10 Movie Scenes You Won't Believe Didn't Use CGI

This one is a little tragic, since there may be no better case of throwing good work after a bad film than John Carpenter’s Escape to L.A.

The belated sequel to 1981’s gritty Escape to New York, Escape to L.A didn’t make its way to multiplexes until a whopping sixteen years after the original film was released, leaving the star at its centre, Kurt Russell’s tough-as-nails Snake Plissken, a little longer in the tooth than anticipated by the time shooting rolled around.

The film was plagued by a ballooning budget and all manner of tonal issues, with Halloween director and snyth score icon Carpenter disregarding an early script as “too campy” only to end up closing the flick with some totally tubular and painfully nineties tidal wave surfing—an effect which, we’re sad to say, was very much CGI (and it shows).

However Russell was nonetheless game for the film, and practiced basketball obsessively between takes in order to nail the famous “Basketball to the death” sequence. Unlike the producer’s insistence that the film make it to the screen, Russell’s persistence paid off, with the actor managing to nail an undeniably impressive full court shot during the scene.