Assault

John Carpenter is quite possibly the most interesting American director of the 1970s-80s in terms of political philosophy - take Zizek on They Live!, the attempt to use phenomenology to avert apocalyptic technics in Dark Star - and in that fine tradition, here's Socialism and/or Barbarism on Escape from New York, read through Trotsky-via-Mike Davis. Someone needs to do similarly sterling work for the electronic urbanism of Assault on Precinct 13 (see above) or the combination of chameleonic terror and the horror of remoteness in The Thing. The S and/or B post also includes conjunctural coinage of the year so far: 'combined and uneven apocalypse'.