Well boppers, another riveting month of movie action has come to an end… time to turn the wheel and say a parting word or two for our beloved Warriors. As always, we’d like to share a few nuggets of required reading for anyone looking to extend their fascination with Walter Hill’s magnum opus beyond just one month.

Normally around this time of the month we’d be posting up a lengthy version of our own favorites inspired by the soundtrack to X movie. It just so happens that we think the soundtrack for The Warriors by Barry Devorzon and all of the other tracks on the album are just too hard to top. Well, you know what they say – if you can’t beat ‘em, join em. As such we’ve completed our own song inspired by the soundtrack.

Step inside the wayback machine, and give the knob a quarter crank. It’s 2005, and a video game for a 25 year old movie very few people remember has just been released… by one of the largest and most successful video game companies in the world. After the controversial and yet incredibly successful third entry in the Grand Theft Auto series, it seemed Rockstar Games could do no wrong. While the move left a lot of insiders (and gamers) scratching their heads, the Toronto branch of Rockstar was crafting one of the most beloved games from the last generation of video game consoles.

For the completist, “The Bronx Trilogy” is the unofficial title for a trio of Italian films by Enzo G. Castellari, director of the original Inglourious Bastards, inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s film. The films include 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx and The New Barbarians. The films are most often described as The Warriors meets Mad Max, and the description is apt. Released from 1982 -85 the films take place in a post-apocalyptic version of the future-past where the Bronx has been quarantined and contained (Just like Escape from New York). Gangs fight for control of the limited territory.

One of my favorite aspects of fandom in the age of democratized technology has to be the fan film. Sure, a lone fan can conjure a bit of photoshoppery or script up their own episode of Star Trek, but filmmaking is an incredibly time consuming, collaborative effort. Which means of course that groups of fans are getting together and spending long hours assembling their own cinematic homage to the films they love.

The Warriors had a definite impact on punk cinema, even though the movie wasn’t explicitly about punks. The gangs’ unique styles, camaraderie, and general anti-establishment stance (by creating theirown gang code) inspired many movies, all trying to capture that Warriors essence. As punks began toinvade the cinematic landscape, there was one movie that took the highly stylized gang warfare of The Warriors and transported it to a much scarier location… a high school.

Mix equal parts of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï’s reductive cool with the economic low-tech visual flourish of other auto films like Vanishing Point, and you’ll have the essence of The Driver. Even on first viewing, it’s readily apparent the unheralded impact the visual style of the film has had on everything from the “Grand Theft Auto” games to films like The Transporter, The Fast and the Furious and Death Proof (almost assuredly and admittedly a direct descendant of Hill’s work here).

Sometime in the late 80s, comic book adaptations of films became part and parcel of the promotion of a movie.  I can fondly recall paging through my own copy of the Archie Comics-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie adaptation until it was dogeared.  At a time when the window between theatrical and home video release was extensive (and that’s putting it mildly! I was forced to view my beloved Jurassic Park in the cinemas for an entire year!  Six viewings!), these inexpensive adaptations were assuredly a good way to keep young minds tuned into a property well beyond its expiration date.  On the page, I could relive the magic of the film, recalling it fondly as I anxiously awaited a time when I could watch the movie in the comfort of my own home.

Prior to the film, DPK was an in demand stage actor appearing alongside Deborah Van Valkenburgh (Mercy) in a musical attended by Walter Hill and his cohorts. There, Hill spotted DPK with his long flowing hair, strumming away soulfully on stage with his guitar and decided to cast him as the malevolent gang member. Luther would be DPK’s first role on the silver screen.

On his commentary for the director’s cut of The Warriors, director Walter Hill mentions a small competition of sorts between his film and another film about youth gangs shooting in New York at the same time. As it turns out, that film is none other than The Wanderers. If the name doesn’t strike a bell then maybe the director Philip Kaufman will. The very same director of films like The Right Stuff and Quills, who also co-created the character and story of the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, with George Lucas.

The leap from page to screen can be jarring for some films, and The Warriors is no exception. Cinema is an art like no other and frequently scenes that seemed incredibly pertinent to the development of a story are discovered later to be a burden on the pacing and structure of the storytelling. Director Walter Hill and his editor Freeman A. Davies wisely decided to dump seven largely expository scenes in favor of keeping up the brisk pace of the film. The dialogue of these scenes was either reworked into other moments of the film or excised entirely.

“By 1975, many people considered Times Square to be the epitome of urban and moral decay,” says a brief history of the area. Just four years later, Walter Hill would direct a film that gets directly at that urban and moral decay, by creating a dystopian picture of a near-apocalyptic fantasy New York, controlled by gangs and ravaged by street violence. Based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 book of the same name, but updated to reflect cultural shifts from the intervening 14 years, The Warriors is something like fear distilled. It is our world, and yet not our world at the same time.