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I stayed up late last night watching one of the greatest cinematic classics featuring a futuristic dystopia. ‘Escape From New York’ was a campy cult action movie when it first dropped. It was directed by JOHN CARPENTER whose claim to fame was the thriller ‘Halloween’.

In this film CARPENTER tells the story of a famous war hero turned criminal named Snake Plisken who is sent onto the prison colony of Manhattan island to rescue the president of the United States. In a scene that is so eerily omniscient of September 11th, 2001 the president’s plane has been hijacked and crashed into a skyscraper by nuclear arms anti-proliferation terrorists. Just prior to the crash the president is evacuated from the plane via an indestructible pod. Once the pod has landed the president is captured by the gang leader who runs the prison colony, the Duke of New York.

‘Escape From New York’ is fun and farcical. The movie was made in 1980 and they imagined that twenty years in the future we would still be using cassette tapes for audio recordings. The cellular phones and short wave radios were all fucking ginormous and even the government computers in the future had advanced little farther than the ENIAC machines of our grandparent’s recollection.

Despite the look of the movie being hokey and remarkably low budget for even an early 80’s flick this shit is one of my favorite joints of all time. First of all, JOHN CARPENTER is one of the GOAT filmmakers along with KUBRICK, LUCAS, SPIELBERG and my nigga JOHN STAGLIANO (peep the Buttman in Budapest series).

Secondly, this movie has a lineup of sick ass actors. KURT RUSSELL plays the lead role of Snake Plisken. FYI, RUSSELL is one of the best B movie actors in the game. He’s elevated B movies to A- minus status.

Black Moses makes an appearance as well. Before ISAAC HAYES assumed the role of the chef on South Park he played the fuck out of the Duke of New York.

When we were going all 1980’s teen wood crazy I neglected to mention my brunette babysitter ADRIENNE BARBIEU. She’s up in this piece with the tittays just as big and beautiful as ever. Wait until you see how ol’ girl gets merc’ked by the Duke. She literally has her wig peeled. This is a JOHN CARPENTER joint so you know he has to put a little something gruesome into his flicks. Just like I have to talk about sneakers and doodee.

The third important factor I love about this film was CARPENTER’s attention to NYC details. He captured a nice feel for some of New York’s long gone landmarks. Namely the Twin Towers and the old Madison Square Garden that was up by Lincoln Center.

Lastly, CARPENTER killed shit with his funky theme song. You can’t tell me this shit ain’t hardbody.

‘Escape From New York’ title track

Has anyone sampled this shit already? My nigga JOELL ORTIZ needs to get up on that joint and spit some escape from New York firestarter lyrics. And you need to NetFlix ‘Escape From New York’ so you have some good shit to hold you down on a wind-chilled weeknight.

I’ll send my DVD copy to the first person who tells me the real name of the actor who played the taxi dude that drives Snake around NYC.