John Carpenter’s second film establishes him as a low-budget badass, a master of the wide screen and a filmmaker who’s not above killing a cute little kid to make his villains extra nasty. He passes, with an A+ grade, The Great B-Movie Test, which is to make a real nail-biter in a cost-effective setting with few effects and a cast with no stars. Keep it simple and keep us on the edge of our seat. That’s all we really want.
Carpenter keeps Assault on Precinct 13 so simple that it’s never tied down to a time or place. It could be rewritten with ease to qualify as a whole other genre. We call it a crime movie or an action movie because the good guys are cops (and a few crooks) under siege by South Central Los Angeles gang members in a soon-to-be-closed, minimally staffed police station. Put cowboy hats on everyone though and you’ve got a potentially great western. Recast the gang members as zombies (not hard to do, since none of them speak or have any individual personality; they’re a faceless, wordless horde) and you’ve got a horror film. Make the police precinct a space station surrounded by mysterious marauding aliens and you’ve got sci-fi. This movie is a lean machine built for white hot suspense, violence and swagger. Carpenter’s not-so-secret weapon is that he’s a keen student of film. He knows his Howard Hawks inside and out and he learned all of the right lessons from Night of the Living Dead. He was ready to make some film history of his own.