Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 84: Saturday Mar 24

Assault on Precinct 13 (Carpenter, 1976):
The Old Police Station, 114 Amersham Vale, Deptford, SE14 6LG

This evening is a classic example of the pop-up cinema phenomenon. The Vanishing Point, as stated on their website, promote immersive film screenings in strange places, inviting the audience to become lost in the environment with theatrical and musical elements. The events strive to make cinema an interactive, unpredictable and fun experience.

Tonight's action takes place in a disused police station . . . the perfect setting for John Carpenter's taut cops-in-peril action thriller which brilliantly reworks Hawks' Rio Bravo.

Here is a great introduction to the evening by Matthew Thrift on his website and here is the trailer for tonight's event. You can get a feel for the evening via the Vanishing Point's Facebook page too.

Time Out review: 

'Just as Dark Star undercut the solemnity of space movies like 2001 with hilarious astronaut situation comedy, Carpenter's second feature borrows the conventions of protagonists in jeopardy from Night of the Living Dead to produce one of the most effective exploitation movies of the decade. The gimmick is cops and cons besieged in an abandoned LA police station by a group of kamikaze urban guerillas. Carpenter scrupulously avoids any overt socio-political pretensions, playing it instead for laughs and suspense in perfectly balanced proportions. The result is a thriller inspired by a buff's admiration for Ford and Hawks (particularly Rio Bravo), with action sequences comparable to anything in Siegel or Fuller. It's sheer delight from beginning to end.' Rod McShane 

Here is the movie trailer

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