What a frightening, surreal, sometimes unintentionally funny, but overall awesome movie. It takes place in a futuristic and dystopic Manhattan island that's been converted into a criminal compound. Yes, you heard right: the entire island of Manhattan is now one massive prison cell where the criminals create their own sub-society within. It's the late 1990s—already a future of the past—and though the film isn't prophetic, it is at least a dark coincidence that the President's airplane has been hijacked and crashed into lower Manhattan. The shadows of the blacked-out skyscrapers mingle with the night sky to create an effect of eerie surrealism. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a criminal himself, is sent to rescue the president who has since been captured by the criminal underground after the crash. Snake has 24 hours to glide his plane atop the World Trade Center unnoticed, maneuver his way down 50 flights of stairs (the elevator stops at floor 50), and track down the President through a barrage of litter, graffiti, and thousands of hardened criminals—the worst of whom look a lot like the undead. Essentially one of the biggest cities in the world has been converted into a space of grotesque horrors and inhuman characters; a social commentary that comes between George A. Romero's final two installments of the Dead Trilogy, Dawn of The Dead and Day of The Dead. The former of which takes place in a society so superficial and consumer-driven that it's shot in a shopping mall, where the customers are quite literally zombies. The latter, is set in an underground military base, because the world above is so ravaged it's uninhabitable. Escape From New York is more akin to Day of The Dead, primarily for it's commentary on military defense structures, and the impending social apocalypse as a result.
Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasence, and Lee Van Cleef also star. Also, don't forget Ernest Borgnine as the cartoonish cabbie.
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