Original Film Prop Armsel Striker Street Sweeper Shotgun From Ellis Props – As Used in Hollywood Movie Escape from LA Original Items

Original Item: Only One Available. This full scale rubber replica non-firing prop gun as used in the 1994 Hollywood film Escape from LA. The Armsel Strike was modified to appear like a hand gun for Escape from L.A. which is the 1996 sequel to 1981’s Escape from New York. John Carpenter returned as director and Kurt Russell stars once again as Snake Plissken, who is sent into the prison island of Los Angeles to retrieve a device stolen by the daughter of the President of the United States that is the key to activating a powerful doomsday weapon.

The vast Ellis collection was acquired beginning in 1908, when a pawn shop, Ellis Mercantile, began renting merchandise to early filmmakers. According to Ellis Props, it began when a studio employee wanted to buy a glass eye. The pawn shop decided to rent it in case the owner returned, and it continued the practice with other items.

This all rubber example was acquired from the Ellis Props and Graphics liquidation auction. Ellis was the oldest and the largest Prop House in California until its liquidation auctions in late 1999 and early 2000.

The original Armsel Striker is a South African-manufactured cylinder shotgun, designed by Rhodesian Hilton Walker in the 1980s. Production was financed by the Armsel company, but actual production was done by another company called Aserma Manufacturing. Various versions existed, some with the top-folding stock, and others without.

The Striker featured a unique revolver-like cylinder drum, giving it a rather high capacity for the time at 12 rounds. Unlike a revolver, the cylinder isn’t turned by the trigger itself (which would give the weapon an extremely heavy trigger pull); instead, the drum is wound up with a clockwork mechanism, and every time the trigger is pulled, the tension from the mechanism turns the cylinder.

Reloading the Striker is a long and drawn-out process; the Striker lacks an automatic extraction system, and the user needs to manually extract spent casings with an ejector rod, load in new rounds one by one (manually advancing the drum with the rear drum advance lever), and finally wind up the drum with the knob in front of the drum.

Strikers are identified not only by the unique ‘knob’ that serves as the winding key in front of the drum, but also the drum advance lever on the back of the receiver. The Cobray guns don’t have this lever.