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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).

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