamental point remains.
The simple, inescapable understanding that the people in charge probably don’t have our best interests at heart. If punk has a defining characteristic, it’s surely a healthy mistrust of and disrespect for authority. John Carpenter’s dystopian classic has lost none of its edge since in hit screens back in ’81.
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