1976’s Assault on Precinct 13 is not the first of John Carpenter’s works that I’ve seen (we will get to that at another time, trust me… it’s literally the entire premise of the Express), but it’s his earliest work that I’ve seen (thus far). Precinct 13, of course, being the director’s second film, sandwiched between his first film Darkstar (1974), a film that I assume needs an introduction, as all I know about it is it’s Carpenter’s first film, and the smash hit Halloween (1978), a film which certainly needs no introduction.
As we’re only a few weeks out from Halloween (the day), one might ask why I didn’t decide to lead with Halloween (the film) – and my reasoning is as follows – I don’t believe it’s fair to look at a director’s work that means so much (but, ironically, so little at the same time) to so many people. When I first saw Halloween, I was way too young to appreciate it as a film – I didn’t give a shit about the dialogue, I didn’t give a shit about the pacing, the score, the acting, anything. I was there to get scared.
Precinct 13 was the first of Carpenter’s works that I watched strictly because I had already fallen in love with some of Carpenter’s more famous films – and because of that, the first I watched with virgin yet critical eyes.
Assault on Precinct 13, written, directed, scored and edited (!!!) by Carpenter, tells the razor thin story of a police officer who is directed to take control of the imminently closing Precinct 9, District 13 police station. The station, operating at the hands of a disinterested skeleton crew, finds itself under siege by an almost comically evil street gang – every hope that the precinct has, the gang eliminates – even going as far as removing evidence from outside the station. The rag-tag group of survivors, at this point consisting of prisoners from a prison bus that had stopped at the station because one of the inmates was sick, are forced to ban together for their survival.
Like I said, the plot is razor thin. I have to face it, Carpenter’s scripts require a certain level of disbelief. His strength, however, is in his characters – Lieutenant Bishop and the prisoner Wilson, especially. As I wrote earlier, the LA gang is almost comically evil – one of the gang members kills a 7-year-old girl – comically evil. That said, watch the news on any given night and you’ll hear the same – or worse. There are comically evil people who would kill a 7-year-old girl. These characters are believable, and although we aren’t really given any back story to them, we don’t need backstory. The movie moves along slowly when it needs to, and suddenly explodes into action sequences that remind us what is at stakes.
Carpenter’s writing, at least in this instance, is one of his strong suites. It takes a great writer to take such a razor thin plot and turn it into not only a competent film but one that is worthy of praise – somehow he took a movie that by all rights should be a short film (I’m well aware that the plot I described should be over and done with in ~30 minutes) and turns it into a 91 minute edge of your seat ride that treats is characters as real people.
When I was curious and researching the topic (seeing how well the film was received), the one word I kept seeing was “tense.” This movie is tense, but the films score is even more tense, if that’s possible. Carpenter might possibly be a better musician than director. I’m not entirely sure how strongly I back that statement (my argument would be that he’s equal, somehow), but it could, at the very least, be argued – he’s more than competent musician, and this might be my favorite of his works. It’s tense, and while I know this is subjective, it makes me feel like some sort of trouble is on the way and I need to prepare myself.
The real strength Carpenter possesses, however, (and flexes, in this film particularly,) is that he knows exactly how much character development to give us – he doesn’t give us too much useless info the way a lot of writers pretentiously do, but yet he flushes his characters out just enough that they are believable. As much as we want to believe our lives are like movies, not all of us have backstories worth telling. Some of us have had our trajectories changed by traumatic or horrific events – but not all of us. Sometimes, all we need to know about a character is that they just really want a cigarette.
I rate Assault on Precinct 13 a 4/5. My ranking of all of the selected works of Carpenter will show up at the end of this project.
The Porkchop Express 