AKA: Fuga Dal Bronx (1983) - Original Italian Title
AKA: Escape from the Bronx - 1990: Bronx Warriors II (1983) - Australian title
AKA: Bronx Warriors 2 (1983) - European English title
AKA: Escape 2000 (1983) - International English Title
(Release Date: August 15, 1983)
(USA Release Date: September 02, 1983)
No one will sit on a john... full of dynamite!
Or move to New Mexico for that matter.
T'was the Day After Christmas and all through the busted-ass cabin in the middle of the woods
"A sequel? You've got to be joking!" Christine cried out, no longer interested in rhyming.
Aki bowed her head and said "I only wish I was joking, sister." Kneumsi was indignant "You mean there was so much demand for more 1990: Bronx Warriors, a complete ripoff of Escape from New York, The Warriors and The Road Warrior that someone actually made a part two to this farce?" "Actually, virtually the exact same people made the sequel." Aki said, none too proud pof having to say those words. "Enzo G. Castellari came back as director and brought with him writer Tito Carpi to, and I say this lightly, come up with the story and wrote the screenplay with Enzo." Kneumsi's eyes widened for a moment. "But no Sacchetti, then?" The other four laughed and Aki responded "No, thankfully, Dardano had nothing to do with this movie." "Oh thank GOD!" Kneumsi exclaimed with the gusto most reserved for being informed their conditions were not terminal. Aki continued, ticking off names. "Ennio Girolami is back as is... uh..." "Just say it, honey." Nagas said. "We can take it." Aki sighed again and just said it. "Marco Di Gregorio!" The othe four gasped, then moaned. "Mister Man Boobs?" Jones cried out. Christine added "He was in shape, but yeah... I couldn't tell if he was the bassist from Twisted Sister or just, you know, somebody's sister." Jones cleared his throat and managed to work up the courage to ask "And you believe watching this will work?" Aki shook her head. "I'm not sure. What I do know is that we are surrounded by an army of interdimensional, interplanetary, interspecies, underhanded bad guys all bent on destroying us as revenge for perceived slights against that alien fuck, that dick and the newly cyborgized time travelling jackass you guys somehow nicknamed 'Time Tender' and this is the best idea we have. If the alternate history and Bad Italian Suckitude won't overwhelm Time Tender and his cronies, I'm not sure what will!" "What's this obnoxious sequel even called?" Kneumsi was almost afraid to ask. "Well, to completely ensure that subtlety and originality are both quite dead, they decided to name it Escape from the Bronx!" All four of the others screamed in pop culture agony. "Well, how bad is this Escape from the Bronx?" Nagas demanded, visible fear in his eyes, more at the film itself than the approaching hoard." Aki nodded to her husband and said "Remember the end of the Judas Priest video 'You Got Another Thing Coming'?" "Hell yeah!" the other four exclaimed. "This movie is so bad it could do to Time Tender what Halford's voice did to that spectator in that video." Aki completed. Kneumsi coughed "You mean blow his head off and cause his pants to fall down?" Aki nodded and matter-of-factly said "Exactly." "Well with power like that, let's get the proverbial show on the road!" Kneumsi shouted. "Let's do the 2017 Christmas Turkey!" And so they did. Kneumsi opened the Shudder app on his iPhone, took a sponsored moment to ask if anyone in the room could believe Shudder cost under five bucks a month for all these quality films, then beamed the image directly through his AppleTV and opened a Pepsi to enjoy during the ritual. As the positively tripped out Fulvia Film Presents logo danced across the screen the group was quite sure they had been dosed with some incredible LSD. The quintet watched as the now-familiar images of The Bronx with buildings as gutted and demolished as both Rehobeth Hall (the House of Blues Anaheim) and Kneumsi's original dinner theater now were. Much of the same annoying style crap as the first film was going on with one addition. Some stupid-looking paramilitary group was evicting people from The Bronx and trying to relocate them to... "New Mexico?" Jones guffawed. "From the Bronx to New Mexico? I think most people would rather die." he snickered. Then the events of the film proved that was exactly true. "Oh... shit." Kneumsi shook his head. "I'll bet this did wonders for New Mexico's tourism industry." Christine agreed, saying "The New Mexico Tourism Board would have sued if anybody watched this stupid movie." The rest of the gang giggled, but then immediately straightened up when a shaggy mained goofball staggered onscreen. "Aw, shit, what Trash!" Kneumsi said. Nagas leaned in. "I assume that's Mark Gregory? Is he that bad?" "His character's name actually is 'Trash.'" Aki explained. "Oh. That actually makes sense." Nagas confirmed. Having been rescued from the timestream by the ritual surrounding 1990: Bronx Warriors he had not been forced to actually watch the goddam thing. "Just wait." Aki advised. "It's about to get a bit worse here." The group watched in annoyance as a the paramilitary group started eliminating people from households while dressed in what ostensibly were supposed to be fire suits but were really space suits, complete with gas valves and backpacks. "So these are aliens?" Christine asked. "No, just New Yorkers." Kneumsi said. "Then why are they dressed like the cast from Lost in Space?" Nagas asked, with an eye-roll. "The funniest part is that they couldn't afford space helmets for everyone so they put motorcycle helmets on most of these idiots." Jones scoffed. "Wow, this couple clearly loved the previous movie in the series as much as they hate New Mexico!" Kneumsi observed. "They've got a huge poster of Trash from the first movie right there." "Those are Trash's parents." Aki advised. "That's apparently supposed to be a home photograph." Christine laughed "At least they're supportive." Kneumsi nodded "And also dead apparently. Is this the 'worse' part you warned us about, Aki?" "No. This is." They watched as Trash rode his stupid looking motorcycle down several flights of stairs to a subterranian lair (all of them thankful that Trash was wearing more clothes in this film) and watched as the leader of the underground gang stepped out of the shadows to, shall we say, reveal himself. "Who the hell is that?" Christine asked. "Remember that idiot who showed up at the RNC to pimp Trump last year?" Aki asked. "Yeah. Chachi!" Kneumsi laughed. "No, not Baio. But, yeah. Gah. I hate Baio." she said. "No, I mean the other guy. Almost as bad and equally surprising." "Oh, that guy from Earth 2?" Nagas asked. Aki nodded. "Right. This is his father, Antonio Sabato, Sr." "Wow!" Kneumsi exclaimed. "And he's speaking Spanish. That doesn't sound like someone Trump would associate with." Aki nodded. "It's weird. Sabato was a native of Italy and had, well, this kind of career. No idea what the hell happened to his son or why he's speaking Spanish here. Even more confusing is that later in the movie some characters make a lot of racist Arab jokes toward him." Nagas scoffed. "That sounds almost as confused as... well, the rest of this movie." "Damn right. Now watch this." Aki said. "Here's why they are clearing out The Bronx. The GC Corporation wants them all out so they can do this amazing real estate deal on top of where the multi-ethnic citizens live." "Now that sounds like Trump." Kneumsi said. "Oh, you don't know the half of it. Check this guy out." Aki said. Jones pointed "That's the same corporation president from the first film. That Fred Trump looking motherfucker." Aki nodded. "Right. That's the aforementioned Ennio Girolami playing President Henry Clark of the GC Corporation." "Wait, what?" Kneumsi started. "Didn't he play Samuel Fisher of the Manhattan Corporation in the last film? Jones said he was some kind of weapons manufacturer but I really wasn't paying attention." "Right." Aki said. "Same actor, different character. This time much more of a Trump." "This is incredible." Kneumsi said. "You've got a guy who uses the title 'president', who hires completely unqualified people to do important jobs all so he can enrich himself with real estate deals, manipulates politicians to do his dirty work... and he looks like a Trump!" He shook his head slowly. "Are the events of this movie the results of the breakdown of spacetime you've been warining us about? Are we seeing some misplaced harbingers of the future?" Aki shook her head. "No. This movie actually happened. And speaking of hiring the wrong guy..." "Henry Silva!" The other four shouted in unison. "Henry 'Did I Take This Job For A Quick Buck' Silva is in this?" Kneumsi demanded. "Yeah." Aki said. "And, being a good actor, he takes this job as seriously as you might expect. He knows his career was in trouble and it shows here." "At least we have one likable actor." Christine joked. "Yeah, but now that Trash has found his parents are dead the proverbial shit is about to hit the proverbial fan." Aki confirmed. This was in spite of the fact that Trash's introduction involved him shooting a helicopter until it was dead. "Did Silva really just say 'Disinfestation'?" Christine laughed. Aki nodded. "Yeah, this jackass character, who gleefully says 'I'm worse than anybody." is leader of the DAS', the 'Disinfestation Annihilation Squad.'" All five people broke from their fear and misery to engage in hearty laughter at that one, each person repeating "Disinfestation Annihilation Squad" several times before the laughter subsided. Sadly the movie went on and on and on like that. A long, boring, repetetive war between the now unified gangs from The Bronx (including the Broadway lamé guys and the Clockwork Orange droogs) and the (ha ha ha) Disinfestation Annihilation Squad went on and on and on and on with some bad and unconvincing stuntwork from Gregory and lots of sarcastic dialogue equal parts annoyed and annoying from Henry Silva's character named (get this) Floyd Wrangler. Possibly realizing he had about a half-hour's screentime Silva put in as much pause acting as he possibly could to make each sentence take about a week to deliver. Possibly the worst and most offensive New York accent (not only in this movie but possibly of all time) was delivered by the character of reporter Moon Grey (Valeria D'Obici) as she angrily declares "I wuz Boh-wun in da Buh-rawwwwwwwnx!" Meanwhile Sabato's Dablone delivers a lot of miserable lines (worse than those of Silva), which you can barely blame him for while Moon Grey makes fun of his Arabic heritage... in spite of the fact that he is a Spanish speaker played by an Italian. Folks, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and neither Christine nor Jones nor Nagas nor Kneumsi nor Aki liked it one bit. It got even stupider around the time the dorky Bronx characters decide to employ a spelunking jewel thief named Strike (Giancarlo Prete) and his homophobic son Junior (played by, shockingly, Alessandro Prete) who immediately calls Trash a "fag"... multiple times. At that point the plot shifts to kidnapping the president of the GC Corporation to force them to negotiate and put things back the way they were before... with all the warring gangs at each others' throats... which seems like a lateral move at best. In fact, the one thing that everyone can agree on is that The Bronx of this universe is a goddam hell hole... so why the hell is everyone dissing "Enchanting New Mexico" again? Shit. Pretty much from that point on every single thing is predictable. The five viewers (which were five more than Escape from the Bronx has cultivated in decades) would surely have fallen asleep if not for the incredible noisiness of the soundtrack and the fact that they were relying on this movie's badness to destroy the evil army (even worse than the stupid Disinfestation Annihilation Squad) outside and help them restore the timeline. "This just keeps getting dumber." Jones observed. "Yeah." Kneumsi agreed. "Henry Silva's people are ordered not to follow the Bronx kidnappers directly due to their being explosives on the path... yet every one of these idiots just walks right into explosives." Nagas scoffed. "Yeah, it's like these guys in silver are actually aiming themselves at bullets when they can't get blown up." "I don't like this." Christine muttered. "How about the Gothic Castle. Do you like that, baby?" Kneumsi asked. "In name only... so no." After seemingly seven hours of screentime a predictable final battle took place and that goofball Trash made a few wisecracks before the incredibly stupid credits rolled. Nothing was resolved, really. Oh, the immediate issues might have paused for the moment, but they would surely keep rolling, now with a legal reason to crack down on The Bronx and wipe out all of its citizens and even if the Republicans didn't get their way the place would still be complete anarchy with rival gangs killing each other to the sound of inexplicable drum solos... with onscreen drummers. What the actual fuck? "Okay, that was the longest movie I've ever seen." Jones growled during the final credits. Aki giggled "It was less than an hour and a half." she said. "WHAT?" Kneumsi cried. "Is that part of the effect of time and space breaking down?" "No, with Time Tender's tachyons enveloping us, we can't feel the effects in here." she said. "Escape from the Bronx is really just a miserable viewing experience." "Speaking of which," Aki's husband Sagan Nagas said "did it work? Was this movie bad enough?" Aki nodded and said "Break out your Westinghouse Brand Weird Devices and aim at Time Tender." "We don't have Westinghouse Brand Weird Devices!" Kneumsi and Christine insisted. "I've got Flynn's!" Jones said. Aki nodded. "Good. The three of us will aim at Time Tender. Kneumsi and Christine, you reverse the film just like the day before yesterday and complain about it... hard. Especially as the characters you hate come back to life. You probably won't have to go back farther than the part where Silva says the idiotic line 'If we intercept them we've got them.'" "Thank God!" Christine sighed as she and Kneumsi began to reverse the film and bitch... hard. Aki instructed the other two men, saying "Okay, aim at Time Tender's mechanical parts. Those are the parts that came from that Dick's Westinghouse Brand Weird Time Oscillator Type Tachyon Thingy. If we can filter the horrid nature of Escape from The Bronx through our Westinghouse Brand Weird Devices and keep them locked onto the right places where Time Tender's flesh meets his robotic parts we should be able to force him to disintegate like Zantorion's Westinghouse-brand Time-Normalizing doohickey did... or will do... in the future when..." Nagas' eyes widened. "When the younger version of myself first met up with Flynn and Kneumsi which was..." Nagas continued his aim out of the window but angled his Westinghouse Smartwatch to check the lattitude and longitude. "... Oh my GOD... that was... or will be... right here." Jones intensified his beams as Christine and Kneumsi endured the most agonizing parts of the movie again and screamed. "You mean... this place is..." Aki smiled. "Yes. Don't you see? This place, this cabin in the woods that Nagas found to torture Kneumsi with Troll 2... is the exact spot upon which Zantorion's battleship crashed... or will crash... in the future. It is the same spot where Nagas proposed to me... right when Kneumsi jumped out and kicked his ass that time." "That was hilarious." Kneumsi said. "Keep complaining. Focus!" Aki insisted. "It is the same place in the now alternate timeline in which the museum dedicated to Kneumsi would be built. And it is the same place where Nagas first bashed Time Tender over the head with the case of Ham Dingers and stale Twinkies in order to steal his time ship." The noise of the tachyons was growing louder and louder by that point. It was near-deafening. They could barely hear each other over it and the screams of Christine and Kneumsi. Still Jones spoke up. "And there's more! Much more. It was no mistake that Nagas found Flynn when he did. It wasn't a coincidence. This charming clearing where the cabin is built... several hundred thousand years from now this is the same place where Flynn's shack will be built. This is where Flynn first exposed me to the menace of Can't Stop the Music! Don't you see? This location... it's tied to us all!" Aki laughed. "Right! And that is why when I arrived at Flynn's Shack just after Thanksgiving this year and found you... I said 'I'm home.'" Jones scoffed. "I was going to ask you about that. I figured it was a minor plot hole." The new and improved composite Nagas grinned, now without evil "It was no plot hole. This is our home. In another time." "It's working!" Kneumsi shouted and bounded out of the door. There he saw the army scrambling to attack but unable to pierce the now domelike field. Meanwhile the large cyborg Time Tender, who was even less human by the day, was held in place by three beams of red energy, channeling the crappiness of Escape from the Bronx into a vicious weapon. To add to the assault Kneumsi himself began reciting some of the worst lines of dialogue and adding even more pauses than Henry Silva as he did it. In the distance, Time Tender screamed, reached for the heavens and clenched his fists in pain. "I can't believe Nagas and Kneumsi are actually working together!" he howled at the edge of the clearing. "Neither can I, man!" Kneumsi bellowed before adding the quote "'The Bronx will be back in the hands of the gangs, which means you'll go back to being the number one man for all the big robberies. Instead of hiding out down here, scratching your balls.'" Immediately Christine was by his side and took his hand. "'I LIKE scratching my balls!'" she quoted as they walked toward Time Tender menacingly. They were now close enough to see Time Tender digitizing like Will Hurt toward the end of Altered States. "And now for the Coup De Grace!" Kneumsi shouted over the fray. "Nagas, Aki, Jones... intensify the beams, focus on the crack. No, not his... I meant the crack in his armor where Time Tender's blood first merged with the machine." As they did so Kneumsi quoted Silva one one last time. "'No sugar you idiot! How many times do I have to tell you, no sugar! It makes me CRAZY!'" And with that, the now inhuman Time Tender ruptured just like Zantorion's own Westinghouse-brand Time-Normalizing doohickey had (or will do) in the 2014 Thanksgiving Turkey, his now mechanical head did indeed explode, his pants inexplicably fell down and this rupture caused a wave of red energy to fill the forest. The last thing Kneumsi saw before dragging Christine back inside was Zantorion himself hugging Dick Butterworth for comfort as the wave of mutilation zoomed over them, causing both to vanish along with all of their erstwhile army. "And so we are victorious." Nagas said with a satisfied smirk. "Thanks to Escape from the Bronx, the 2017 Christmas Turkey!" Christine narrowed her eyes. "So they're all dead? Why are we alive?" "No." Kneumsi explained. "Nagas Aki correctly surmised both that the time cyborg the Time Tender now is had tracked us here due to the location and the badness of the previous movie. And to do so he had to use his mechanical parts, inherited from the Westinghouse Brand Weird Time Oscillator Type Tachyon Thingy in the same way Zantorion's ship had used the Westinghouse-brand Time-Normalizing doohickey on the 'don't you dare' setting. By simulating the rupture that took place when Nagas and Aki- "Yeah, I was there. We met when I was a cadet. It's not a plot hole." Aki contributed. "... when Nagas and Aki first met Zantorion which, unfortunately, was over a year after I met that asshole." "With Flynn." Jones reminded Kneumsi. Kneumsi nodded and said "That's right. Exactly right. Then, as now, the tachyon wave caused everyone to revert back to their own proper times and spaces. Thus Zantorion is back in his future, the armies are all back in their proper worlds, times and dimensions and Dick Butterworth..." "He's back in jail in the present." Nagas said with a smile, having turned the channel on the TV to a real news channel that Trump would surely call "fake"... because Trump is an idiot. Aki sighed with a smile. "And focusing the energies through our devices and using this place as a ground zero lens worked. We made it happen... and meanwhile were all safe inside. We... we won!" And they had... for the moment. But as Christine and Kneumsi gathered up the posters that read "Win Part of a Guitar" and "Speed doesn't kill... IMPACT DOES!" and "Full On Godhead!" as well as the one that has the complete lyrics to the "I Can't Get Over Ovaltine" Jingle, including the rare, radio-only, musical bridge, all printed out in that nice, clean 2001 A Space Odyssey font, Jones stood up and turned around to address all four of his allies. "We made it through this, yeah. But guys... we are no better off than we were on Thanksgiving... or was it Christmas Eve? Don't you see? When we leave here we don't even know what date it will be. Trump might not even be impeached yet and we're no closer to finding and rescuing Flynn." The other four nodded slowly and bowed their heads. This was all true. This bizarre saga had caused so much damage over the years. What could be next? The day may have been saved, but the spacetime continuum was still in danger... and where was Flynn? The end… And the beginning. |
The 2017 Christmas Turkey
Reviewed (late) by J.C. Maçek III
Who is solely responsible for the content of this site...
But where the hell is Flynn?
Got something to say? Write it!
Humorously, Escape from the Bronx actually kept my attention.
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