Lt. Bishop (Austin Stoker, c.) has to team up with a pair of murderous felons (Tony Burton and Darwin Joston) to battle a vicious gang in John Carpenter thriller
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (John Carpenter, 1976)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, February 15, 2:00 & 6:30
Series continues through February 22
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
In his second film as writer, director, producer, and composer (following Dark Star, which he cowrote with Dan O’Bannon), low-budget maestro John Carpenter turns an about-to-be-abandoned police station in the fictional L.A. ghetto of Anderson into the Alamo in the urban-angst thriller Assault on Precinct 13. Setting the stage with a pulsating synth score and a beautifully cheesy opening-credits design, Carpenter captures the rage and unrest burning inside America in the 1970s in this claustrophobic tale of revenge. Austin Stoker stars as Lt. Ethan Bishop, an easygoing cop who is given the supposedly painless job of monitoring a police precinct in South Central Los Angeles on its final day of business, as a few of the last remaining workers pack up boxes and bid the place farewell. But following a police ambush of the Street Thunder gang and the senseless murder of a little girl, an ever-increasing number of gang members soon descend on the station, seeking bloody retribution. Bishop is forced to defend the precinct with secretaries Leigh (Zimmer) and Julie (Nancy Loomis) and dangerous convicts Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) and Wells (Tony Burton) as the power is cut off and their weapons dwindle. The unending stream of gang members swarm around the station like zombies, trying to burst through doors and windows, as the cops and the cons struggle to come up with a plan to save themselves before all hope is lost. “The very least of our problems is that we’re out of time,” Leigh says to Wilson, who replies, “It’s an old story with me. I was born out of time.”
Carpenter melds together Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in Assault on Precinct 13, so much so that he edited the film under the pseudonym John T. Chance, the name of the sheriff played by John Wayne in Hawks’s 1959 Western. Meanwhile, the Stoker character Bishop plays is often a dead ringer for Duane Jones, and Martin West’s role as a catatonic father evokes Judith O’Dea’s catatonic Barbara in Romero’s frightfest. Filmed in Panavision, the flick nearly earned an X rating because of the scene in which the girl is shot; Carpenter deleted that from the cut he showed the ratings board but left it in the final film. The production has a lurid look and sound as it represents the battle for the streets going on across the country following the 1960s. “It’s a siege,” Bishop says at one point, incredulous as to what is happening. “It’s a goddamn siege.” Assault on Precinct 13 is a scintillating siege on the senses, a mid-’70s indie cult classic whose reputation continues, deservedly, to grow in stature. Jean-François Richet made a respectable all-star remake in 2005 with Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Brian Dennehy, Ja Rule, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello, Gabriel Byrne, and Drea de Matteo, but there’s nothing quite like the original; be prepared to have the music and images echoing in your brain for weeks. Assault on Precinct 13 is screening on February 15 at 2:00 and 6:30 as part of the BAMcinématek series “John Carpenter: Master of Fear,” which runs through February 22 and includes such other Carpenter gems as They Live, Escape from New York, and Starman in addition to the “Carpenter Selects” titles Straw Dogs, Sorcerer, and Forbidden Planet.