Assaut

It's time for the old precinct to retire, the last night, after which it's not required, with Ethan Bishop holding fort, there should be nothing to report, what could possibly go wrong, you might enquire. A visit from a bus going to jail, then a shell-shocked guy who's struggles to inhale, there's a gathering outside, where some pressure is applied, before you know it, there's a full frontal assail.

A quiet evening doesn't quite go to plan for the skeleton staff of an almost decommissioned police station, as a gang of vengeful thugs take their frustration out on the inhabitants after an incident earlier that day. It remains a great piece of filmmaking with some brilliant performances from a director who went on to make a difference.

John Carpenter is the master of the B-Movie genre, making well-liked films such as Halloween (birth of the slasher film), Big Trouble in Little China and Escape to New York. Assault on Precinct 13 is one of Carpenter's best, and one of my favourites of his.

In Los Andres gang-warfare is troubling the streets, and one gang was able to steel some advanced weapons to use for their mayhem. The gang, Street Thunder play revenge on the LAPD and swear a blood oath. On his first day on the job, Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), is assigned to run Precinct 9, Division 13 police station, a station about to closed down, and running on a skeleton staff. At the same time Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a prisoner on his way to death row is transfered, but on the way to a high security prison, a prisoner becomes ill and they have to stop at Bishop's station. In South Central LA, Lawson (Martin West) is searching for the house for his daughter's nanny. When he stops his young daughter buys an ice-cream from a van, and ends up getting shot by a gang member. Lawson quickly seeks revenge, killing one of the gang members. By doing this, he obviously get the gang hunting him, and ends up in the police station. The gang lays siege on the station, and the cops and criminals have to work together to survive.

It's a simple premise and plot, and works as a suspenseful horror like film. The siege of an numerous enemy is very similar to George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. It is a short film, and very action packed. It is violence, as excepted, with a shocking scene involving a young girl dying. My DVD is rated 15, but I'm surprised it's not an 18 (and that is rare). The acting a little wooden, but it doesn't matter so much in this type of film. At least John Carpenter tries to bring some character and backstory, especially Napoleon Wilson who works as an anti-hero and a early prototype to Snake Plissken in Escape from New York. Some of the pacing is a little off, especially in the beginning. But Carpenter knows simple ideas, like cops and criminals working together to stop a greater threat, and action and set pieces.

When a man and his daughter drive down the wrong street they get into the middle of a gang shooting. The little girl is killed and the father left distraught, but armed with another victim's gun. He catches up with the gang and kills the leader before seeking refuge in a local police station. However the station is only manned by a few staff as it is in the process of being shut down. A prison wagon also arrives at the station with sick prisoners for temporary holding – however it is then that the street gang launch their attack with stolen and silenced automatic weapons.

I had half watched this film several years ago and didn't review it then because I knew I had been distracted and not able to give it enough attention to be able to form a fair opinion of it – however I didn't really enjoy it then. Giving it another chance produced a much more enjoyable film, even if it seems very basic on the face of it. The plot seems very simple and, in fairness, it is – gang outside, people inside, people try to keep gang out and stay alive. This is doing it a disservice of course because it creates an enjoyable tension from this simple set-up and delivers some enjoyable (if basic) action and thrills. The direction is good; my personal favourite shot being the shot near the end where the smoke clears! This effective delivery is also aided by Carpenter's own score that is nicely pulsating and still sounds great even if it is dated – the important thing is that it still fits the film and therefore works.

The dialogue is trashy but this fits the slight b-movie feel the film has. The characters are also quite simple (very basic backgrounds and personalities for each) but again this seems to work really well. The strength of having a mostly unknown cast is that you can't be sure who will live or die by the end of the film. Despite being mostly unknowns (to me anyway) the performances are generally very enjoyable even if no Oscars are being given out. Stoker and Joston lead the film really well and give good, natural performances with an overflow of charisma. I don't know the other's outside of these two but the rest were good as well, even if the film belongs to Bishop and Wilson. I was a bit let down by the lack of a central bad guy but in one regard the film also uses this well by making the gang an unseen threat that could be an isolated group or an army.

Overall this is a very basic film in several regards, but it is also a very effective and enjoyable one. If you are looking for film references then there are some to be had but for most of us the film's charismatic leads, action and effective tension will be what we stay for – and luckily it has all those with some to spare.

Set in gang-riddled Los Angeles in the 1970s, director John Carpenter was inspired to make a film that was basically a combination of Rio Bravo (1959) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) with rookie cop Ethan Bishop in John Wayne's Rio Bravo role/Duane Jones' Ben, a recently vacated police precinct as the small town jail/farmhouse, and with gang members in place of Night of the Living Dead's zombies/Nathan Burdette's men.

For some viewers, that premise alone may be enough for them to not be able to grant this film a 10, but Assault on Precinct 13 is yet another example of why quality isn't correlated to having unprecedented ideas.

One of the first striking things about Assault on Precinct 13 is that it looks beautiful. It was made on a relatively low budget, and it looks like a large percentage of the money must have gone into camera rental, film stock and film processing. Douglas Knapp's color cinematography is crisp, innovative (I just love the shot with the camera mounted in front of the car headlight, with the sunset in the background) and marvelously portrays Los Angeles as a gritty, suburban wasteland as well, if not better, than any other film I can think of. What makes it effective isn't over-the-top, run down buildings and heavily populated streets, but vast, wide-open spaces, with squat, nondescript houses and buildings, all fading into nothingness. Knapp even manages to make the streets look like this, and a couple scenes are set in what is effectively a sand-logged desert, with a lonely, dangerous phone booth sitting in isolation. The police station also reflects the suburban wasteland look in terms of its spaces and their relationship to each other, its sparseness and its colors.

The low budget nature of the film forced a very successful straightforward, brutal and realistic approach to the action, especially the violence. Carpenter, on his commentary track on the DVD, notes that some scenes weren't as he would have liked because they didn't have the coverage they needed, and had to let them play out, longer than normal, from a single angle. Thank the heavens for a lack of time and funding! Despite the over-the-top mayhem in subsequent action films by other directors, the impact of many of the scenes in this film cannot be topped, and it's often because of the unusual, almost documentary-like feel of the film.

Also adding to the effect is Carpenter's score. Although it's technically primitive, it's just as good as any of his other music, and Carpenter is as talented as a film composer as he is as a director. His use of motifs, often in an almost trance-like repetition, is similar too, and just as effective as, both Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone.

The performances are all excellent, and the staging is even better. If you know anything about the premise of the film before you begin watching it for the first time, you may have difficulty figuring out how they're going to pull off the central situation of the film. The logistics seem to be against creating a prolonged tense situation. Carpenter and company create the perfect scenario with just a couple ingenious moves, and the unending threat, combined with the unusual pacing of the zombie-like menace make Assault on Precinct 13 as frightening as any horror film could be.

The gritty, stylish 'Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)' is my first experience with American director John Carpenter, labelled an "auteur" by the French and a "bum" by his compatriots. At this early stage, I'm siding with the French. This is one of the definitive "siege films," a deft, low-budget blend of the American Western (let's say '3:10 to Yuma (1957)') and a zombie movie ('Night of the Living Dead (1968)' being an obvious influence). In modern-day Los Angeles, the lone inhabitants of a closing-down police station – among them police officers (Austin Stoker), secretaries (Laurie Zimmer), and prisoners (an ice-cool Darwin Joston) – are affronted by dozens of armed gangsters, who are waging a bloody war with the authorities as payback for recent gang-member deaths.

After an extended prologue, in which disparate story lines fatalistically converge on each other (and featuring one particularly nasty moment than nearly landed the film an X-rating) the siege scenario begins… and the tension rarely lets up. One sequence in particular, a tense crawl towards a parked car, had me holding my breath for minutes, its conclusion a veritable kick in the guts. Carpenter, assisted by his own low-key but insistent synchronised score, manipulates the film's urban setting to his advantage: isolation becomes so much more unbearable when civilisation is so near, and yet so unattainable. Chillingly, most of the antagonists themselves remain faceless shadows in the darkness, representing an incomprehensible force of evil, consumed by bloodlust, and unafraid of the consequences.