Movie Review: Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

I didn’t realize how much I love a good siege movie until I finally sat and watched this one. Fighting a faceless entity while trapped with people you hardly know and have nothing in common with is a recipe for a good time in my book.

Despite a character’s gender, race, or criminal history, everyone’s equal when you’re being attacked on all sides.

There’s something about the anxiety of being surrounded by a threat you can barely see, coming out of the dark, faceless, that pulled me in. It’s not technically a horror movie but it has that same dread running through it, the kind of thing that clearly carried over into Carpenter’s actual horror work later on.

Carpenter is really good at the siege setup specifically. It’s the perfect pressure cooker for forcing people together who’d otherwise never trust each other.

The gang in this one is ruthless, killing the girl at the ice cream truck early on makes that abundantly clear. No conscience. No hesitation. But we never get a reason why for this gang. No motivation or backstory, but I think that’s on purpose. The point was never about the gang or why they’re doing this. The point is what happens when people with nothing in common get pushed into a corner together and have to survive.

People still die, so it’s not a full feel-good watch by any means. But there was something almost heartwarming about the way it all came together by the end.

Originally posted on Letterboxd.