Assault On Precinct 13

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Runtime: 91 minutes

Directed by: John Carpenter

Starring: Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Martin West, Tony Burton

From: CKK Corporation

Last night was a great time to watch this film (for the first time in years), as I explain below:

Yesterday was the 70th birthday of John Carpenter, who despite what the Twitter account of Rotten Tomatoes briefly said in a tweet that was quickly taken down, is still very much alive. This was the perfect time for me to watch again a film of his I hadn't seen in many years, but always had enjoyed. As I suspected, I still feel the same way now.

Borrowing a lot from Rio Bravo, this low-budget stunner has several people at a soon to be closed police station in a bad part of Los Angeles have to deal with a vicious street gang known as the Street Thunder, who are agitated for several reasons so they attack the station with a lot of firepower; this has also been compared with Night of the Living Dead (Carpenter has acknowledged both that and Rio Bravo as inspirations) as the bad guys are unstoppable and unrelenting like the zombies in Romero's classic. Ironically, the police have to defend with the place with the criminals that are there at the wrong time.

Some things could be nitpicked when it comes to putting all the pieces into place and having the siege take place. I won't do that as I think this is very good. It is intense, contains several moments that will be shocking the first time you see the film, has a quality synth score from Carpenter, and best of all is the interactions between the main characters; it is interesting seeing how they all deal with the siege but before and after the attacks is also important in terms of character work and how they all change due to this horrendous experience.

I've never seen the remake but I am probably safe in assuming it does not have the magic of the original and the changes they made were not for the better. If you even like Carpenter and have never seen this, that is a mistake you must fix, and the sooner the better.