ABOUT PLOT

"Why would anyone wanna shoot at a police station?"

An L.A. street gang declares war on a police station about to be shut down that has given refuge to a man who has witnessed a gang slaying. Because of the shutdown, the phones and electricity have been turned off, and gang members await outside with knives and guns where the precinct has been totally shut off from the outside world.

This gripping thriller is a model of low budget film-making. A hybrid of Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead it ranks as one of the best B-movies ever made in the urban horror action genre.

RELEASE

The film was originally released in the United States in 1976 to mixed critical reviews and unimpressive box office earnings. The following year, however, it was screened at the 21st London Film Festival, where it was one of the festival's best-received films and garnered tremendous critical and popular acclaim. The overwhelmingly positive British response to the film led to its critical and commercial success throughout Europe. Subsequently, the film underwent a reassessment by American critics and audiences, and it is now generally considered one of the best action films of the 1970s. John Carpenter has said that the British audiences immediately understood and enjoyed the film's similarities to American westerns, whereas American audiences were too familiar with the western genre to fully appreciate the movie at first.

SOUNDTRACK

One of the film's distinctive features is its score, composed and recorded by Carpenter. The combination of synthesizer hooks, electronic drones and drum machines sets it apart from many other scores of the period and creates a distinct style of minimalist electronic soundtrack with which Carpenter, and his films, would become associated.

Beyond its use in the film, the score is often cited as an influence on various electronic and hip hop artists with its main title theme being sampled by artists including Mark Shreeve, Afrika Bambaataa, I-F, Dead Prez and Bomb the Bass, whose song "Megablast" featured a sample of the score and was used in the soundtrack to the video game Xenon 2 Megablast. UK punk band The Exploited also utilized the main theme as a bass riff in the song "Don't Blame Me", which appears on their 1996 album Beat the Bastards.

REVIEWS

“For this low-budget, independent film, Carpenter enjoyed a great degree of creative control, which allowed him to craft an extremely violent, but highly stylized, fable of urban violence.”

Senses of Cinema, Marco Lanzagorta

“Often described as a melding of Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" and George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", this is one of the ultimate siege movies.”

BBC Review

“A flawless low budget Action Thriller from B-movie maestro John Carpenter. Assault is quite simply one of the tautest and most purely exciting movies ever made; it doesn’t contain one ounce of fat.”

moviesumustc.com