John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 is a muscular throttle of an experience. The film pushes photographic extremes in its respectable 35mm anamorphic format. Each shot is imbued with coarse grain and lighting contrasts so sharp they threaten to shred eyeballs to ribbons. Backing up its aesthetic is an unrelentingly savage narrative. In a run-down South Central L.A. district, a local gang called Street Thunder attempt to steal a weapons cache in the dead of night. They are mercilessly gunned down by police during an ambush and a band of “warlords” unite in response. Countless vengeful entities join the men in a final confrontation between them and the occupants of a deserted precinct. Per the original tagline, a night of white-hot hate erupts, pushing the latter group to endure with fast-diminishing resources.
On his way to a shift at the precinct, Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) listens to a news report about the previous night’s slaughter. From his driver-side window, we see Bishop’s quaint residential area turn desolate. Concurrently, the radio host exacerbates a harrowing struggle between Street Thunder and the authorities. His embellishments downplay the one-sided affair we’ve just seen unfold, affirming the status quo to his listenership. Notably, Bishop’s expression does not change during the program. This is because the broadcast isn’t news to someone already trained to carry out violence with impunity. It exists to sell residents of Bishop’s neighborhood a skewed perspective of the outside communities he is hired to police. Considering the director’s highly political messaging spanning multiple projects, this bit of commentary falls squarely into a career’s worth of anti-establishment sensibilities. From here, the film explores its main hypothetical: what chance does authority stand against a concerted effort to upend the hum-drum, conservative social order?
Immediately, the visual significance of the warlords comes across like a brick to the face. A goofy bloodletting scene establishes them as intimidating early on, but the crew’s menace is politically coded to a near-farcical degree. Each man assumes a militant bearing, dressed in all black and with the possessed gait resembling a work of right-wing propaganda. Excluding their white member, the warlords belong to marginalized racial groups. One of them straight up looks like he walked out of an Alberto Korda photoshoot. But the warlords aren’t burdened with characterization and hardly speak full sentences. They are non-human as per the director’s vision, crafted to provoke certain theater-goers. The nihilism of a white 28-year-old college punk radiates at face value from these blank images alone. However, Carpenter’s instincts steer the film away from authoritarian conventions of that era’s exploitation genre fare.
The 1970s were an oasis for blood-thirsty vigilantes in cinema. One could practically ride the wave of reactionary politics, from real life to screen, and land on the shores of films like Dirty Harry and Death Wish. Vigilantism in those films is engaged sensationally, if at the expense of people who weren’t the self-righteous white man with a gun. In Carpenter’s own project, there is no way of salvaging anything close to humanity from either the warlords or their cohorts. Instead, it challenges authority in the immediacy by warping genre traits. The story flexes its horror roots by using the supernatural presence of the gangs to instigate conflict. In fact, Carpenter models them after the mindless ghouls in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Horror being inextricably political, the director’s framing is consistent with Romero’s own intentions. Displays of carnage in Assault on Precinct 13 are exhausting and unglamorous. Survivors are ill-prepared to confront the harm done in both existential and material ways. The warlords may be faceless goons, but their uprising signals a karmic reckoning. Going further, Carpenter flips the script on the traditional US western by exposing the fallacies in its protection of phony ideals and barrel-chested posturing.
Broadly speaking, the classical western often centers lawmen acting on violent means for the collective good. Howard Hawks’ 1959 film Rio Bravo, from which Carpenter lifts his film’s plot and stylistic inflections, canonizes hard-nosed leaders as part of a national mythology. These messages were read loud and clear during political tensions in the McCarthy era. Carpenter’s decision to “remake” it fit his own fraught social reality. Among his many revisions are criticisms of the penitentiary system and the maverick lawman. In Rio Bravo, the duo of sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) and ex-deputy Dude (Dean Martin) suffer a contentious relationship before virtuously coming together in the name of justice. The dynamic between Bishop and the formerly incarcerated Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) similarly puts them at constant odds with one another. Assault on Precinct 13, however, scraps a redemption arc for Wilson and instead presents him as the antithesis of Bishop’s stoic authoritarian-type.
A man on death row, Wilson is the product of a failed legal system. When we meet him in prison, he is struck out of his chair by the warden for little else than a sarcastic remark. He later reciprocates but is threatened before getting wrangled onto a transport bus. Wilson’s concern for an ill prisoner on the bus, who dies before setting foot in the temporary jail of the precinct, affirms his sympathetic qualities. In line with characters like Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) in Jules Dassin’s Brute Force, Wilson is able to take charge of a grim situation. With fellow prisoner Wells (Tony Burton), he forms a close friendship when the firefight breaks out. Thrown into a mire of which they had no part in creating, the men share camaraderie as they ironically defend the hole from attackers. Bishop, meanwhile, spends the majority of the film justifying his own position. As members of the police force are eliminated or incapacitated, Bishop is put into a bind. When the moment calls on Bishop to shed his Old West archetype, survival becomes the impetus for unity. Prisoners inside, and the gangs outside, are hardwired to hold no value in Bishop’s head. Yet, blurring allegiances between state actors and state property is his only recourse.
The dread of the unknown is followed through with instances of palpable human error. And the cost of failure is devastatingly calculated. When Bishop is thrust from a passive leadership role to a team player, the survivors begin to make headway. As will become a staple of his action-oriented films, Assault on Precinct 13 ends bombastically. The terror is vanquished in an explosion that takes out the precinct itself. The cavalry shows up just as emotions run high from this victory. But, ultimately, they achieve nothing. On the surface, this sophomore outing from Carpenter is on par with his most fist-pumpingly upbeat. In actuality, it shares a bleak open-ended conclusion with films like Halloween and The Thing.
The violence in Assault on Precinct 13 rivals the most impactful in any Carpenter film. It grasps the dispiriting aspect of being trapped in a no-win scenario and puts silver-screen heroes through a meat grinder. Violence is all-consuming, though you needn’t be a warlord. The gang ends up at the precinct in the first place chasing a man named Lawson (Martin West) after he kills one of their own. Lawson’s response is prompted by the callous murder of his daughter in one of the most distressing scenes revolving around an ice-cream cone ever put to celluloid. A siege with burning socio-political ramifications kicks off and the warlords’ path of destruction inadvertently accelerates unrest. If this is meant to be a comment on current events, it’s vague at best. But the ensuing night of terror is self-contained and meritless, which is the point.
Laurie asks Loomis whether Michael is the boogeyman and we are given an answer in the affirmative with disembodied breathing overlaying an empty house. No matter who the “thing” is, Childs and MacReady will die before it ever reaches land. Bishop shares a brief moment of gratitude with Wilson and the two walk away from the wreckage, practically riding off into the sunset. What they leave behind are a ravaged building and an aggrieved community. To the state, a paltry group holed up in a precinct bordering a neglected district does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Few were saved, but the rest were mere collateral. It’s not just a struggle between a mob and the authorities. It’s an uphill battle against a social hierarchy that would nuke its nose to save face. Carpenter offers no comfort in this morbid absurdity. And this is a film that kicks you out of the nest, winged or not.
