WARRIORS . . . Come out and play-i-ay . . . One of the ultimate New York cult movies – “The Warriors” – is laying it down and cutting things up 26 years after its release. Recently, a director’s cut was released on DVD, and today, a video game based on the gang adventure hits shelves.
Can you dig it? Can . . . you . . . dig it?!
Jean-Marie Whitley, who works at the sci-fi/comic store Forbidden Planet, certainly can.
“It’s kind of an urban history to New Yorkers,” she explains.
“If you have family that was raised in New York itself, it’s part of your history. It’s part of understanding what happened in the past, what your family was doing at your age – not necessarily being in a gang, but being around something like that, that atmosphere.”
Set in the late ’70s, “The Warriors” takes place over the course of one night, in a city overrun by colorful gangs, including the face-painted Baseball Furies and the overall and roller-skate-wearing Punks.
Falsely accused of killing the leader of the most powerful gang in New York during a citywide truce, the Warriors must make their way from The Bronx to their home turf in Coney Island, all while being hunted by rival gangs.
“It’s the first real gang movie, predating ‘Scarface’ ” (1983), says 25-year-old fan Greg Wang of Manhattan, who likes the “grittiness and New York rage” of “The Warriors.”
“We watched it once a week in college and dressed up as the Baseball Furies for Halloween. I don’t want to ride the subway and hit people with bats, but it’s absolutely a romanticized New York.”
Fortunately, the mature-rated video game version of the movie lets you indulge any deeply repressed bat-swinging desires you may be harboring with a game controller instead of a bat.
A return to “brawlers” of the past, the game features lots of fist fighting, roundhouse kicks and clubbing people with wooden bats (no guns though). It also begins three months prior to the events of the film – which happens two-thirds of the way through the game – to set up the Warriors’ backstory and give gamers a feel for what it was like to be in a gang in the late 1970s.
“I’ve been waiting for it to be a video game,” says Wang, who was 12 when he first saw “The Warriors.”
“The movie was like a video game [to begin with]: You’re fighting your way through New York City to get to the main bad guy, so it has that kind of appeal for young kids watching it.”
With Halloween right around the corner, Forbidden Planet’s Whitley says there’s no doubt that you’ll be seeing lots of “Warriors”-inspired “gangs” roving the streets.
“People that have never heard about ‘The Warriors’ are starting to hear about it,” Whitley says.
“Because the game and DVD are out, people are going to recognize it and are going to dress up like ‘The Warriors,’ just like two years ago, when people were dressing up as Neo and Trinity from ‘The Matrix.’ “