Guest hosts Tyler Sonic & Lisa Macaroni
“Proudly wears its affection for crusty Sergio Leone archetypes and countdown-clock suspense sequences; Carpenter was Tarantino long before Tarantino was.” —Time Out New York
Welcome to the movie that transformed Kurt Russell’s career, taking him from clean-cut Disney heartthrob to seriously grizzled action hero. Escape From New York is John Carpenter’s 1981 vision of a dystopian 1997, in which Manhattan has been turned into an anarchic maximum-security prison fenced-off from the rest of the United States and ruled with an iron fist by Isaac Hayes’s diabolical arch-criminal potentate, the Duke. When an Air Force One crash strands the U.S. president (Donald Pleasence, inexplicably British) on the lawless isle of Manhattan, merciless mercenary Snake Plissken (a resplendently eye-patched Russell) is the only man who can get the Chief Executive out alive… never mind that Snake’s a convicted criminal himself. What follows encompasses hang-gliding into the World Trade Center, vicious death match gladiatorial combat, and Harry Dean Stanton—which is to say, pure cinema.
Tyler and Lisa moved to Vermont in 2024 from Central Michigan, where they produced and hosted the monthly screening series VHS Night at the Broadway. They also publish Horror Macaroni, a zine on horror, kitsch, and dead formats, whose fifth issue will be out this summer.