Australia - 1981
Director - Brian Trenchard- Smith
Embassy Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 20 minutes
I'm not entirely sure why, but it may be the alternate title for Escape 2000, "Turkey Shoot" which has garnered it attention on several different blogs at this particular time of year. Primarily I would like to point out The Scandy Factory's nice writeup of a Turkey Shoot DVD which includes some cool video clips (his box scan is also much nicer than mine.) I picked up this tape years ago on the merits of its cover art, realizing only later that Smith directed numerous other awesome B-movies that I already knew, most notably Siege of Firebase Gloria.
Years ago I initially began recording my impressions of films on VHS (call them reviews if you like) because I wanted to remember the forgettable details that connected them; no-name actors, voice actors, stolen music etc. An interesting factoid about Escape 2000 that has always brought a smile to my face is that the monologue recited by Steve Railsback in his pirate radio truck at the beginning of the movie, is sampled by the militant Islamic Wu-Tang spinoff group Killarmy on their 1998 sophmore album Dirty Weaponry. It apears in the breakdown of the third song, "5 Stages of Consciousness."
So there ya go, obscure history in music and film collide once again.
This poster comes from IMPAwards
A Thai poster I got from Bearded Movie Afficionado, and another from a retail site.
Australian DVD cover from Flinders Students.
4 comments:
Many thanks, Seth! My video art may be crisper, but I'd really rather have an actual mainstream release over my ultra cheap-o tape. The thing to really have is the import disc which is a substantial 10 minutes longer than the cut US release. I've not gone in and noted every cut, but I'm sure some other site did that a long time ago anyway. ;) Oh, and very cool tidbit about the Killarmy connection.
I was actually going to post more clips, but I found that some Aussie already uploaded the entire movie to YouTube earlier this year. It's a bit on the hard-to-see side, but it's all there.
You betcha.
The 2003 Anchor Bay DVD is 93 minutes long, did you mean another 10 minutes on top of that? It also features a great feature length commentary by Smith, an interview with him and another with several of the stars.
Another tidbit; Killarmy albums were supposedly (not confirmed) found in the vehicle used as a home by the DC Snipers. Their third album, "Fear, Love & War" was released on Sept. 11 2001.
well, fuck. i wasn't even aware of the Anchor Bay disc. The import denotes 93 minutes, but my DVD counter clocked it at 90. Don't know if format conversion is responsible for that or what. There's two featurettes and an interview segment with Smith and others.
I loved Turkey Shoot aka Escape 2000! I discovered it after seeing the awesome Ozploitation doc Not Quite Hollywood in 2008. Seeing Olivia Hussey shoot a jeep mounted heavy machinegun was like a little slice of heaven!
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