Chapter Two
Escape from LA and A Very Brady Sequel
By Brett Beach
April 14, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
That snarky parenthetical aside—one of my all-time favorites — comes courtesy of Roger Ebert’s review of the 1970 disaster flick Airport, a ten-time Oscar nominee that ushered in a decade’s worth of storylines where all-star casts were assembled for the sole purpose of dying ridiculously violent deaths at the hands of natural disasters, faulty buildings, disasters at sea, killer insects, and any other threat that had some cinematic pulp to squeeze out of it.
It’s been a long time since I have rambled my way through to the meat of my column (I have felt fairly structured these past weeks), and I bring up Airport only because a) I have rented the DVD collection featuring the quartet of Universal’s airplanes-in-peril series from the ‘70s and felt full disclosure was completely necessary and b) I seriously doubt I will ever get around to writing about Airport 1975, even if I somehow find the time to spend watching it. On the subject of time, I recently sent back nearly half of the 30 movies I had checked out from the library, many ones I had been putting off seeing forever, and that will have to remain strangers to my eyes just a while longer. The ranks of the 18 that remain include such diverse offerings as a 1971 Pink Floyd concert, Woody Allen’s most recent effort, Edward Norton’s film debut, the film that inspired a sequel that finally won Paul Newman an Oscar for Best Actor, and a Tom Hanks slapstick comedy from the days just before he started racking up nominations left and right.
If I can get around to even half of them, and stay focused on the ones I haven’t seen before, I will tally it up in the win column. There have been a lot of changes rumbling on about in my life lately, most of them fairly important, one of them merely materialistic, but all worthy of noting. In the past weeks I have switched jobs, had a marriage proposal accepted, watched my son take steps on his own and exhibit definitive traces of his developing personality and individuality, made plans to take my fiancée and son back to my childhood town for a memorial service to honor my recently departed uncle, and purchased my first-ever flat screen television (for all you inquiring minds/anal retentive Patrick Bateman-types, it is the Samsung 40-inch 6300 series LED-backlit LCD model with detachable blender).
Life changes upon life changes tend to make me even more than introspective than usual, which then leaves more vulnerable and open to tallying ridiculous “patterns” in my life. As for example, the last time a Scream film came out I was also engaged and set to be married in the not-too-distant future. Does it mean anything? No, but it certainly feels like there should be a metaphor, or a life lesson, or at least a clue as to the new Ghostface’s identity (or identities, as the case may prove to be).
Choosing to write about John Carpenter’s Escape from LA and A Very Brady Sequel, a pair of Chapter Twos released by Paramount in August 1996, makes me reflective of a period even slightly earlier. I was four months away from graduating from college, turning 21 and having my first drink; three months away from my second disastrous bicycle accident, two months away from my first disastrous bike accident; weeks away from spending my final semester living off campus with two women, in the house of the professor who gave me the single worst grade of my academic career before or after; wrapping up my first summer living in Portland (also with two women); and finishing with my first ever real-world employment (sole mail clerk at the head office for a 36-branch bank).
Now depending on your interests and level of credulity, you may look at that preceding paragraph and wonder: You truly didn’t have anything to drink until you were 21? (Nope. And my first time getting truly and blissfully bombed was over a year later, at a lesbian dance club, but that’s another story.) Or you may be agog at my two two-wheeled catastrophes only four weeks apart (I was hit by a car and later wiped out all on my own on a back road on my way to school. And that fall season was the first time I had ever worn a bike helmet. I don’t bike anymore). Some of you may even be torn between asking me what my secret is with the ladies, and questioning if I’m sure there was a second Brady Bunch movie. I have nothing to comment on the former, but on the latter...
Escape from LA and A Very Brady Sequel are interesting case studies for two reasons — both brought their respective series to a rather sputtering end, and, unlike many sequels, that aim to give audiences more of whatever elements they presumably loved the first time around, both films essentially remade the previous film (Escape from New York, and The Brady Bunch Movie) with similar supporting characters (and the same leads), plot beats, dialogue, and pacing, highlights and low-lights alike. I find it almost impossible to say I vastly preferred one installment to the other, but in the end, one of the would-be franchises definitely does stand tall over its rival. For Paramount, the summer started strong with Mission: Impossible and their first release of the fall — The First Wives Club — also lit a box office fire (both were record setters for openings in their day), but in between? Their other summer offerings averaged just over $20 million in grosses, fine for the pair that only cost $12 million each (A Very Brady Sequel and Harriet the Spy) and not so much for the two that cost at or near $50 million (Escape from LA and The Phantom).
Some interesting number comparisons and analysis: Escape from LA out-grossed A Very Brady Sequel — but only by $4 million. The second Brady film may have grossed 55% less than the first film ($21 million, down from $46 million), but its budget was virtually the same, and so it became simply less of a win and not a loss. Escape from LA grossed $200,000 more than John Carpenter’s other coastal escape, which is not that hot (though perhaps to be expected for a sequel to a cult hit from 15 years earlier) but becomes dismaying in light of the extreme budget uptick from $6 million to $50 million (easily the biggest of his career, a full 25% more than the runner-up, Memoirs of an Invisible Man).
Yet, the $25.4 million final tally of Escape from LA is at the high end of most of his film’s final figures. Excepting Halloween, Starman is Carpenter’s highest grosser, with the two Escape films just behind, and Christine, The Fog, and Vampires not far after them. Most of his features are cult hits in the making/waiting. His reputation was secured nearly 35 years ago, and he has been free, with mostly smallish budgets, to make the films he wants.
Paramount went out on a bit of a limb (although perhaps the studio already had its worries accounted for with Titanic still in production) but my guess is that they were counting on Kurt Russell to bring in more of an audience than was the case. The early to mid 1990s were his commercial high water mark with Tango and Cash, Backdraft, Unlawful Entry, Tombstone, Stargate, Executive Decision, and Breakdown each grossing between $50 and $75 million. In fact, during those seven years, the only films that didn’t reach that range were Escape from LA and...Captain Ron. (Oddly enough, in his impressive five-decade career, Russell has starred in exactly one (1!) film to crack the $100 million plateau. Any guesses? See the end of the column for the answer).
I saw Escape from LA in the theater, but I had never seen Escape from New York until last month. (My favorite films by the director are The Thing, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness, all variations on the theme that you can’t really trust your perception of your friends or the world around you, and all rendered with varying strains of dark, ironic humor.) I hadn’t been deferring the film such much as avoiding it. Snake Plissken never seemed all that much of an interesting character in his second film and I found it hard to believe there was a lot to be gained from seeing him at the center of the same kind of predicament.
I recall Russell giving an interview once where he likened Jack Burton, his character in Big Trouble in Little China, to a parody of the macho, in control action heroes such as Plissken. The trouble I have with that statement is that Plissken comes off as a parody to begin with. With that ridiculous growl, the “mysterious” eye patch, and hair that yearns to be defined as post-apocalyptic mullet, he never screams to be taken seriously.
Escape from New York struck me as a fairly benign action film for a story in which the whole of NYC has been turned into a maximum-security prison. Plissken seems hopelessly mismatched for almost the entire time — attempting to rescue the President of the United States after his plane makes an emergency landing in said prison — and nothing much ever seems at stake, until a surprisingly moody and downbeat final 10 minutes in which most of the supporting cast is killed and our anti-hero achieves a well-played fuck you to the powers that be, kind of the 1980s riff on Harry Callahan tossing his badge into the trash at the end of Dirty Harry. The mission was accomplished, but in the existential scheme of things, did it really mean anything?
What gives Escape from New York its juice is its assembling of the most perfect B-movie cast ever: Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau, Season Hubley, Donald Pleasance, and Harry Dean Stanton. Carpenter seems determined to fill each frame with the kind of offbeat character or performance that now seems to be the realm solely of Tarantino and the Coens. Never mind that many of them don’t have all that much to do or say when they are on camera.
Escape from LA attempts a similar blend of recognizable and established male character actors (Stacy Keach, Cliff Robertson, Steve Buscemi) with female actresses “of the moment” (Valeria Golino, Michelle Forbes, A.J. Langer) and a few random WTFs (Bruce Campbell, Pam Grier, and... George Corraface?) If the cast is similarly eclectic, it also suffers by comparison.
With Russell as one of his two screenplay collaborators, Carpenter blithely transposes nearly all of the elements of his first film to the other side of the U.S. Once again, in a setting about 20 years into the future, Plissken is nabbed by the police, infected with a highly lethal virus, and sent on a suicide mission with a ridiculously finite time frame (down to 10 hours here from 20 hours in the first film). Escape from LA is both more biting in its satire (and more satiric overall). A submerged Universal Studios is briefly glimpsed, Plissken must shoot hoops at the former Forum to save his life, and a whole race of plastic surgery disasters reside underground, surfacing only to nab fresh faces for transplants performed by the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills.
New York in 1997, the first film’s setting, probably seemed to some just like the way it was in 1981 and the notion of New York as a dumping ground for felons less metaphorical than Zeitgeist. Los Angeles in 2013 feels more reactionary, as if in Carpenter’s mind, the city is paying the price for its Sodom and Gomorrah-esque habits, and that becoming a penal colony for the undesirables and immorals is to be its ultimate fate (Somehow, I imagine that all the real-life aspirants for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination would concur).
Plissken is even more ridiculous a figure this time around (he is never “quite as tall” as people think he should be when they meet him) although he certainly gets to dispatch a lot more victims and at the film’s mind-blowing close, set the stage for a completely transformed New World Order.
The Brady Bunch Movie kept to a very established world order and became one of the few successful adaptations of a television show to walk a fine line between cutting humor and loving homage. By setting it in the then current 1995, but keeping everything about them stuck in the 1970s, the writers also solved the riddle of whether to update a show from its milieu and attempt relevance, or give it a distinctly retro vibe. Mostly, it benefited from an almost fetishistic and funny/creepy attention to the detail of the Bradys’ fashion, attitude, and home furnishings, and a cast that were a combination of physical dead ringers (Christine Taylor) and spiritual dead ringers (Gary Cole, in a deadpan performance of Leslie Nielsen-eque heights, pushes past parody and into performance art).
An unexpected hit, the first movie also did and said just about everything there was to with the subject, so any sequel would naturally feel redundant. But unexpected hits don’t stay lonesome for long in Hollywood, and but so only 18 months later, there was a follow up, that many viewers of the first opted to stay away from. The “racy innuendos” — thanks as always MPAA for finding just the right turn of phrase — of the first give way here to more overt drug and sex content (Alice unwittingly serves up psychedelic mushrooms at the dinner table, Marcia and Greg struggle with the fact they want to get too groovily close for comfort) but still on the affectionate side of good taste. The star cameos are fairly weak (Zsa Zsa Gabor and Rosie O’Donnell) but the silly plot borrowed from The Addams Family movie (is that really Carol’s long-lost first husband/the long-lost Uncle Fester who has mysteriously shown up, or just an impostor) is more engaging than the “raising money to pay property taxes” conceit of the first.
In the biggest surprise, Tim Matheson, who plays the enigmatic Roy Martin, brings the lightest of comedy touches to the proceedings, and whether tripping out at the dinner table, being forced to endure a Brady makeover at a vintage clothing store, or listening to Mike Brady’s tortured philosophical maxims without cracking up, he makes more of his role than Michael McKean was able to do as the villainous neighbor in the first film (though to be fair, McKean had to endure infinitely more pratfalls).
There are an equal number of spot-on musical productions (at the mall, on a plane) as the first, just the right amount of self-awareness and self-reflexivity (the final guest cameo is the best) and a dash of cringe-inducing ridiculousness. Perhaps the biggest compliment that can be paid to A Very Brady Sequel is that, even with a different director, and screenwriting team, it sets out to do what The Brady Bunch Movie did exactly and as well as its predecessor, and comes close, missing out only on the novelty of the first that is the sometimes burden of being a Chapter Two.
Next time: With summer movie going just around the corner, I weigh in on two of the biggest franchises of the last decade to see which superhero sequel reigns supreme. It’s Spider Man 2 vs. X2: X-Men United, bub.
(Oh, and it was Vanilla Sky).