Police ambush and kill several gang members in Los Angeles. Gang members make a pact of blood to strike back at police and conduct a siege on the police station which is almost abandoned and due to be closed. Staff of the closing precinct and the criminals being held there while in transit must work together to fight off the attacking gang members.
Review
Set in gangriddled 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 Waynes Rio Bravo roleDuane Jones Ben a recently vacated police precinct as the small town jailfarmhouse and with gang members in place of Night of the Living Deads zombiesNathan Burdettes 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 isnt 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 Knapps 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 isnt overthetop run down buildings and heavily populated streets but vast wideopen 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 sandlogged 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 werent as he would have liked because they didnt 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 overthetop mayhem in subsequent action films by other directors the impact of many of the scenes in this film cannot be topped and its often because of the unusual almost documentarylike feel of the film.
Also adding to the effect is Carpenters score. Although its technically primitive its 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 trancelike 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 theyre 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 zombielike menace make Assault on Precinct 13 as frightening as any horror film could be.