Kritiken

Shot on a shoestring and packed with brutal, unrepentant violence . . . Assault on Precinct 13 was reviled upon its release as exploitative trash and then reevaluated after the massive success of Halloween. Forty-two years later, it stands as perhaps the starkest illustration of its creator’s gifts for staging and sustaining on-screen carnage.

...John Carpenter was inspired to make a film that loosely followed the George Romero template, drawing a line from the heaving faceless masses of "Night" back to the prison-siege framework of Howard Hawks's "Rio Bravo". It proved a thoughtful connection. The resulting film, "Assault on Precinct 13", plays out in the intersection of its two seemingly incompatible influences — a Western without the West, a zombie film without zombies.

If Assault on Precinct 13 takes place against an abstractly minimal depiction of New Hollywood angst and fear, it nevertheless emerges one of the most optimistic classics of the period, even taking into account the murder of a little girl getting an ice cream cone.

Unfortunately, the second half feels more conventional, relying on flash editing and walls of noise to provide easy scares in the dark, offset by the pornographic video game pleasure of turkey shooting zombie-like marauders... Nonetheless, Carpenter remembers the power of anticipatory quiet in between rounds of bloodbaths, as the dwindling number of defenders regard each other with surprisingly touching gazes, a humanist admiration earned through cold, hard survivalist professionalism.

Because Assault on Precinct 13 is among one of the most remarkably composed films of all time, it's easy to look at Carpenter's rigorous framing techniques as their own acts of political resistance. The film's tight medium-shots position the characters in constant defiance of each other: blacks against whites, women against men, prisoners against officers.

Near the end, before Bishop, Wilson and Leigh go down into the basement to take refuge, a shot of Leigh—her cloudy eyes turned towards the outside—is matched with one of the reverse shots. Point of view is no longer necessary to see death's approach, it has contaminated the entire space of the film and will soon go through the door of precinct 13.

Hopelessly violent but exceedingly well made police thriller (1976), short on motivation but long on paranoia. The second film by John Carpenter, it has wit, flair, and movement, even though the hommages to Howard Hawks get a little heavy at times.