The 1970s, the decade of flared trousers and dodgy haircuts, have been getting a lot of revisits and 'retropective' lately, with TVs 'Life on Mars' doing more than most to capture some essence of that essentially 'dodgy' era. But not everything from those times was 'naff' and the 1976 John Carpenter release 'Assault on Precinct 13' stands as one of the period's finer moments. Yes, the clothes, cars and hairdos reek of the times, and yes, here was yet another low-to-modest budget offering that could so easily have sat with the rest of the screen fodder fighting to hold onto dwindling cinema audiences. But instead here was something else entirely - a movie ahead of its times in many ways, from the tight, almost claustrophobic focus on a small cast in a small place, to the tense clever soundtrack, and the less than neat conclusion. It is in films like this that you can see the glimmers of the cinema revival 'to come'; when you watch this you are seeing an ancestral line that begins with the westerns of Ford and company - an ancestry that Carpenter himself has acknowledged - and ends in such 'modern' benchmarks as 'Pulp Fiction'. But don't watch it for a 'history of cinema' - just watch and admire its gripping, tension-building urban action that still has the quality to have you 'on the edge of your seat'.