No, absolutely not.
I have a The Swarm and The Poseidon Adventure Continues box set…
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Michael Caine made some stinkers
Also, via at least 3 dodgy movie choices ,1 guilty pleasure and a favourite of my youngest son. I seem to have quite the extensive accidental Pam Grier collection…
Jackie Brown
Mars Attacks
Scream Blacula Scream
The Package
Escape From LA
Fort Apache The Bronx
Nico ( think it’s called above the law in the US)
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I still don’t think I’ve ever seen Escape from LA.
Escape From LA reminds me a little of Highlander II…
Both movies that seem to be universally derided. Yet, as a huge fan of both their forebears I get a lot pleasure from both these ever so slightly dodgy sequels.
H2 has a solid excuse; a crash in the $ made their budget disappear overnight. With much of the film yet to shoot they ended up with a bit of a mess in the edit, which The director’s cut couldn’t really fix. I won’t mention the alien planet plot, since everyone but me hates it 
If EFLA has an excuse I’d love to hear it!
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As I said, I haven’t seen it. However, from what I can gather, Escape from L.A. suffers from the same malaise as many film sequels that release 10+ years after the previous entry. It’s nothing more than a soulless cash grab intended to bank on nostalgia. Escape from New York is a cult classic, but is itself a very strange movie with a strange premise. Trying to do it a second time is like trying to make a sequel to a comedy movie that just recycles the same jokes (ex. The Hangover Part II is just The Hangover in Bangkok). I think there is a reason why sequels like The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back work, but Jaws 2 (and 3 and 4) and the Jurassic Park sequels don’t. They are one trick ponies and doing a sequel is just telling the same story again.
Compare it to the Craig Bond films: why do Casino Royale and Skyfall hold up, but Quantum of Solace and Spectre don’t? CR and SF tell independent stories that build on what’s established, but hold up on their own. QoS and SP are too concerned with world building and reminding you of what once was and can’t be viewed as their own stories. And I think this is why so many sequels have failed.
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It’s a movie to be watched when very intoxicated, like eating a kebab
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Oh how I could go for a kebab right now…
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Big Carpenter fan myself but LA is most definitely not NY. If anything it almost attempts to channel the off-beat energy of Big Trouble in Little China. To theSpectre’s point, the only way to follow NY would have been with more of the same. But that’s just not Carpenter’s thing. Almost Catch-22 - in trying to avoid “just doing another” you end up with “hey this isn’t the original.”
That said, like nearly every Carpenter, there are moments of real inspiration in LA.
For the devoted fans, the novelisation of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (by some Mike McQuay) builds considerably on the script and features several deleted scenes. Den of Geek gives an idea here…
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L.A. is like a remake as a comedy, and Carpenter designed it especially for the next generation which did not know the original.
It is kind of fun and well made as everything Carpenter does. But I prefer the dark thriller of NY.
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Whul, i’m really looking forward to reading this when i get a moment to savour it. And DoG’s stuff is usually well written, so a huge thanks for the heads up 
Good observation about it not being a thriller! Also coming in the wake of Pulp Fiction everything was afraid to wear its heart on it’s sleeve, so instead of a dystopian thriller, we got a knowing wink to the camera pastiche.
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I love novelizations. Shameless plug, but I wrote an article on DoG about that very topic.
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Is it still there - would love to read it!
As do I. They can sometimes add things to the film as they are often based on previous drafts. Case in point: James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me. I’m currently reading The World Is Not Enough novelization. It doesn’t deviate much, but there are some interesting things that are different from the film, such as a Bond and Elektra playing blackjack before meeting Zukovsky and more about Elektra’s mother.
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That’s very kind of you. It’s quite old and I like to think I’m better at writing these days, if only slightly, but here it is:
I wrote another article for them that I now regret, about wanting to make Bond 23 - what became Skyfall - the last film. This was when the MGM bankruptcy had threatened to end the franchise and I was considering the merits of Eon ending it on their own terms. I wanted history to remember Bond going out with a bang, and not risk it going with interminable legal issues. I’ve since realized that you can’t live life in fear of what might happen and that you have to carry on regardless.
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What did you think of the Christopher Woods ones? I’ve got Spy, but haven’t got round to it yet (I wonder why they haven’t been republished?). I did read his memoir on Bond, though, which I liked.
From what I recall of the TWINE book, Benson repeats the wording of M’s orders twice in a single page, but to be fair to the guy these things have to be written in haste.
I never fully understood the whole business at the beginning with Sir Robert King and the stolen dossier, so perhaps you can say if I’m right or not: Sir Robert King bought a black-market dossier on the dangers of running an oil pipeline in the Caucasus region. A 00 agent was killed for it. On reading it, however, King is dissatisfied and wants a refund. This, for some reason, is carried out by bankers in Bilbao, and his friend M gets Bond to retrieve it. The sum they give him is the precise figure of Electra’s ransom which King had rather recklessly refused to pay. The money was laced with an explosive of some description, which kills him. Electra’s behind it, along with her former captor and current lover Renard. Fittingly, I understand, Electra is a symbol of revenge in Greek mythology. Am I close, or a whole Thames boat chase away from it?
You’re pretty close. It is rather confusing and odd. The agent that is killed is 0012 and King’s lapel no longer sets off the bomb, but rather it’s the cigar girl activating the lapel that turns it into the trigger. Bond opens up far more to Elektra as well. I’m only about halfway through. I’ve never been a huge fan of Benson’s writing style and I do understand the difficulty with creating a novelization with a strict deadline.
To answer your other question, James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me is not just the best novelization, but is one of the best Bond continuation novels overall. Christopher Wood does a great job in capturing the feel of a Fleming novel and the story is significantly different enough from the film to almost exist as it’s own story. James Bond and Moonraker is also a fun read, but much more closely follows the film. From what I remember there are 2 big differences in the story in that Corinne Dufour is an entirely different character and doesn’t meet the same gruesome end and James Bond takes a space walk that is very tense, but does not appear in the movie. I would highly recommend reading both of them if you can.
As for why they haven’t been republished, I don’t believe IFP has the publishing rights, but I could be wrong on that. On their website, the only continuation novels they list are Licence to Kill and GoldenEye. Which is odd as I know they have the publishing rights to TND, TWINE, and DAD.
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All very interesting. I wonder what was wrong with the dossier to make Robert King demand a refund? It’s an interesting set-up, but a bit ropey, for me at least.
Wood says in his memoir that he was hoping that IFP would hire him instead of going to Gardner. I suspect IFP didn’t ask him because of the connection his previous Bond books had to the films.
I say that because of a vague suspicion that Eon and IFP (or Glidrose) didn’t like each other. Michael G. Wilson made a couple of somewhat barbed comments concerning one of Gardner’s books (presumably For Special Services) and how they would never film them. I also read that Saltzman had banned Colonel Sun from being filmed as IFP hadn’t published Per Fine Ounce by author Geoffrey Jenkins (a friend of his).
From IFP’s perspective, it must be rather annoying when your relative created this character for a series of novels and yet most people just know of the films. They may also have looked askance at the frivolous nature of the Roger era. (Fleming himself was ribbed something rotten by friends and family who thought very little of his writing and the thriller genre in general).