Made in 1976 by John Carpenter, Assault on Precinct 13 is the story of a police precinct, mostly abandoned, and about to be shut down, being assaulted from all sides by nondescript group of juvenile thugs. Lt. Ethan Bishop is forced to enlist the help of a few prisoners in his effort to defend the precinct from the relentless assault. The film was inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (which was itself a direct rebuttal to High Noon).
For the most part, the film is smartly written and directed, and there's no shortage of interesting subtext (i.e. race relations, Vietnam, etc.). The synthesizer score, by Carpenter himself, is also excellent. Still, I think it was occasionally let down by the performances, which aren't all great. Sometimes, there are unnatural pauses between lines of dialogue, and Darwin Joston doesn't quite have the heft or intimidation factor necessary for the character of Napoleon Wilson, although he does have solid interplay with the other leads.
Other aspects of the film sometimes threw me out of it as well; for instance, after having seemingly thousands of bullets zipping through the windows, the characters are remarkably cavalier about standing in front of them and looking out of them; they seem to know exactly when the thugs aren't going to gun down whoever's standing there. It doesn't help that the actors don't seem to know how to properly hold their weapons; Austin Stoker firing his scoped rifle from the hip struck me as a bit strange.
In spite of all this, I think the film is mostly deserving of its cult status. It's as much a horror movie as an action movie (you could call it a zombie movie, if the zombies could run fast and had assault weapons). The best horror movies are always about the people rather than the scares, and Assault on Precinct 13 understands this lesson.
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