With just his second full length feature project, John Carpenter, who two years on would found the Halloween franchise, turned in Assault on Precinct 13, a work he wrote, directed, produced and acted in. Well, act might be too strong a word as Carpenter functioned as one of the gang members in the film, all of which had not speaking lines. Either way, Carpenter put in a great deal of work on this one.

After watching the thirty four year old movie, though, it half surprising that it was recently remade as a vehicle for Ethan Hawke. Imagining Hawke or really any of the Hollywood whose-who sitting down and taking in an hour and a half of the original film isn’t something easily summoned in one’s mind. That being said, the original Carpenter film is really well paced, sports decent dialogue and while the locations are meager at best, they work within the world created by the film.

Exploiting the then recent mounting fear related to street gangs and violence spreading out from the city into more suburban environs, Carpenter begins the film with a clutch of multi-racial gang members driving around some ghetto in the greater Los Angeles area. Within the first ten minutes of the film, the tuffs are taking aim at various folks walking down the street or sitting around drinking out of a paper bag.

By chance an ordinary suburbanite and his young daughter are heading down to grandma’s house, which happens to be located in the middle of the declining urban sector. Unfortunately, the pair gets lost, stops at a pay phone (remember those?) and gets shot at, leaving the girl dead. Outraged, the man chases down the car and shots one of the gang members. Too bad he runs out of bullets and runs to the nearest police station. Another stroke of bad luck – the station’s basically closed and has been relocated leaving a meager staff on duty over night.

And that’s all in the first thirty minutes or so.

There’s a dash of social justice tossed in the mix for good measure and only the slightest hint of a love-story sub plot. But what Assault on Precinct 13 does well is to use its scant few sets to good effect. It doesn’t all come off as a stage production, but could easily be rendered as such. That being said, this obviously wasn’t the film that sent Carpenter to stardom. Still worth a gander, though.