The Warriors Is A Controversial Cult Classic

Walter Hill’s The Warriors is one of those movies that’s quickly becoming more and more of a cult classic. You know how Scarface is a big movie for rappers? The Warriors is well on its way to replacing it in the hip hop community. It belongs on any list of must see action movie downloads for the way that it creates its own world, mixing the fifties, the seventies, sci-fi, and Greek legend.

The film follows The Warriors, a street gang from Coney Island, as they make their way to a meeting with Cyrus, the leader of the Riffs, the biggest gang in New York. Cyrus is a legend, and he riles the other gangs up with the idea of banding together, ending the bloodshed, and taking over the entire city, block by block.

Unfortunately, some crazy fool shoots Cyrus for no good reason, and pins it on The Warriors. So now the Warriors are running across New York City, trying to get back to Coney Island, marching through miles and miles of hostile territory. They flee from rival gangs and cops as they attempt to get home to safety, to their own turf.

It deserves comparison to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours for the way that it really just leads its characters from one screwy situation to the next, although the focus in this film is on action. The action, by the way, is really something. Each fight scene is modeled after a different genre, so you have a samurai battle in one scene and a horror scene in the next.

The movie is really driven and defined by its style. It’s colorful, gritty, glossy and slick all at the same time. The streets are covered in rain and lit by neon signs, and they seem to go on forever. This isn’t just shot on location in New York, but rather, the city looks like some sort of field of legends through Walter Hill’s camera.

The music is another story entirely, with a lot of Rock and Roll and disco tunes setting the scene as The Warriors run, chase, fight and brawl their way across New York City. In The City became a classic, as did Nowhere to Run to. The video game based on the film, released a couple years ago, is worth playing if only because it adds to the soundtrack with more great licensed songs from the era.

The film was based on a novel of the same title, but there are a lot of key differences. For example, while the book shows street life in an ugly light, with not-so-heroic lead characters (the Warriors themselves are much more violent and thuggish in the book), the movie uses the fantasy theme to really create a more heroic adventure story out of the same core events.

There’s supposedly a remake in the works, focusing on LA Bloods and Crips in the early nineties. It’s doubtful that it will match the original, but we’ll see.

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