Word: precincts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PART OF THE APPEAL of John Carpenter's Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 lies in their essential vileness, and in the harsh, sly, single-minded persistence with which Carpenter strums and strains his audience's nerves. Assault on Precinct 13 is a kind of hipped-up, relocated Western: an undermanned Los Angeles police precinct station is besieged by a silent army of murderous street gangsters; Halloween is a scare picture about an escaped lunatic who, having returned to his home town Halloween night, stalks some high school girls babysitting in adjoining houses. The combined budgets of these two films...
Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween develop out of the simple, steady building up and then the furious release of pressure implicit in their plots. Carpenter wrote and directed both films, and composed his own music. He is especially skillful in constructing and sustaining situations that can cause an audience to yell, and, watching these films, there is the peculiar pleasure of being in a crowd that can't keep its mouth shut for excitement...
...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...
...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 is one virtuoso scene in Assault on Precinct 13, in which the station office room receives an intensive barrage from outside: the street gang is equipped with silencers stolen from a government arsenal, and the only sound, as we watch the room being ripped apart, is the quiet clicking and crumpling of glass and venetian blinds, concluding with...
...physician. The suit also asks $125,000 in damages for each victim. If the suit is successful, a large number of women may demand payment. The A.C.L.U. estimates that as many as 10,000 may have been strip-searched hi Chicago when apprehended for minor violations. Indeed, Chicago Precinct Captain William Connolly admits that the treatment given the Jane Doe who made the illegal turn represents "no apparent violation of long-established department directives...