assault on precinct 13

John Carpenter hit the ground running with his first full feature, Assault on Precinct 13, in 1976. As a writer / director / composer almost all his stylistic virtues were already in place: throbbing synth music score, carefully composed shots, anti-authoritarian hero, and some studio system spit and polish on a film produced well outside of it. If Dark Star, his 1974 sci-fi collaboration with Dan O’Bannon (Alien), proved Carpenter could point and shoot on budget, Assault on Precinct 13 saw him poised to break it big.

A modern-day variation on Howard Hawks Rio Bravo (1959), the film finds a mismatched group of cops and prisoners fighting for survival against a faceless horde of Los Angeles gang members out to avenge one of their own. Lt. Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is the new cop on the job assigned to help shut down a ghetto area police station. A wayward prison bus drops famous criminal Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Justin) in their ill-prepared laps just as a panic-stricken father races in the door pursued by a host of LA’s well-armed, well-organized street gangbangers.

Assault opens with a bit of showy Hitchcockian exposition and its one honest-to-goodness exploitation element: the execution-style murder of a 10-year-old girl (Kim Richards of Witch Mountain and later Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fame). It’s still a shocking moment and one of the most cold-blooded in Carpenter’s career. But it dramatically sets the stage as a father’s clumsy revenge winds up putting every character’s life in danger.

Anti-hero Napoleon Wilson is an obvious first draft for Snake Plissken, a little rough around the edges but more honorable than criminals he’s been lumped in with. The rest of the cast fill out their archetypes in classic Howard Hawks fashion, particularly Laurie Zimmer as Leigh, the smoldering lady-cop who takes a bullet without a whimper (much as Joanne Dru took an arrow during the Indian attack in Hawk’s 1948 film Red River). An avowed fan of westerns, this is the closest Carpenter ever came to making the real thing.

Assault, like most of Carpenter’s film catalogue, has always looked pretty good on home video. And the same holds true here on this Scream Factory blu-ray, offering up a clear, colorful hi-def transfer. It isn’t a huge leap in quality picture-wise over the previously available 2008 disc from Image. And some of the extras – including one of the director’s better commentary tracks and a 2002 interview adding Austin Stoker – are ported over as well.

But seeing as that old disc is out of print, Scream Factory does more than just keep this great little flick out there and looking fine. They’ve added some new material too: updated interviews with Stoker and actress Nancy Loomis Keyes, along with a new commentary from Tommy Lee Wallace, frequent Carpenter collaborator who served as art director and sound effects editor this time around. All that plus newly commissioned cover art in perfect keeping with the drive-in era.