Assault on Precinct 13

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) takes place in a Los Angeles police station about to be closed down. A gang besieges it, leaving one officer, two staff and two prisoners in transit inside. The phone is cut, there is no power, and no help is coming. It was made for 100,000 dollars. John Carpenter wrote it, directed it, composed the score and edited it, taking the editing credit under the pseudonym John T. Chance, the name of John Wayne's character in Rio Bravo. The reason is plain: Carpenter's first script was called The Anderson Alamo, and when the budget would not stretch to a western he moved Rio Bravo directly into a contemporary city. The second source is Night of the Living Dead; the gang members barely speak and move like the dead. Its most notorious scene is the shooting of a young girl beside an ice cream truck. The MPAA threatened an X over it. Carpenter submitted a cut version to the censors and distributed the film with the scene intact. He said years later that he regretted it, that he was young and stupid, and that he would not do it again. It went unnoticed in America. Its screening at the 1977 London Film Festival changed that; festival director Ken Wlaschin praised it and the film built a reputation across Europe. It runs 91 minutes. Good for: siege films, low budget genre cinema, and early Carpenter. Less good for: the ice cream truck scene is still shocking. Some of the acting is amateurish and the characters are thin. The gang is given no motive at all; that is deliberate, but for some viewers it empties the film out.