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John Carpenter's Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)

3:00 am. An armed gang slowly make their way along a dark alley. Suddenly the police shout out, a gunfight breaks out and all the gang members are killed. This opening scene from Assault On Precinct 13 announces the arrival of a major new directing talent. Over some opening scenery shots radio broadcasts inform us that a huge shipment of firearms has been stolen by a street gang.

Newly promoted Lieutenant Bishop (Austin Stoker) is given what he thinks is a small assignment. He has to take care of a nearly deserted LA police station that is in the process of being moved to another location. Only the desk sergeant, a policewoman (Laurie Zimmer) and a young secretary (Nancy Loomis) are still present.

Multiple murderer Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) is being take to Death Row with two other convicts, one of them suffering a terrible fever. The fever gets so bad that they have to pull into the nearest police precinct to call a doctor. The convicts are unloaded and placed into the empty cells of Bishop's 'empty' police station. Bishop's small assignment is starting to become more complicated.

A father and his young daughter are trying to find a relatives house. They have a confrontation with the armed gang which leaves the father terrified, virtually unable to speak. He runs to the nearest police precinct, now Bishop's first night is definitely getting more complicated.

The armed gang want the father at what ever cost so they attack the precinct with a bewildering array of silent arms. Bishop ropes in the convicts to help in the defense, but the precincts resources have all been shipped out.

Assault On Precinct 13 is a masterpeice of taut action and suspense. It has been compared to many films, most notably Rio Bravo and Night Of The Living Dead. In both movies a group of people are under seige, facing impossible odds as wave after wave of enemies attack their outpost. Carpenter admitted that Assault was inspired by Rio Bravo, which is his favourite movie. This is our first real look (Dark Star also touched upon these themes, but not as completely) at JC's common themes that would resurface throughout his film career. The 'heroes' inside the prison are anything but traditional muscle chested heroes who will save the day. They are a disparate bunch of common people forced to join up top defeat an unseen/unknown enemy; this theme appeals to JC and is probably directly attributed to his love of Howard Hawks films such as The Thing and Rio Bravo. The film also touches on lawlessness in society, the power of violence and the corruption of authority and authority figures. The real quality of Assault.. is that these themes are presented as part of the fabric without overwhelming the power of the film to shock and thrill in equal measures.

Assault is an excellent movie. The constant attacks of the faceless horde are superbly staged. The movie follows a very satisfying rhythm with a silent calm after each attack. Each attack is progressively more violent and successful, this builds up the tenstion to the explosive finale. The soundtrack echoes this, written by Carpenter himself it layed down the outline for most of his movie score work to date. Taut electronic rythms accompany the suspense and action, a more flowing electronic music is used in the more contemplative scenes. The acting, especially the two leads (Stoker and Joston) is commendable, but the real stars of the film are the virtually unseen street gang. Just a mass of terror that keeps coming and coming.

This fantastic film finally got a remastered DVD release in Mar 2003, here is a great review of this shiny new disc by Graham Hill:

Assault On Precinct 13 was John Carpenter’s second film after Dark Star, and when it was first released in America in 1976 received little acclaim. However, when shown at the 1977 London Film Festival, the film proved very popular and his career started to kick into gear. While the USA may have seen him as a “bum” (his words) European audiences found something in the film that they connected with, despite its US setting and decidedly Western tone. Carpenter, a lifetime Howard Hawks fan, modelled the film on the classic western Rio Bravo (1959), as he took morally decent characters and trapped them in an enclosed environment trying to defend themselves from overwhelming numbers of an evil enemy. As Carpenter says in the DVD commentary, he has always been interested in this kind of plot, and seems to have used it many times in the likes of The Fog, Prince Of Darkness, Ghosts Of Mars (itself a remake of Rio Bravo and Assault On Precinct 13) and of course The Thing.

Austin Stoker proudly plays the lead role as policeman Lieutenant Ethan Bishop, assigned to oversee the winding down of the virtually abandoned police Precinct 9, Division 13. Events conspire to ensure notorious criminal Napoleon Wilson (played with a John Wayne-esque glee by Darwin Joston) stops off at the station with his police escort and a few fellow prisoners, while a father who has seen his daughter killed by an LA gang goes after them, kills a gang member and tries to take refuge at the station. This is the catalyst for the gang’s assault on Precinct 13, but while the distraught father is their target, the lieutenant isn’t about to let them get him without a fight. The men and women inside the station must try to survive until morning…

Even though it is only the director’s second film, the use of camera is so assured that it is easy to see why he landed the job of directing Halloween two years later. For a very small budget (only a few hundred thousand dollars), a considerable amount of location filming in Los Angeles was attempted, giving the film an authentically creepy and dangerous atmosphere, something Carpenter fears is even more relevant about the ‘city of angels’ today.

One of the most controversial sequences in the film concerns the shooting of an ice-cream seller and his customer, a little girl. They are shot in cold blood by a gang member (played with chilling detachment by Frank Doubleday), and the staging of the deaths beside an ice-cream van in broad daylight seems to undermine the aspects of society we all presume to be safe & protected, in a similar way to the siege on the police station later that day.

This sequence upset the US censors so much that they demanded Carpenter remove the scene of the girl being shot or it would get an X certificate: his answer was to cut the scene in just the print to be sent back to the censors, and to leave it in every print that was to be distributed across America!

To say much more would spoil things for those who haven’t yet seen the film, but what follows is a great example of what made early Carpenter films so fascinating: superb use of the Panavision camera, driving electronic musical score, a cold disdain for human emotions beyond stoic heroism and, yes, somewhat corny dialogue!

The DVD itself is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. This extra wide picture format, much loved by the director, has been used in all his films since and seems to suit his ensemble pieces extremely well, not to mention the use of landscapes to evoke a mood. The actual picture quality is a definite step up from the previous, non-anamorphic DVD released in the US, and while there is still some grain to be seen this is only to be expected from a low budget film that is over 25 years old. The bitrate seems to hover over 5Mbps most of the time, and the DVD is dual layer to keep the quality high. It is certainly streets ahead of the dreadful, Pan & Scan VHS release we have all known and loved throughout the years!

There is no such drastic re-mastering of the audio, which is probably a good thing as 5.1 remixes of older movies sometimes seem a bit too gimmicky – what we have here is the unmistakable thump of Carpenter’s score driving out in glorious, original mono, encoded at 192 kbps, and the track is clear whether it’s music, dialogue or effects.

Extras wise, first up is the Audio commentary by John Carpenter. Available on the earlier laserdisc version, this is a solo effort but doesn’t ever get boring, being filled with lots of information such as the limitations of filming with a low budget, creative use of locations and how to make a handful of extras look like dozens of gang members. He is as ever generous with praise when talking about his cast and crew.

Another audio track consists of the film’s classic score isolated so no dialogue or effects are heard.

The main, new extra is a 23 minute Q&A with the director and star Austin Stoker, filmed at the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood in 2002. Carpenter was on stage for a season of his films at a festival, and here he talks not just about Assault On Precinct 13 but his other films as well. Obviously much of the talk focuses on this film though, and there is some interesting detail that is not touched on in the commentary. Austin Stoker does answer a few questions but 90% of the interview is concerned with the director’s work. The only criticism of this extra feature is the sometimes shaky camerawork, but then we’re lucky to have it on the disc as it is, so I shouldn’t moan.

A moving image gallery of just over 15 minutes is next on the disc, and this shows storyboards for sequences, behind-the-scenes stills, poster designs etc while playing some of the score in the background.

Finally, we have two 30-second radio spots and an old trailer that had so many speckles on the picture that it made me quite nostalgic for the fleapit cinemas of old.

In summary, this is a great re-release of an excellent early film by John Carpenter. It really can’t be recommended enough. The only depressing thing about watching it is that when you compare it to Ghosts Of Mars, released last year - basically a sci-fi spin on the same story - the difference in quality between the two is somewhat alarming. As a huge John Carpenter fan I have had to defend the likes of Escape From LA and Ghosts Of Mars from just about everyone who’s seen them, and I do genuinely like them both as nuggets of cheesy B-movie gold, but even I have to admit that in the early days, when the films were made with more serious intentions, they had a quality and sense of pride that later efforts just can’t seem to match.