The Disney parks have long been the source of urban legends-that the turkey legs are really made of emu, that a man was once decapitated on a roller-coaster, that a secret staff of “fixers” quietly clean up any problems-and Escape From Tomorrow nods to those rumors, while using a lot of limited-perspective shots to show how just the slightest tweak can make The Happiest Place On Earth seem like one man’s personal hell.
Abel Korzeniowski’s dreamy orchestral score and Lucas Lee Graham’s sharp black-and-white cinematography create a sense of wonder that Moore then undercuts by using computer effects to distort the faces on Disney’s animatronic rides (not that it takes much to make them look grotesque), and by emphasizing the seminal spurt of amusement-park fountains and sunscreen tubes. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu. It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. Some of what he sees and hears may just be bubbling up from his fevered imagination-or perhaps he’s having a rare moment of clarity, allowing him to see the truth beneath Disney’s relentless corporate-enforced cheeriness.Įscape From Tomorrow doesn’t vary much from start to finish, beyond getting darker and stranger as it goes. As the day grinds on, Jim gets seduced by a mysterious woman who reveals to him that all the park’s “princesses” are actually high-priced prostitutes, and he gets taken into a secret lab inside the Epcot dome. His family can’t agree on anything, he keeps suffering mishaps and hallucinations, and he’s struck with a general queasiness caused by a combination of motion sickness, intoxication, paranoia, depression, and possibly a touch of the “cat flu” that’s been going around. Jim tries to shake off his funk by going to the park with his wife and kids, but his day slowly begins to unravel. Roy Abramsohn stars as Jim White, a doughy, dorky husband and father who learns that he’s been fired on the morning of his last day of a Disney vacation. This isn’t some generic middle-class nightmare.
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The location dictated the way Moore and his company worked, which in turn influenced what this movie became. The story of how Escape From Tomorrow came to be is as fascinating as the movie itself, but Moore’s method isn’t a publicity stunt. Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow was shot almost entirely within the confines of Disneyland and Walt Disney World, with the cast and crew collecting footage surreptitiously over the course of several months while pretending to be camera-wielding tourists. Some architects suggest that the shape of a place can determine what happens inside.
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