Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

★★
John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is big on ambition and short on execution. It's the story of a gang siege on a police precinct with minimal staffing. The movie features dozens, maybe over 100 gang members all trying to break in, and they're kept at bay by a brave Lieutenant, a secretary and a few prisoners who have no choice but to fight back. It's an interesting concept—inspired by Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, of which Carpenter is a fan—but the direction is tepid, and the acting is stilted. Carpenter would, of course, find greater success later in his career, so this early effort is best viewed as a practice run, allowing the director to fine tune his skills for his most famous projects to come. Carpenter was just getting started, having completed Dark Star with college classmate Dan O'Bannon two years before this. His career went through its growing pains before maturing, so there should be no expectation that he would hit a home run with his first or second movie. Nevertheless, his failed efforts should be scrutinized for what they are.

The police precinct in Anderson, located in a rough part of Los Angeles, is closing down to consolidate its efforts in a new building. All that's left is a skeleton crew. Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) receives his assignment to lead the night shift. Elsewhere in the city, a father (Martin West) and daughter (Kim Richards) are driving around lost. This is not a good time to be lost, because the gang Street Thunder is waging a war against society as revenge for losing some of its members in a police ambush. The gang members are an especially cruel bunch, completely emotionless and needing no words to express themselves. One of the leaders even resembles Che Guevara. The daughter, Kim, approaches an ice cream truck while her father is using a pay phone. Both she and the driver are shot, igniting a confrontation that will play out at the police station and that will last most of the night. The father chases and kills one of the gang members and takes refuge in the station. To make matters more complicated, a prison bus transporting three convicts pulls into the station because one of them is sick. Among them is Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a notorious criminal with a dry sense of humor.

His dry sense of humor actually befits the movie. Street Thunder brings an army to the station, with the occupants trapped inside and cut off from the rest of the force. Weapons and ammo are limited. We have the groundwork for a tense and claustrophobic action picture, yet neither side shows any real sense of urgency about the situation. The actors inside the station recite their lines woodenly. They acknowledge the danger outside but move around as if sleepwalking through a bad dream. The gangbangers are no better. There's clearly a plan of attack, as the members take up different positions and use vehicles for cover, but there's no convincing effort to break into the station. Carpenter spaces out the individual attackers to give our heroes enough time to shoot them. One guy even casually approaches secretary Leigh (Laurie Zimmer) and slowly points his gun to her head instead of shooting her on sight and running past her. This gives Napoleon enough time to smack him. When the initial attack is over, nobody picks up the guns of the dead gangbangers who broke into the cell block.

The entire movie plays out like this. The catalyst for the whole situation, the despondent father, lies curled up on the floor most of the time. He's supposed to evoke the memory of Barbara, the doomed heroine of Night of the Living Dead (1968), but with Barbara on pause there was still plenty happening around her. The survivors in that farmhouse analyzed their situation and voiced disagreements about how to handle it. The innovative use of news coverage advanced the plot while the hero Ben boarded up the windows. The drama in the police station, on the other hand, suffers from unenthusiastic line delivery. Napoleon's repeated requests for a smoke is supposed to be a joke, but he asks the question blandly, and it isn't funny. I don't know why Carpenter settled for these performances. There's an extended pause in the action to allow some exposition and permit the trapped personnel an opportunity to hatch an escape plan. They decide to send someone through the sewers to sneak out, but there's no conviction in their voices, no sense that they're under duress. They're just reciting lines from rote memorization.

I've seen the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 from 2005, but I remember almost nothing about it. According to my master list, I did like it more than this. That isn't surprising. Remakes can be annoying if there is no creative vision behind their production, but occasionally a remake can fix something that was broken. The new version of Last House on the Left is a vast improvement over Wes Craven's original from 1972. Assault on Precinct 13 was clearly hampered by the novice skills of its director. That's okay. Francis Ford Coppola's first movie, Dementia 13, wasn't very good, but he did okay afterwards. Carpenter's sophomore effort is weak, but he shook off the imperfections in time for his next film, the horror masterpiece Halloween. Just imagine if Laurie Strode wasn't on the verge of tears when she instructs the two children to go for help. What if she was dry-eyed and gave the kids instructions as if telling them to do their homework? There would be a total lack of suspense. In a story about a horde of gangbangers trying to break into a police station, suspense is a must.

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