Chariddy Shop Cinema #2 : Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #2 : Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) What a result! Thank you Age Concern (nee Help The Aged) of Fleet High Street. I didn’t expect to pick up John Carpenter’s second corker, but I’m so glad I was able to. My brother had been to stay with a school pal of his and came back raving about an oddball sci-fi comedy they’d seen called Dark Star. I got a call from one of my school pals who’d obtained a dodge vid copy of a smash hit horror called Hallowe’en. And then our local electrical shop turned itself into a video library and allowed me to rent a top-loading piano-key VCR (via my dad’s signature) and we could actually watch films on our front-room telly years before they’d be shown, and then they’d be cut - and the library had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Straw Dogs and The Exorcist and they’d never, ever be shown on the television. Fired up by Dark Star and Hallowe’en it was time to rent the middle one, the one that had got away - Assault On Precinct 13. What a wonderful, strange, violent film it was. And so odd to be able to watch it on a Sunday morning, even if we had to suffer my dad tutting behind his News Of The World at the bloodletting. Cops gunning down gang members in a welter of gore. Los Angeles - palm trees. Black people acting and being treated the same as whites. Silenced rifles. Pump action shotguns. A gurl who could shoot and didn’t go into hysterics when the action started. Convicted murderers joining forces with the cops. A character called Napoleon Wilson who didn’t look all that be seemed to have a fearsome rep. Utter madness. I’m delighted to say it still holds up today. Perhaps I’ll check out the remake. Had to smirk at an interview I found with JC in which he said he wouldn’t do something like having the little girl gunned down now, but he was young then (John Waters’ excuse for the ending of Pink Flamingos). That sequence (an ice-cream van!) was (pardon the pun) the killer bit of the film for us (we were young!) - it was so unexpected. The outrage we experienced when ITV screened the film and cut that bit out. Thank goodness the Beeb restored it for Moviedrome, and thanks to Alex Cox for pointing out the homages. I’m still not over fussed about Howard Hawks, but I must admit I’d watch some of his stuff to see where Carpenter got it from.