Assault on Precinct 13: We are not safe

Sometimes, just sometimes, a film will contain a moment so shocking that you are unable to believe what you just saw. A third of the way through Assault on Precinct 13 one of those moments occurs. I won't spoil it but I will say that as my jaw dropped I knew that if John Carpenter could show something that brutal, he could do anything. From then on out there were no rules and nobody was safe. The scene actually earned the film an "X" rating and when Carpenter asked his distributor what they should do they suggested that he cut the scene out, resubmit the film to the MPAA, get a "R" rating and then simply release the uncut version in theaters. Rather surprisingly, this plan was successful. And it's a good thing because what makes this film so successful is that when things start to go wrong they get very bad very quickly. After carefully establishing characters for the first thirty minutes Carpenter mercilessly slaughters most of them over the next several minutes, leaving the few remaining characters in an impossible situation. Carpenter drew his inspiration from Howard Hawks' classic Rio Bravo (the screenplay he wrote was even attributed to John T. Chance, John Wayne's character in that film) but the film that kept coming to my mind was Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. In addition to a direct allusion in the previously-mentioned notorious scene, a convicted criminal explains how his life turned out that way by saying that, at an early age, he was told by a priest that he had "something to do with death". That's the same line that Jason Robards uses to explain Charles Bronson's outlaw to Claudia Cardinale. God, that was a great movie . . . and so is this one.