I'll Tell Ya Sometime
Mood:  sharp
Now Playing: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
Showed the John Carpenter original to Cheeseburger, Panno and Salva tonight in anticipation of the remake. One aspect of Carpenter's film that I like is its lean storytelling. You just know that the new version is going to have tons of plot, too many characters, and a barrage of loud automatic gunfire. Carpenter rachets up the suspense by giving us only as much information as we need to know (which is more than the characters have, another method of building tension) and by slowly developing each of the major characters before they arrive at the precinct house. Some of the performances are a bit laconic, but we do get to know these characters, we like them, and we want them to survive. Carpenter also supplies his faceless villains with silencers; one of his most effective scenes features a bunch of cops getting gunned down by silent bullets, as you just hear the thwip-thwip of slugs penetrating chests and bodies falling to the ground. That's a much creepier concept than giving the heavies personalities and arming them with heavy artillery, as you can bet the remake does.

It's also interesting to see Austin Stoker playing the leading role of Bishop, the police lieutenant in charge of keeping everyone alive. Outside of the blaxploitation genre, there were very few black leading men who were active in major Hollywood features at that time. Stoker was a good, solid actor who got to play somewhat looser in the very rare COMBAT COPS aka PANIC CITY (the title of my British X-rated print), in which he played a macho cop seeking a racist serial killer in blackface. He would have been a terrific lead in a TV cop show.

Not many people saw PRECINCT during its original release, and it continued to be a relative sleeper for many years afterward. My brother and I saw it on home video back in the '80s and became big fans of it, turning on friends to it whenever possible. Over the last decade or so, PRECINCT appears to have built a fan base; it has been released twice on DVD. Quentin Tarantino is reportedly a fan, probably because of Carpenter's terse screenplay filled with black humor and many homages to his favorite childhood movies.

I also watched a 1984 interview with Carpenter from a Canadian talk show. In it, he mentions an idea he had back in the 1970's for a western that would have starred John Wayne and Elvis Presley! He even had talks with Wayne's son Michael about it, but The Duke's health was too far gone at that point; he and Presley died about a year apart. It seems unlikely that Carpenter, based only on the strength of his first film, DARK STAR, and ASSAULT (and, to be fair, his Oscar-winning short subject BRONCO BILLY), would have enough juice to interest The Duke and The King, but it unquestionably would have been an interesting film.

Also on tonight's agenda was ARENA, an Empire picture made around the time of ROBOT JOX. It's not terribly interesting, pitting a human against extraterrestrials in futuristic intergalactic boxing matches. Claudia Christian of BABYLON 5 plays a major role in it, and Richard Band's score is characteristically good. And that's about all I can say for Arena, which looks cheap and has little spectacle.