Though the sort of movies that John Carpenter makes are looked down on by most "reputable" critics- and frankly most of his more recent efforts do look pretty weak- but as a director he has just as strong a personality as any acclaimed critics' darling. In this, his first professional film, most of his characteristics as a filmmaker (though not all of his skill) can already be seen. Like most of his best movies, Assault is basically a movie about a group of people who come under siege from a sinister, apparently unstoppable outside force. Here, in Carpenter's first stab at this scenario, this unstoppable force is an L.A. street gang with. Obviously the last thing Carpenter was interested in was anything resembling accurate sociology; the bad guys are closer to the zombies from George Romero movies than to any real gang- they're completely emotionless, care nothing about their own lives, have an apparently limitless number of members, and have an almost supernatural ability to appear out of nowhere. The movie gets off to a shaky start as cops ambush several gang members (in a very 60s touch that's typical of Carpenter, the police shoot them down in cold blood). This scene is disconcertingly amateurish, and with its shaky camera movements, grainy photography, and unconvincing stunts, looked more like something I might see as a class project than as a John Carpenter-directed action scene. Luckily, the movie improves dramatically on from here, leading me to suspect that the movie was shot at least roughly in sequence and that Carpenter may have been still feeling his strengths. In the scenes that follow, Carpenter shows his usual skill at building up suspense, as the gang prowls the streets looking for a target on which to vent their rage and the usual varied group of characters assemble at a police station that's about to be shut down. As I also found of his later Escape from New York, Carpenter's action scenes are solid but somewhat lacking in punch, though here that's probably due as much to constraints of money and financing as it is of talent. Since none of the gang members seem to have any fear of death, their attacks mainly consist of charging armed defenders and quickly getting shot. The acting is a mixed bag, ranging from poor to solid, but luckily the leading actors generally fall into this category. Like the film school graduate that he is, Carpenter makes plenty of movie references and in-jokes- the basic premise is modeled on Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead. One of the two heroes, a black cop, tells a story about his childhood taken right from an anecdote that Hitchcock liked to tell about himself, while the other hero, a white convict, uses lines lifted right from Once Upon a Time in the West. All in all, Assault is a nice reminder of a time when enterprising filmmakers could make low budget genre flicks that were lean and unpretentious, instead of the solemn and bloated big budget efforts that now seem to be coming out very other week (painful memories of Man on Fire spring to mind). As debut films (which I think this could be considered) go, it's no Citizen Kane, but it is an entertaining promise of better things to come.
Review of Assault on Precinct 13
