Damn - this really is a case of the movie in my (25-year-old) memory being a lot better than the movie I just re-watched. Ah well, they can't all be "Citizen Kane"...
I love John Carpenter's creative sensibility: gritty, dark genre films made with a sly sense of humor, a noir aesthetic and a budget of approximately $300 and a Mars bar. Carpenter is a genre film lover who knows how to play with and subvert our expectations while still delivering the thrills. One plot strand that I'd forgotten and loved this time around was the way that the script seems to be obviously setting up one of the lead characters up for an inevitable heroic death which will pay off a repeated line of dialogue - which never happens. It's a good joke and one that shows Carpenter's respect for his audience.
I re-watched "Halloween," "They Live" and "The Thing" last year and loved them (particularly "The Thing). Time hasn't been so kind to "Assault on Precinct 13." Don't get me wrong, I love the central premise of the film - a modern urban Western with a racially diverse group of Los Angeles gangbangers standing in for the Comanches, and an almost equally racially diverse group of cops and convicts playing the cowboys defending the fort, I mean police station holding out desperately for the cavalry (played by the fine gentlemen of the LAPD) to bail them out.
Now, it didn't help that the DVD I watched looked like it was a mediocre transfer from a third-run print, but the problems go deeper than that. And the biggest problem is that, while the premise is great, the actions that set up the siege really don't make sense. Notoriously, the gang first kill a little girl at an icecream truck, but beyond the shock value of the scene (which is all that I noticed on my first time around) - why? The gang's actions are set up to be revenge against the police for their fallen brothers, but what, they're going to take down an icecream truck and its patrons first?
Then it gets really dumb, and in a way that really didn't hit me as a younger single man who almost never spent time with children and parents: The girl's father goes over, sees his beloved 9-year-old daughter's dead body, which he drapes with his jacket and then drives off after the gang with the icecream truck driver's handgun. Leaving his daughter's body at the side of the road somewhere in the bad part of LA. Seriously?
Oh, and while we're at it, why exactly is this film called "Assault on Precinct 13" when the film makes it very clear that the station is in Precinct 9, District 14? No really, there's no 13 in there at all. And how in the hell did I not notice that before?!
*ahem*
Meanwhile, I think my years as a Line Producer really made me feel the smallness of the budget this time, for the example the way bullets fired into an office have a way of sending up plumes of paper without any visible holes. As for the acting, well, it's not the worst, but some roles and line readings really did pull me out of the story this time around. This film could have really used a Kurt Russell, or at least a Harry Dean Stanton.
On the other hand, since Carpenter really was make a full-on action movie with so few resources, he does make some great creative choices in sound design, framing and empty space to drive the suspense. The lead pair of Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston, as heroic cop and bad-ass convict, have enthusiasm and screen presence which is very likeable (particularly at the very end of the film). And Laurie Zimmer as the female station manager has a nice little smoulder and some tough-chick wit going on. (Fun fact from imdb - Zimmer never acted in anything about 1979 and in 2003 a documentary was released entitled "Whatever happened to Laurie Zimmer?")
If there's one element that really does work for me just as much as it ever did, it's Carpenter's score. Those minimalistic synthesizer chords are be very much a product of the '70's and '80's, but they send just the right chills down my spine every time. Carpenter may have gone on to work with better scripts, better actors and (slightly) bigger budgets but he had the tunes down right from the beginning.
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