Assault On Precinct 13
Sometimes, when stripped of all the normal luxuries that one associates with the glitz and glamour of the filmmaking industry, the one thing that can pull almost any project together is the pure raw talent of the filmmaker himself. John Carpenter was on the precipice of an historic, game changing career as arguably the single greatest horror / science fiction director to ever live, but first he too had to prove himself worthy of bigger and better projects, so in 1976 and on a meager budget of $150,000, he came up with this noteworthy accomplishment, a hybrid of The Warriors (which was actually made later), Night Of The Living Dead and (most obviously) the John Wayne / Howard Hawks Western classic Rio Bravo. Even more amazingly, the biggest name actors in the cast itself remain to this day Tony Burton (best known as Apollo Creed’s trainer in the Rocky franchise), Charles Cyphers (best known as the Sheriff in Carpenter’s own Halloween) and Nancy Loomis (who played the Sheriff’s daughter also in Carpenter’s Halloween), none of whom are even the leads here. Despite an utter lack of star power (even the comparatively low budget Halloween at least had Donald Pleasence) and a number of averagely talented actors giving rather average performances, Carpenter’s writing in and of itself redeems just about everybody on hand here, elevating things tremendously and keeping the viewer invested in the characters even if most of them have unfamiliar faces. The storyline as it is concerns the recent theft of a very large police weapons arsenal by whom it is believed to be a vastly well manned street gang (although we’re never told if this gang has any kind of an official name) that the LAPD has been at war with for quite a while. They have every right to be worried, since soon the gang is fanning out all over Los Angeles on what appears to be a bloodthirsty suicide mission, killing every regular person that they see in the streets to the point where the LAPD resources to combat them are becoming extremely limited. Meanwhile, a regular, well meaning patrolman (Austin Stoker) is given an unusual assignment for the night: to oversee the precinct station from which the film’s title is derived from for its final night of being operational before getting shut down the next morning. Of course, the station is right in the heart of the ghetto which the gang calls its home base (and probably explains why the cops are moving themselves on to greener pastures due to the outright fear that they won’t make it home on any given night) and it isn’t long before a random series of events leads to the gang both surrounding the building and then finally laying siege to it. But there’s even more fun incoming: a prisoner transport bus which has Cyphers in charge of it is forced to make an emergency stop at the station (because it’s the closest one nearby) and with it comes a couple of criminal inmates including Burton’s character and a death row inmate named Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) who carries with him a bit of philosophical wit and a dark sense of humor and is clearly an early template for Carpenter’s most beloved creation, Snake Plissken in Escape From New York. Once the siege begins, it becomes clear that these prisoners are just as much of a target as any of the law enforcement in the building, leading to us witnessing the compromise of freeing them from their shackles and having them fight side by side with both the cops and female secretaries (one of whom is played by Loomis) who were unlucky enough to be on duty that night. Carpenter’s technique for presenting the gang members is unnerving: he COMPLETELY dehumanizes them to the point of being apathetic monsters, never speaking a word of dialogue onscreen even amongst themselves and carrying out their dark mission with not even a shred of the slightest human compassion. We even get Frank Doubleday who was so effective as the mohawked henchman to Isaac Hayes in Escape as one of the primary members. But there is a moment (just one) where Carpenter kind of goes “too far” maybe for the one time only in his career and that is in the first 30 minutes here with depicting the brutal killing of a child, and a little girl at that. The problem is mainly with the presentation (the killing of children onscreen is nothing new although usually done more discreetly) starting with the idea that the child was brought into this dangerous area by her father for his own selfish reasons (i.e. he intended to use her to convince the girl’s nanny to move in with them, something the little girl was indifferent about which makes it obvious that her daddy actually wanted to have more opportunities to fuck the nanny instead) and secondly that the direct events leading to the little girl’s death appeared to be due in large part to her being a spoiled brat with her killing almost being a punchline to justify what happens to her. Finally, the child’s death is not only extremely shocking, but gory as well, complete with a blood squib coming out of her chest when she is shot down. Carpenter reportedly ran into issues with the MPAA over this scene and it’s easy to see why, a moment of exploitative shock that (temporarily) derails the whole film and (even worse) takes away much of the fun associated with his work since while horrific things happening were common in Carpenter films, because they would happen to either grown adults or teenagers, they still wouldn’t have the negative effect of knocking the viewer completely out of the movie as this scene does here. A subjective opinion perhaps, but at least the main source of the action at the precinct remains well paced, taut and suspenseful, with Burton’s inmate even commenting on how he had known a member of this gang while incarcerated and even by his own criminal standards, found them to be so utterly sick and twisted that he never wanted to have nothing to do with them. But some would laud the film’s true strength being in the cops and convicts banding together in the name of mutual survival all while maintaining that trust in each other that neither one nor the other will turn on each other at any given time. While Stoker’s patrolman who becomes the de facto commander when he was really just passing through is overall rather bland, Joston’s convicted murderer Napoleon with his laconic sense of humor and the viewer’s constant attempts to place where they’ve seen this actor before (always a sign of a good performance from an unknown and no, most likely you probably have not seen anything else that he’s been in) pretty much carries things across well enough including his constant asking for a cigarette (later to be a Plissken trait) along with the mutual attraction between himself and one of the secretaries (Laurie Zimmer) who herself has a pretty fatalistic attitude. Overall, a dynamic piece of low budget filmmaking that not only propelled Carpenter to bigger and better things, but also a film that in and of itself carries its own cadre of Carpenter fans who consider it to be the absolute best work of his entire career, a subjective yet valid opinion…
8/10