A BLOG POST ABOUT ‘ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13’
Even after all these years, Assault on Precinct 13 is still one of the most zero-fucks movies ever made.
Released forty years ago this month, shot in Panavision on a $100,000 budget, Precinct is a nasty, brutal, exploitation action picture. Set in devastated, inner-city Los Angeles, the movie focuses on people who get trapped inside a police station, fighting for their lives as a virtually unstoppable gang of killer cholos take siege on the building. It’s a corpse-heavy urban nightmare where everybody is in the dark, both figuratively and literally.
But Precinct is also is a throwback to the Westerns and melodramas of the thirties and forties. For writer/director/editor/composer John Carpenter, this was his chance to make the kind of film his idol Howard Hawks would make. Even though he would remake a Hawks film several years later with The Thing (which Matt Zoller Seitz recently spent thirty minutes talking about) a redo of the Hawks-produced, 1951 film The Thing From Another World, Precinct is practically a Hawks tribute. It references nearly all of Hawks’s movies. Hell, the movie itself lifts the plot from Rio Bravo. But it also bites The Big Sleep, Red River, To Have and Have Not and Rio Lobo, Hawks’s last film. This certainly explains why, despite its pulpy, grimy veneer, there’s some sophisticated storytelling going on in Precinct.
But, as Carpenter as noted in the past, the movie also cribs from Night of the Living Dead. You definitely get the feeling that the gun-toting gang that wreaks havoc on this movie resembles zombies more than actual people. These thugs are so ready to kill and be killed that they have no qualms killing a little girl (played here by future Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Kim Richards), which actually happens in the movie. (Man, watching that kid get shot straight in the chest further reminds you how movies back in the ’70s had absolutely no chill.) When the daughter’s father retaliates and kills the gang member responsible, he runs in the precinct and remains catatonic from then on. That’s what sets the siege in motion.
Inside the station, it’s practically a desolate scene — only a couple of cops and a couple of female employees. They also coincidentally get a visit from a band of in-transit convicts who make a stop to the station when one of them needs medical attention. Once the bullets start flying, that’s when the cops, the employees and the convicts instantly become a unit fighting for their own survival. The convicts get some guns to shoot back at the gang (which consisted of crew members and college friends) trying to get in. It’s an us-against-them situation, as they briefly forget their place in the world so they can live through the night.
And that is perhaps the most fascinating thing about Precinct. Even in a pulpy B-movie like this, Carpenter creates a world where different people work together. The gang inside the station is just as multi-cultural as the gang outside. Hell, Carpenter even cast Austin Stoker, an Afro-ed black guy as the policeman/main hero. He actually shares hero duties with two other characters: there’s Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a convicted killer who becomes the cop’s main ally. Wilson, who Carpenter has said is a precursor to Snake Plissken, Carpenter’s famed antihero from Escape from New York, is a detached desperado who seems to have quantum-leaped from a Western, spouting cornpone dialogue (“You look like somebody spit in your socks”) and acting like an outlaw with a moral code. These two are aided by Leigh (Laurie Zimmer), a mysteriously badass woman who doesn’t even flinch when she gets shot in the arm. Needless to say, she and Wilson get along just fine.
In its own grungy, violent way, Precinct presents an idealistic — dare I say, hopeful — view of what should happen when people get stuck in a life-or-death situation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a cop or a convict — you should have each others’ backs if you want to make it out alive. (You certainly didn’t feel that in the lousy 2005 remake, with Ethan Hawke as the hero cop and Laurence Fishburne as the slippery convict, which I’m not even gonna waste a lot of time talking about.) And since we’re currently living in a time where the country couldn’t be more divisive politically, it’s almost beautiful watching a movie like Assault on Precinct 13, where bullshit like that doesn’t matter and people ultimately realize how much they need their fellow man in a time of crisis.
