Word: assaults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pictures. Assault on Precinct 13 is the most solidly worked out and the most satisfying. Ignored as an exploitation film upon its initial release in 1976, it is Carpenter's second feature (his first was a science-fiction spoof expanded from a film school project, called Dark Star.) The basic situation and central characters, actors' mannerisms and shards of dialogue are derived from Rio Bravo, a late Howard Hawks film. Assault largely inexperienced cast lurches beneath the preposterous weight of a self-consciously anachronistic script. The dialogue is as tersely as any Hawk's film, and it is often difficult...
Halloween, while still cheaply made, is a much slicker, more flagrantly commercial movie than Assault, and it has been grossing big money. Carpenter employs a gliding subjective camera throughout, alternating between the killer's and the victims' points of view, producing a continual, stomach-tightening sense of menace. There is surprisingly little blood in the movie, scarcely any nudity, and, considering the story it comes out of, and the opportunities available for flat-out ghoulishness, Carpenter has produced a tame and tactful film. However, most of Assault's quirky humor and antic allusiveness have been rubbed away, and Halloween...
...practically seamless. Nearly every scene appears to be the product of all the right decisions about where the camera should be and when it should move. Such ingenuity and control displays itself in ways that are embarrassing to name: the breathtaking efficiency, for instance, with which one character in Assault snaps a man's arm at the elbow; or the startling, gimmicky appearance, time and again, from out of nowhere, of the masked killer in Halloween, whose presence is signalled by an amplified breathing sound and a supernatural thrum. Carpenter's action sequences are especially resourcefully engineered. There...
Apart from the main shocks and spasms of violence, numerous small touches--a subtle darkening of light or deadening of sound--all carry their quiet effect and chill. Some of the best things in both films lie in the casual and exact use of particular locales. In Assault, the desolate quality of a faded section of Los Angeles is captured perfectly in the disconsolate look of a parking lot, a few haggard palm trees, and a grim, sloping street, and there is a similarly good, throwaway treatment of leafy suburban lawns in Halloween...
...whole premise and intent behind each of his movies is as simple-minded and morally undernourished as the genres require. You would hope for a great deal more from his best movies--the best, even, of this limited, specialized kind--than Carpenter may be capable of, but Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 are such neat packages of self-acknowledged hokum that it is difficult to resent or condescend to them. Compared to the slackness and swaggering middlebrow pretension of recent thrillers like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Last wave, they are remarkable for their stringent suspensefulness...