Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) on Netflix
R19761h 31mActionCrimeThriller
Lieutenant Ethan Bishop takes charge of a decommissioned Los Angeles precinct during its final hours. A prison bus brings convicts, and a gang seeking revenge chases a man into the station.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.3/1061,792 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Anderson precinct in Los Angeles is closing for good, and the officer sent to oversee its last hours is Lieutenant Ethan Bishop, newly promoted. Sergeant Chaney and the secretaries Leigh and Julie are the only staff left. A prison bus stops at the station so that Officer Starker can find medical help for an inmate who is sick; the other prisoners are Napoleon Wilson, convicted of murder and headed for death row, and Wells. Across the city, the gang Street Thunder swears a blood oath of revenge after police officers kill six of its members. A man named Lawson, chased by gang members, takes shelter inside the station. The telephone lines then go dead and the electricity fails.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The MPAA, then headed by Richard Heffner, threatened to give the film an X rating unless John Carpenter cut the scene where a gang member shoots a little girl standing near an ice-cream truck. He cut the scene from the copy he sent the MPAA but released the film with it intact.- Because Assault was a hit in London, John Carpenter named the masked killer in Halloween after Michael Myers of Miracle Films, the British distributor of Assault. Carpenter went on from Assault to work with producer Irwin Yablans on Halloween, the most successful film of his career.
- The main title theme was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa, Tricky, Dead Prez and Bomb the Bass. The theme was also reworked in 1986 as an Italo disco 12-inch and more famously as the 1990 UK-charting rave song "Hardcore Uproar".
- Boxer-turned-actor Tony Burton, soon to be known as Tony "Duke" Evers in the Rocky films, was cast as the convict Wells partly because of his own prior stint in prison for armed robbery.
- Carpenter wrote the original script, titled The Anderson Alamo, under the pseudonym "John T. Chance", the name of John Wayne's character in Rio Bravo, and kept "Chance" for his editing credit. He wrote the script in eight days.
- John Carpenter wrote the score in three days and performed it with Tommy Lee Wallace. Dan Wyman assisted, and the banks of synthesizers each had to be reset when a new sound was created, which took a great deal of time.
- Assault was shot in 2.35:1 anamorphic Panavision widescreen, the first time Carpenter used the format that he would go on to use on all of his feature films.
- The bus traveling to Sonora was shot on a closed section of the Los Angeles freeway system, and the cast and crew had lunch on the freeway.
