1976 action, dir. John Carpenter, Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston;
IMDb /
allmovie. The old police
station's being decommissioned, and a skeleton crew just has to get
through one last night,
When you've made Dark Star as your first film, what do you do
for your second? Scrabble about for financing, if you're Carpenter. He
wrote scripts for two low-budget films, this and Eyes; Eyes was
sold and eventually became The Eyes of Laura Mars, but Carpenter got
to make this one, explicitly based on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, but
updated in early revisions to a modern-day setting, mostly to remove
the need for expensive period sets.
As is often the case with Carpenter, there's some excellent casting
here. Austin Stoker is the newly-promoted cop who's left in charge; as
he said, "this was one of the few heroic starring roles for a
black actor in an action film of the 1970s outside of the
blaxploitation genre." He does a great job of portraying someone who's
a policeman first, but is clearly no stranger to discrimination, and
that gives his character that little extra edge that Bland White
Action Hero wouldn't have.
Opposite him is Darwin Joston as the murderer being transported with
several other prisoners, and in a fine economical effect we never hear
any details about his crime: maybe it was entirely justified, maybe it
wasn't, but that doesn't matter because now The System has decided
that he's a killer and it knows what to do with people like that. (And
this effectively sets up the balance of black cop and white criminal,
in 1976 with race riots still very much in people's memories even if
they were getting rarer in the news.)
Bits of the plot seem quite tenuous. A strangely multi-ethnic gang
gets ambushed and slaughtered by the police, and its leaders decide to
get revenge by causing chaos. One of them does this by murdering an
ice-cream vendor, and the little girl who's buying an ice cream at the
time ("and Kim Richards as Kathy" in the opening credits, but this
film has the guts to kill her off quite quickly); her father then goes
revenge-crazed and kills the guy who did it, and flees to the old
police station. Meanwhile one of the prisoners has a nasty cough, and
the transport bus pulls in to try to get some help. Then the gang
arrives…
At which point it's tension and action, in a building that was
constructed solidly but not designed as a fighting position (and
certainly not for only a handful of effective shooters with very
limited ammunition). As in Carpenter's Halloween, even though things
are happening in the dark, it's always clear what's happening and
who's where—which in turn raises the stakes beyond what what a series
of close-ups could manage.
Carpenter turns low budget into a virtue; while individual elements
may get shaky, overall this is a solid piece of entertainment that
even manages to be slightly thought-provoking.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.