Part of Midnight Movies
“The ne plus ultra of comic-book cinema isn’t a comic-book adaptation: it’s Walter Hill’s exhilarating 1978 re-imagining of The Odyssey set in untamed pre-Giuliani New York, where a gang framed for the murder of a charismatic would-be ruler must bop its way home to Coney Island across miles of hostile territory. (Back in ’78, my friends and I thought Michael Beck’s SWAN was the last word in big-screen badassery — and next thing we knew, he was roller-skating with Olivia Newton-John and a bunch of cartoon fish in XANADU.) In this immersive fantasy of urban peril — a template for 30 subsequent years of video games; it’s basically Grand Theft Auto on foot — the city is one big interstitial interrupted by boldly stylized encounters with mythic foes: the siren-like Lizzies, the skinhead Turnbull AC’s and, best of all, the glam-rock, bat-swinging Baseball Furies. Hill, the movies’ poet of the cleanly thrown punch, stages every beatdown and bust-up with such exultance in motion you can practically feel the swoosh of whizzing fists. I love this movie.“ —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (Sep 25, 2008)
“This isn’t just a movie that humanized the street punk. It’s one that existed entirely within the world of the ’70s teenage gang, one where the heroes and villains and authority figures all live that life. It’s a movie that built a whole universe around them.” —Tom Breihan, A.V. Club
