assaultSecond Sight, out now (standard edition released January 9, 2017)

John Carpenter’s follow-up movie to his Dark Star is a modern-day remake of Rio Bravo, relocated to a Los Angeles police station under siege. Throw in a Night of the Living Dead vibe and what you’ve got is a 70s cult classic that belies its low budget with some bravura set pieces and brutal action.

Second Sight’s 40th anniversary box set release of the movie is worth buying just for the CD soundtrack alone, which (if you could find it) sells on the buyers’ market for upwards of £30 (this entire set is retailing under £20 in the UK) and features the same 16 tracks and 26-minute running time as the Record Makers and Death Waltz releases. What is lacks in length it makes up for in classic synth mastery, overlaying and mixing three different themes and economically inserting them into the movie where required. As witnessed on Carpenter’s recent UK tour, the main theme is a classic, and this soundtrack deserves a place on your shelf.

The movie follows police Sergeant Ethan Bishop, temporarily reassigned to Precinct 9 (Not 13!) in Division 13 of South Los Angeles. The station has shut down and is in the process of being relocated from this troubled part of town to more heavily-fortified premises. But before you can say ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ a prisoner en route to Death Row (a prototype Snake Pilssken in the form of criminal Napoleon Wilson) is temporarily sheltered there and a gang of street warriors descend. The original title of The Anderson Alamo is pretty much on the money, as this is at heart a classic western, trading the fort and Native Americans for a police station and a Latino/black hoodlums. Make no mistake, this is low-rent exploitation B-movie fare; it’s brutal, its politics are very murky and clearly no body count is high enough. And yet it’s a masterpiece of its genre – the characters are impossibly cool, do cool things with guns and cigarettes and you feel like you’ve survived the night with them (those who make it, at least).

The new 1080p transfer is crisp and only occasionally lets itself down in some of the dark interiors where the blacks aren’t that defined, though I’m going to guess that this is more a fault of the original negatives – we’re talking low budget film-making here circa $100k. You can also choose to listen between a tidy 5.1 DTS-HD mix or the original mono track.

assault-on-precinct-13-posterAnd what of the extras? Leading man Austin Stoker is interviewed for 9 minutes about his audition and his experience on shooting the movie while Tommy Lee Wallace spends 20 minutes talking about how he got together with Carpenter at high school and subsequently worked on this movie with him as art director. Of greater interest to me is producer Joseph Kaufman’s 15-minute reflection on the challenges of making the movie, sharing some interesting insight and new gems. For a movie like this where was no time or budget to create promotional material at the time, it’s fascinating to get the honest, inside track on the production. The reflections on whether the ice cream van shooting was too much is of note.

There’s a nice 12-minute interview with Carpenter regular Nancy Loomis and a semi-professional recording of a 23-minute interview with John Carpenter and Austin Stoker on stage at The Egyptian in LA from 2002. It does inevitably cover a lot of the same ground as the content found elsewhere on the disc, but it’s a nice curiosity piece any way. Don’t get too excited about the inclusion of Carpenter’s student movie, Captain Voyeur; it’s fun, but it’s a zero budget student movie with hand-drawn title cards and occasional use of sound. It also features Carpenter’s first use of a masked protagonist, but let’s not read too much into it.

Do you Remember Laurie Zimmer? is also a nice curiosity piece. A 53-minute documentary made by French film-maker Charlotte Szlovak, it follows her as she attempts to track down her former friend Zimmer (who plays female lead Leigh in the movie). Will she find her, and what’s she up to now? The conclusion is possibly less satisfying than the mystery promises, but a great reflection on life in LA with endless shots of cruising around Downtown.

Finally, a crackly trailer, some radio spots and two commentaries (from Carpenter and Wallace) help fill in any gaps in the production’s history you might want.

On the downside, while we live in a world where distributors like Arrow and Picturehouse include detailed booklets and inlay notes in their collector releases, there’s nothing at all in this one except for a set of postcards. While a reprint of an archive essay/feature or a new appraisal of the movie might have been too much to ask, surely a track listing of the CD is a minimum requirement?

Verdict: An excellent value movie/soundtrack release of a seminal Carpenter movie that doesn’t skimp on the extras and is probably going to the last word on this cult gem. 9/10

Nick Joy

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