Review: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

Assault on Precinct 13 was the second film in the long career of John Carpenter and the first to really bear the hallmarks of a "John Carpenter film", his first movie Dark Star having been more of a hippie comedy than anything. It's a very rough and uneven film where you can tell that Carpenter was stretching his tiny budget to the breaking point, and that the film's ambitions as a contemporary take on the basic plot of Rio Bravo may have been just a bit too ambitious for a guy working with just $100,000 (adjusted for inflation, still just over half a million dollars). And yet, despite the clear and visible limitations the film is working under, everything important just clicks. The shootouts had me on the edge of my seat even as the film kept the bad guys offscreen, hiding in the shadows. The cast was very uneven, but the three main characters all grabbed my attention. Carpenter's penchant for doing the score to his movies himself elevated even the slower moments between the action sequences. There were a lot of scenes where I thought the movie was spinning its wheels, but far more where it roared back to life. Its take on gang violence bears little resemblance to the reality of such then or now, but does feel terrifyingly prescient of today's wave of spree killers. And the low budget forced upon the film several creative decisions that lent it a measure of grit that sold its urban ghetto setting. It's a perfectly imperfect movie whose faults are plainly visible, but still managed to knock my socks off in spite of them.

The film takes place at a police station in the crime-infested South Central Los Angeles slum of Anderson, where a skeleton crew, comprised of the officer in charge Sgt. Chaney, the secretaries Leigh and Julie, and the highway patrol officer Lt. Ethan Bishop who's been newly assigned to the station for its final night, is keeping the lights on for one last night before the building is shut down and they're moved to a new station. A prison transport containing three convicts, Wells, Caudell, and the well-groomed psychopath Napoleon Wilson, also arrives at the station that night when Caudell falls ill. Meanwhile, in the rough neighborhood outside the station's walls, a gang called Street Thunder is on a rampage, and when a father who witnessed them murder his young daughter in cold blood comes to the station searching for help, Street Thunder responds by putting the station under siege. As Chaney and the prison guards are taken out and the power and phone lines are cut, and with the surrounding city blocks largely abandoned as anybody with any sense moved away long ago, the remaining cops and criminals must band together in a fight to survive the night with whatever weapons they have on hand.

The main idea of Street Thunder bears almost no resemblance to any real idea of how gangs operate, then or now. It's explicitly stated and shown that they're a multiracial gang, and they don't have any particular community ties, either. They don't seem to care about money, instead committing horrifying crimes like murdering children simply for the thrill of it. They have rituals that are almost akin to a cult. They're not a gang as we would recognize them, but they are a scarily prescient portrait of mass shooters, people who generally do engage in the behaviors we see of them, the main difference being that, instead of one lone man with a gun, it's a whole mob of them united by a common cause of chaos for its own sake. They are practically a zombie horde that can think and use guns, a portrait of urban decay as it was seen and thought of by people living through it in the '70s, and they make for a terrifying threat to the protagonists. Carpenter knows when to keep their attacks offscreen and use gunfire as the calling card of their presence, most notably in a scene where the station's lobby is trashed in a hail of bullets that feels like it lasts several minutes, and also when to start having them trying to raid the station in full force, providing some epic shootouts. There are long lulls in the action where you know they're hiding and watching behind the bushes across the street, waiting for the protagonists to let their guard down as they argue with each other and count their dwindling ammo supplies. As a personification of crime in the '70s, Street Thunder is a hell of a villain, dehumanized by design and simply coming for the heroes out of little more than a hatred of civilized society.

The main characters are an uneven bunch, but the three big ones were fortunately my favorites. Austin Stoker plays Bishop as a "boy scout" of a cop from Los Angeles' wealthy Westside who's clearly not prepared for the chaos that officers in South Central routinely face. Wilson, meanwhile, is played by Darwin Joston as a prototype for Hannibal Lecter, a guy whose on-screen behavior, routinely attacking officers while remain calm, cool, and collected throughout, leaves us to wonder what kind of horrifying crimes he committed to get himself sent to prison. As Bishop and Wilson butt heads through their teeth-clenched teamwork, I got the feeling that one of them might turn on the other once all this was over, if they even waited that long. Laurie Zimmer's Leigh was more of a supporting character, but she still got a lot to do in the action scenes and came off looking and feeling like a badass even after getting injured by the bad guys. The weaker characters fortunately got less screen time and were mainly used for cannon fodder, but I still found myself wishing at times that the film could find more to do with them, especially given the focus many of them get in the lengthy opening. In particular, I didn't like how, after arriving at the police station, the father went catatonic like Barbara in Night of the Living Dead and spent the whole movie hiding, especially given how he was such a major focus of the first act. Given what the villains did to his daughter, I would've liked to see him get more to do fighting them, perhaps with a nastier edge as it's personal for him. Instead, for long stretches I almost forgot he was still around, only occasionally being reminded of his presence just to establish that he's not dead yet.

The Bottom Line

Assault on Precinct 13 is a grimy, mean, and vicious action thriller that strains under its low budget but otherwise makes for a hell of an introduction to John Carpenter, who's proven himself to be one of the best there ever was at this kind of movie. Check it out.