ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13—“I wanted vanilla twist.”  Yes, ‘Kathy’, but the Mauser flavoring will wipe out your allowance. Is this 1976 exploitation classic’s thru-the-cone dispatch of a cute, pig-tailed little girl (Kim Richards, 12) the most shocking on-screen murder of a child in movie history? If there’s something worse (there no doubt is) we don’t care to know. But we do choose to salute John Carpenter’s urban nightmare indie for the 91 minutes of serious rump-kicking that surrounds the infamous ice cream homicide blithely perpetrated by one of the zombie-like crew of ‘Street Thunder’.

South-Central L.A.—a decommissioned police station in a crime-ravaged area becomes a ‘last stand’ siege situation (the original title was ‘The Anderson Alamo’) when a street gang horde launches banzai charge attacks on the handful of defenders. Highway patrol officer ‘Lt. Bishop’ (Austin Stoker) mans the ramparts windows with the station’s secretaries (Laurie Zimmer as ‘Leigh’, Nancy Loomis as ‘Julie’) and emergency recruited inmates (Darwin Joston as ‘Napoleon Wilson’, Tony Burton as ‘Wells’); the father of the girl slain as the gang warmed up for the battle is catatonic with shock and unable to function.

Honoring past masters, particularly Howard Hawks, for a bare-boned $100,000 and a 20-day shoot Carpenter adroitly refashioned elements of Rio Bravo’s western jail siege into the contemporary gang-ridden milieus common to big cities. In his second time at bat (after ’74’s tiny indie Dark Star) the multi-tasking auteur-to-be wrote, directed, edited & scored, acing each component. At first recognition was minimal, but word spread into eventual cult status that ultimately achieved legendary proportions. The accumulated gross of $2,000,000 put it 122nd among the crowd from 1976, which was marked by big-budget woofs like King Kong and Logan’s Run that outspent this fantasy thriller by Pentagon magnitudes and unlike this left no lasting impact. ‘Fantasy’ fits as much as thriller, given the gang’s almost supernatural bearing: besides Rio Bravo, Carpenter was influenced by Night Of The Living Dead.

The story only needs to make sense within its own universe of dread and redemption (thru, naturally, teamwork and firepower) and it moves relentlessly to accomplish audience engagement from the first riffs of the rippling score to ‘mow ’em down’ catharsis so you can exit the gunfire with a smile on your puss. The choice of unfamiliar actors worked well, especially in the instance of Darwin Joston who has just the right look and tone to summon a tough-guy-you-cheer-for. And a tip of the muzzle velocity to Laurie Zimmer for unflinching coolness under duress (and wound) that falls in line with Hawksian gals from Olden Days. The trip to hell and back would not be quite the same without the simple yet brilliant synthesizer scoring Carpenter provided, so ominously catchy it’s mesmerizing. Writer Derek Malcomb of Cosmopolitan nailed it: “The great virtue of the film is the way it grabs hold of its audience and simply refuses to let go. It exploits all our fears of irrational violence and unmotivated attack, and at the same time manages to laugh at itself without spoiling the tension – a very considerable feat.”

With Martin West, Charles Cyphers, Frank Doubleday (as ‘White Warlord’, kid-killing fiend and no fan of vanilla twist), Henry Brandon and Peter Bruni (ice cream truck driver who doesn’t get off easy; that graveyard shift at 7-11 was the way to go).

* Like the later The Warriors (from another action master, Walter Hill) this feeds the let’s pretend end by making the gang multi-ethnic, likely to ensure box office pull from across the spectrum and not get blasted for slandering a particular group. Carpenter’s ace in the hole was ripped off remade in 2005 for no apparent reason other than greed. That one does boast a good cast.

Kim Richards had been acting since appearing in a diaper commercial at four months old. She was one of the kids on Nanny And The Professor.  A research follow-up on vanilla victim Kim’s adult life makes for yet another sad story of fame turning to flames.