2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK (1983)

 

Curiously, the best 1980s imitation of ESCAPE is exactly the opposite. Although the hero is given many elements of Snake Plissken's look, and is given the knightly name of Parsifal, he's played by Michael Sopkiw, a pretty-boy actor whose idea of "attitude" is to keep his face as emotionless as possible. But while Carpenter's brooding pace yields only sporadic thrills, director Sergio Martino doesn't allow for a slow moment in 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK.  In fact, Martino may be borrowing his tempo less from Carpenter than from George Miller in the Mad Max films, though only the film's opening uses the major visual trope of the Miller films: of crazy-ass cars racing around in the desert.

In Martino's FALL it isn't only New York that has fallen: all of the continental United States has been decimated by nuclear war. The film on just one aspect of the post-holocaust world: that one of the invading forces, the evil "Euraks," occupy New York, where they conduct beastly experiments on the inhabitants. A more far-reaching effect of the war is that no new children have been born for many years. Yet somehow the "American" side, called "the Federation," finds out that one fertile woman exists in the Eurak-held territory of New York. The Federation drafts Parsifal to bring her out, though these bosses are more generous than Carpenter's, for they give the hero a couple of tough sidekicks to help out.

And "help" they do. From start to finish, FALL is full of beatings, shootings, knifings, car races, eyes being gouged out, guys in medieval masks hunting people-- and almost everyone in the film is more visually arresting than the hero. Where Carpenter's ESCAPE is a downbeat dystopia with a few strong action-scenes, Martino's FALL is like a carnival-ride. Indeed, early in the film Parsifal defeats a fellow racer, and an emcee in a clown-getup congratulates the hero on his win: later, brightly-garbed acrobats are among the allies Parsifal draws to him during his New York sojourn. I've seen Martino's fluid camera-work unfairly compared (on IMDB) to the frantic zoom-lens of Jesus Franco. But there's a crucial difference: Franco used to zoom in on *everything* without much discrimination, while Martino is getting in the viewer's face with all the "good stuff."

Presumably the hero is given his name as a reference to the famous knight of the Grail, and here, the "Grail" is the fertile woman he brings back to civilization. Refreshingly, Parsifal doesn't fall in love with the one fertile woman; he has an encounter with another female who sacrifices her life for him. Despite this downside, Martino does give FALL a more upbeat ending than ESCAPE, as if he were trying to keep from biting Carpenter's style too much. But the "fair" rating I give to the film's mythicity derives less from the minor medieval references than from its bright sense of the carnivalesque.