Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasance
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I remember there was a stretch of time there during a particularly ice storm in 2007 where I was desperate to watch this film (in addition to Robocop 2 (1990) for reasons which are still unclear to me), but couldn’t get it running without power to a DVD player. Any time there is cold temperatures, I’m flooded with a desire to watch this movie. How I haven’t watched it since starting these reviews is beyond me.
Did I Like It: So much about this film feels like it is of the later Carpenter period, but it is only three years after he leapt on to the scene with Halloween (1978) almost immediately after The Fog (1980), almost immediately before Carpenter binge-drank his way through the screenwriting process which bound Michael Myers and Laurie Strode as siblings for decades in Halloween II (1981). Maybe it’s the presence of Kurt Russell, which more than any other single element props up Carpenter’s ambition to fuse westerns and sci-fi films together and for all time. Russell channels sufficient Clint Eastwood energy as Plissken and Carpenter wants to be—if not quite Sergio Leone—at least John Ford. They even managed to bring Lee Van Cleef along for the ride, for good measure. The two of them trying their best to be the second coming of that is not a complaint, by the way. Far from it. There are few things in movies I’d rather watch than that pairing with that ambition than almost any other movie combination. Ok, so I want to wrap up the review and watch The Thing (1982) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) as soon as possible, don’t I?
Other little parts of the film delight, and of course I’m talking mostly about the hilariously miscast, creepiest British man who ever lived Donald Pleasance as the President of the United States. I mean that sincerely. I love it. Pitching that man playing the American President is enough to sell a movie on its own merits.