Over time, Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) has become one of my favourite John Carpenter films. Much like George A. Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead, which it was influenced by, it is a triumph of low budget genre filmmaking that cracked the market and inspired countless rip offs. It is the first action picture Carpenter made, which set the tone for many of his other iconic movies (the character of Napoleon Wilson is a prototype precursor for Snake Plissken) and he’d re-use the siege plot for later movies like Prince Of Darkness (great) and Ghosts Of Mars (not so great). In essence, it’s an urban crime remake of an old western, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo for example, and many of Carpenter’s films are just that – westerns in disguise. The mute gangs that lay siege to Precinct 13 on one fateful night are shadowy forms with long hair and denim outfits; they are as amorphous as the Shape in Halloween (while also connecting to the prevailing iconography of criminal gangs as post apocalyptic punk zombies i.e. The Warriors and Carpenter’s own Escape From New York). And the film also goes further than Hitchcock while reusing the shock tactic of Psycho – when a young innocent is brutally killed (the infamous ice cream truck scene) thirty minutes in, all bets are off and no one is safe. The performances of what become our trio of heroes – Austin Stoker as the decent cop, Laurie Zimmer the tough secretary and Darwin Joston as the mysterious prisoner Napoleon Wilson – are great. Is there no finer action sequence than when Napoleon is tossed that shot gun? And there’s that synth Carpenter score – eerie, foreboding and propelling the action and tension forward. Recommended. It’s been available to stream for awhile now on SBS OnDemand (until the end of June 2020).
VHS Tracking 