Assault on Precinct 13 Widescreen Edition
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DVD Cover Information
Brand: IMAGE ENTERTAINMENTDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: NTSC
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Movie Reviews of Assault on Precinct 13 Widescreen Edition
Movie Review: Intense, Nail Biting Action
Summary: 5 Stars
One should not watch this movie expecting the highly choreographed gunfight ballets that John Woo initiated & every other action movie has followed ever sense. This movie preceded all of that. The plot focuses on a small group of police officers and convicts fighting off a relentless street gang in an all but abandoned precinct. There are two central heroes of this movie: Bishop, a Black Police Chief who is new to the job & looking for a little adventure at the beginning of the film (a superior officer asks him "Do you want to be a hero your first time out?" "Yes, Sir," Bishop replies); and there is Napolean Wilson, a White man on his way to death row when the prison bus he is riding is forced to make a detour (check out this plot twist: another prisoner starts coughing & wheezing, nearly passing out, and guess what, rather than pulling a shiv on the cop who examines him, it turns out the guy is really sick! How often does that happen in a movie?). Napolean Wilson is a man with a lot of snappy comebacks. He says everything that we wished we'd said in certain situations after we thought about it because we know it would be so cool. More than one character says "You're pretty fancy, Wilson." The details of Wilson's crime is never revealed, but the fact that it was exceptionally savage is clear by the response of everyone else's response to him. These characters could have been lifted from any John Ford movie, but the fact that the movie takes place mostly at night and has a more contemporary time frame gives the movie a sweaty-palmed urgency that the Westerns lack. Even though the movie was made in 1976, the scene where the street gang cruises around & considers who to kill in a random drive-by shooting feels all too contemporary. Director John Carpenter limits the dialogue of the street gang in much the same way that the old Westerns would keep Indians at a distance -- so that the audience would never feel any empathy towards them. This hardly seems necessary as it seems difficult to feel pity for street gangs, but the move only helps to make them seem more fierce & inhumane than they might have otherwise been perceived. John Carpenter's memorable score also helps to accentuate the tension. A brilliant low-budget thriller that tops most of the big-budget ones we are stuck with today.
Summary of Assault on Precinct 13 Widescreen Edition
John Carpenter (Escape from New York, Halloween) wrote and directed this unrelenting thriller about a police station under attack by a gang of thugs. Inspired by the classic Western "Rio Bravo," don't miss this cult film.Assault on Precinct 13, the second feature by John Carpenter (Halloween, Vampires), has a group of cops and convicts joining forces as they're besieged in an all-but-abandoned police station by Street Thunder, a gang armed with automatic weapons and silencers. The relationships of those holed up in the police station as they try to survive the onslaught form the better part of the movie, borrowing liberally from the films of Howard Hawks, especially Rio Bravo, to make the point about who's "good enough" and who isn't. The action is taut and shocking for its time (1976). Street Thunder is more an irrational force, an embodiment of pure evil, than a clearly motivated group with a political agenda, drawing comparisons with Assault's other main influence, the zombies in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. More than an action-exploitation flick (though it more than holds its own on that level), Assault on Precinct 13 is a disguised Western with a horror aspect that Carpenter would later work out more rigorously in such films as Halloween and The Thing. The DVD is a true Collector's Edition, preserving the film's original Panavision aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and including a fascinating commentary track by John Carpenter. --Jim Gay
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