Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)

In the Los Angeles ghetto of Anderson, six young members of a gang called Street Thunder are shot dead by police. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is given the easy job of caretaking the last few hours of a precinct police station.

But when he gives refuge to a man on the run, a nightmare begins.

Quite probably the best low-budget mainstream movie ever made, Assault On Precinct 13 is simplicity itself.

A cop, a couple of villains, a couple of dolly-bird secretaries and a wounded Joe Public whose daughter has just been blown away outside an ice-cream van, hole up in a disused police station while a gang of Latino bad guys from Street Thunder bombard them with one missile after another.

John Carpenter has always called this movie his tribute to Howard Hawk’s 1959 old-west classic Rio Bravo but it makes more sense when viewed as a horror movie.

Those hordes of hoodlums look more like refugees from one of George A Romero’s zombie movies than the teen hoods of your conventional gang movie. Moreover, the cop isn’t the only good guy; the villains turn out to be men of honour too.

Despite its subtle moralising, what sticks with you are Carpenter’s images – not even Hitchcock has made a telephone booth at the side of a frame bulge with more threat. And the film is filled with humour so black it’s almost shocking.

And his soundtrack – a sequence of synth riffs that know just when to fade in and out – is a real pulse-racer.

Lt. Ethan Bishop
Austin Stoker
Napoleon Wilson
Darwin Joston
Leigh
Laurie Zimmer
Lawson
Martin West
Wells
Tony Burton
Starker
Charles Cyphers
Julie
Nancy Loomis
Warden
John J Fox
Kathy
Kim Richards
Sergeant Chaney
Henry Brandon
Ice-cream man
Peter Bruni
White warlord
Frank Doubleday

Director
John Carpenter

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