Quintessential or Not, Two LA Movies

I was originally title this "Two Quintessential LA Movies", but the more I thought about it, one I felt less and less was quintessentially Los Angeles. They were made eight years apart and both are beloved by certain elements as cult classics.

The first is from 1976, and it is generally called an underrated action film before that genre really became a thing. It's taut, suspenseful, has lots of shooting, and was made by John Carpenter. I'm talking about Assault on Precinct 13.

For some reason this is considered an LA movie. I know it was filmed in LA, and certain neighborhoods are seen before the siege starts, but it doesn't really address LA things. It's not a bad movie, and maybe because I'm not from the Southland I can't understand.

It's basically Rio Bravo mixed with Night of the Living Dead, where the zombies have guns with silencers.

The zombie hoards that lay siege to the last-day-open police station are actually well-armed punks and gangsters. Why they assault the station is left to your imagination, or, is it really because of the guy who's daughter is shot? Probably, but that meaninglessness of it all is central.

A couple of notes: the soundtrack is composed and played by Carpenter himself on a synthesizer, and it captures the eras burgeoning digital dread. It was originally to be called The Siege, and then something else, before an executive changed it himself, thinking Assault on Precinct 13 sounded more ominous. The only reference to 13 made in the entire movie is early on, when the closing station house is referred to at "Precinct 9, District 13".

It's low budget and taut.

The second movie, from 1984, is much easier to call "quintessentially LA". The music captures the LA punk scene perfectly, the locales used for the shoot show off the underside of Reagan's America and Reagan's Los Angeles, and alienated youth takes centered stage, and shares it with an alien in a trunk.

I'm talking about Repo Man. An early vehicle for Emilio Estevez, his father figure was played by Harry Dean Stanton, and the cris-crossing lives of Los Angeles repo men make for great fun when intersecting with a scientist going mad from radiation poisoning hauling an alien corpse in his trunk.

You see the LA river in a car chase scene; you see the boonies in their home office; you see a neat homey atmosphere at Emilio's house. The '80s LA punk rock blares mostly the whole time, and all food and drink commodities are branded exactly the same: white packaging with blue lettering.

I remember the first time I saw the movie was on VHS cassette, and it wasn't new anymore, but when the end credits roll, I was inspired. Instead of the usual coming from the bottom and rolling up, the credits in Repo Man cascade slowly down from the top of the screen to the bottom.

Even the credits are punk rock.