Escape from LA and...Escape from NY???

[LATEXXX COMMANDO]

Escape from LA is the tits

In researching this post I found Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars as well. You can't argue with that

Agreed, I enjoy the film.

It's just a pure fun flick. It has Bruce Campbell playing a psychotic plastic surgeon, Pam Grier playing a Tranny and Snake playing a one on one basketball game for his life only to win it with a full court buzzer beater...

I MEAN COME ON!!!!!! TREMENDOUS!

 

[BisexualMMA]

Serious note though, I think Ghosts of Mars is kind of overrated. It's not in my Top 10 or anything, but I think it's just fucking crazy enough to be entertaining.

I dunno. I think I have to disagree with you on this one, broski. I'll give you that I suppose it manages to be entertaining in a bigger budget Deadly Prey sort of way, but there is so much wrong with this movie.

Natasha Henstridge isn't a great actress and this was her worst performance that I've seen. Pam Grier seems like a cool lady but she is a pretty terrible actress and this is another bad performance. Since they had to carry a lot of the movie, it got kind of painful.

Mostly I don't know what Carpenter was doing with his directing. Characters were always telling stories about what had got them to the place they were at, and if they said "I walked down a hall to get to this room," Carpenter would overlay a shot of them walking down a hall to illustrate. It got to the point of being comical. But the acting was generally so bad, that it was better to have these silly flashbacks of nothing than hold on the actor telling the story.

I guess Jason Statham and Clea Duvall showed some promise to deliver their lines reasonably well amid this waste. It must have been a challenge under the circumstances.

He had a physically imposing main villain with that leader of the Mars Ghosts, but then he neutered him and made him a laughingstock by having him yell baby talk.

Also, it was baffling how often and when Carpenter chose to fade between shots. In the middle of an action sequence, he would use slow dissolves, so I thought time had passed, but then the action scene would just continue. He would fade out of scenes while actors were in the middle of their lines. It was like he had forgotten what fading is for, or else so much of what he had filmed didn't work that he had to just try to cover up the holes with cross dissolves.

I just find it hard to believe that the same guy made such an excellent close-quarters thriller as The Thing, twenty years earlier with far less experience. That film didn't suffer from these weird and cheap narrative and editing choices.

But The Thing was also filled with legit actors down to the smallest characters. There weren't Henstridge and Grier taking you out of the moment at every turn. The conversations just between these two were like high school theater bad.

His whole thing about having the world now be female-dominated was also a failure from the start. He just mentioned it in the opening crawl and had Ice Cube refer to being hassled by "the woman," but then nothing about this world suggested that it was a matriarchal society at all. Statham was sexually harassing Henstridge from the first scene like it was the 1950s, and Henstridge isn't really a casting choice that exudes authority. Plus the male roles were filled with Jason Statham, Ice Cube and some huge Ving Rhames kind of black guy, not exactly docile types easily dominated by women in power. I remember there was a Star Trek episode with a matriarchal society, and the guys all looked like twinks from a cuck video. They committed to that concept. John Carpenter just mentioned it and figured that was enough. It was just lazy.

 

[Guestx]

I dunno. I think I have to disagree with you on this one, broski. I'll give you that I suppose it manages to be entertaining in a bigger budget Deadly Prey sort of way, but there is so much wrong with this movie.

Natasha Henstridge isn't a great actress and this was her worst performance that I've seen. Pam Grier seems like a cool lady but she is a pretty terrible actress and this is another bad performance. Since they had to carry a lot of the movie, it got kind of painful.

Mostly I don't know what Carpenter was doing with his directing. Characters were always telling stories about what had got them to the place they were at, and if they said "I walked down a hall to get to this room," Carpenter would overlay a shot of them walking down a hall to illustrate. It got to the point of being comical. But the acting was generally so bad, that it was better to have these silly flashbacks of nothing than hold on the actor telling the story.

I guess Jason Statham and Clea Duvall showed some promise to deliver their lines reasonably well amid this waste. It must have been a challenge under the circumstances.

He had a physically imposing main villain with that leader of the Mars Ghosts, but then he neutered him and made him a laughingstock by having him yell baby talk.

Also, it was baffling how often and when Carpenter chose to fade between shots. In the middle of an action sequence, he would use slow dissolves, so I thought time had passed, but then the action scene would just continue. He would fade out of scenes while actors were in the middle of their lines. It was like he had forgotten what fading is for, or else so much of what he had filmed didn't work that he had to just try to cover up the holes with cross dissolves.

I just find it hard to believe that the same guy made such an excellent close-quarters thriller as The Thing, twenty years earlier with far less experience. That film didn't suffer from these weird and cheap narrative and editing choices.

But The Thing was also filled with legit actors down to the smallest characters. There weren't Henstridge and Grier taking you out of the moment at every turn. The conversations just between these two were like high school theater bad.

His whole thing about having the world now be female-dominated was also a failure from the start. He just mentioned it in the opening crawl and had Ice Cube refer to being hassled by "the woman," but then nothing about this world suggested that it was a matriarchal society at all. Statham was sexually harassing Henstridge from the first scene like it was the 1950s, and Henstridge isn't really a casting choice that exudes authority. Plus the male roles were filled with Jason Statham, Ice Cube and some huge Ving Rhames kind of black guy, not exactly docile types easily dominated by women in power. I remember there was a Star Trek episode with a matriarchal society, and the guys all looked like twinks from a cuck video. They committed to that concept. John Carpenter just mentioned it and figured that was enough. It was just lazy.

Interesting. I did not expect such extensive thoughts on Ghosts of Mars, I must say. I'd like to offer something good in return, but I haven't seen the movie in over a decade and honestly don't remember a great deal in the way of specifics.

What I do remember is thinking it was weird and interesting enough to hold my attention, even if I didn't think it was a great movie. In fact, I remember having it in my DVD collection way back in the day, so that means I must have paid some kind of money for it. Then again, at that point I was adding anything that I even remotely enjoyed and also had stuff like SWAT and The Mexican in there.

I don't remember having the issues with the acting that you did or making the same observations on transitions and the editing and the like. But maybe it's time for me to revisit this one so that I can evaluate with with fresh--and more mature--eyes.

 

[Guestx]

Agreed, I enjoy the film.

It's just a pure fun flick. It has Bruce Campbell playing a psychotic plastic surgeon, Pam Grier playing a Tranny and Snake playing a one on one basketball game for his life only to win it with a full court buzzer beater...

I MEAN COME ON!!!!!! TREMENDOUS!

The basketball scene is fantastic, I'll give you that.

 

[BisexualMMA]

Interesting. I did not expect such extensive thoughts on Ghosts of Mars, I must say. I'd like to offer something good in return, but I haven't seen the movie in over a decade and honestly don't remember a great deal in the way of specifics.

What I do remember is thinking it was weird and interesting enough to hold my attention, even if I didn't think it was a great movie. In fact, I remember having it in my DVD collection way back in the day, so that means I must have paid some kind of money for it. Then again, at that point I was adding anything that I even remotely enjoyed and also had stuff like SWAT and The Mexican in there.

I don't remember having the issues with the acting that you did or making the same observations on transitions and the editing and the like. But maybe it's time for me to revisit this one so that I can evaluate with with fresh--and more mature--eyes.

I can agree with you that it wasn't a boring movie. That is the highest praise I can give it, but it's also an achievement of some value.

 

[Guestx]

I can agree with you that it wasn't a boring movie. That is the highest praise I can give it, but it's also an achievement of some value.

Speaking of Carpenter, what the fuck happened to that dude?

From 1992 to 2001:

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Village of the Damned (1995)
Escape from LA (1996)
Vampires (1998)
Ghosts of Mars (2001)

After 2001:

The Ward (2010)

He did six movies in a ten year span. And since then has done one movie in a 15 year span. Did he get thrown into director jail after Vampires and Ghosts of Mars? Did he just lose his passion for filmmaking? Did he just get too damn old?

I remember hearing something a little while back where he said he was having problems with his eye sight and was focusing more on his music these days, but that was before he made The Ward so there has to be more to the story.

 

[BisexualMMA]

Speaking of Carpenter, what the fuck happened to that dude?

From 1992 to 2001:

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Village of the Damned (1995)
Escape from LA (1996)
Vampires (1998)
Ghosts of Mars (2001)

After 2001:

The Ward (2010)

He did six movies in a ten year span. And since then has done one movie in a 15 year span. Did he get thrown into director jail after Vampires and Ghosts of Mars? Did he just lose his passion for filmmaking? Did he just get too damn old?

I remember hearing something a little while back where he said he was having problems with his eye sight and was focusing more on his music these days, but that was before he made The Ward so there has to be more to the story.

I don't know. A man can only take so many failures in a row, perhaps. John McTiernan retired around the same time after a much less embarrassing run (although Rollerball gives Ghosts of Mars a run for its money).

I didn't mind Vampires (certainly not up to classic Carpenter standards but a decent action horror) and I think Invisible Man is a much better movie than it gets credit for. I think in both cases, he was rescued by the charisma of his stars though (Woods in Vampires, Chase and Sam Neill in Invisible).

 

[n...not crazy]

Escape From LA.... I'm still smh after all these years.

 

[Thai Domi]

EFNY is a freaking classic.
EFLA is a steaming pile of crap.

 

[Guestx]

I don't know. A man can only take so many failures in a row, perhaps. John McTiernan retired around the same time after a much less embarrassing run (although Rollerball gives Ghosts of Mars a run for its money).

I didn't mind Vampires (certainly not up to classic Carpenter standards but a decent action horror) and I think Invisible Man is a much better movie than it gets credit for. I think in both cases, he was rescued by the charisma of his stars though (Woods in Vampires, Chase and Sam Neill in Invisible).

I thought that Escape from LA was at least a commercial success if not a critical one, though looking at Box Office Mojo now I guess it was not. By all accounts The Ward was also an all-around failure so maybe that was enough for him to just say fuck it. After all, he's almost 70 now.

I just found this link to a podcast interview he apparently recently did:

http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-720-joe-dante-john-carpenter

Just the description seems to back up what I was saying earlier about him wanting to focus on music. I might go ahead and listen to this right now.

BTW, I agree on Vampires. I thought it was okay. But I believe it was still a financial failure.

BTW #2, I just looked McTiernan up and apparently he's been having a rough go of it. I guess he went to prison for a little while:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/die-hard-director-john-mctiernan-683407

I also found this article about him trying to get another movie made:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/die-hard-director-john-mctiernan-729029

But IMDB actually mentioned some other "announced" project called Thin Rain.

 

[simps3d]

The Red Letter Media guys have a review on Escape From NY that's worth a watch.