Assault on Precinct 13 was the second film directed by John Carpenter. It has a tremendous cult reputation, as hass his first, Dark Star, which he directed and co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon.
In Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter goes it alone. Well, not alone exactly. The film is a complicated series of borrowings from other films - in particular, Rio Bravo and the most inspirational of all cult movies, Night of the Living Dead. Crpenter also borrows lines of dialogue from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. In this sense the film is the cultists' dream: 'Charles Bronson said that to Henry Fonda!' you can hear them cry. 'That's what Angie Dickinson told John Wayne!' Some of the lines that Carpenter made up himself aren't bad, either - especially 'Why would anyone want to shoot at a police station?' - but overall the tone is real pastiche. Carpenter also wrote the music and did the editing under the pseudonym 'John T Chance'. No prizses for guessing which John Wayne film that came from.
Now that we've established its cultural pedigree, maybe I can join the loyal opposition and sat that Assault on Precinct 13 has its flaws. The acting is awful. So are the costumes. There are only two women in the film and they both wear identical sweaters. They have identical shapes, too.
For me, John Carpenter's best film is They Live! It, too, degenerates into a mush of running, jumping, shooting, chasing, but its first half is a genuinely weird and interesting critique of consumerism and yuppiedom from a science-fiction viewpoint.