As a heavy metal-loving youngster, few films were initially as appealing to me as John Carpenter’s campy, brilliant, darkly funny sci-fi/action landmark “Escape from New York.” That movie’s hero, Snake Plissken – played memorably by Kurt Russell in one of his most iconic performances – was quite simply, the biggest badass in the galaxy. He was a punk-rock Robin Hood armed with little more than a sneer, a shotgun and his trademark eye patch, with which he was meant to dispatch a whole metropolis’ worth of psychotic goons. In many of his subsequent parts (Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” comes to mind), we’ve seen Russell doffing his cap to the role that made him a star, and it’s not hard to see why. To a whole generation of movie-lovers, Kurt Russell simply is Snake Plissken.
Carpenter’s vividly realized, eye-popping vision of an apocalyptic New York City, reimagined as a terrifying, gigantic prison crawling with homicidal crazies, was the ultimate personification of...
