I will say, this one may not be for everyone. Bit of a time capsule and history lesson when delving into John Carpenter’s first feature film. Not a lot of money, even by 1974’s standards. He wore a lot of hats with producing, scoring, directing and co-writing credits with Dan O’Bannon. Dan wore a few hats as well besides the co-writer, as editor, production designer, visual effects supervisor and acting in one of the 4 main roles as the Pinback character. It’s a Helluva thing.
A space crew on the ship Dark Star, 18 parsecs away from earth so transmission time equates to about...10 years. That’s pretty fuckin far out, man! The Ship’s getting run down, not much help from Earth, they just keep doing what their doing, working with the ship’s A.I. taking out destabilized planets to pave way for future colonizations and trying not to drive each other crazy. It’s...a little touch and go, especially after their captain died in a tragic chair accident. And then their mascot alien beachball escapes its hold and and an electrical meteor shower hits and their happy smartbomb getting sassy with them, it’s a lot of shit to deal with here.
Despite the miniscule budget, they do pull off a few decent small set pieces. Some are a little more accomplished than others. As for the alien, it gets a bad rap. Sure, the physical representation is a bit...sad. it reminds me a lot of The Twonky, both playful and malicious in its interacterings. Obviously a bit of model work and Space Effects that are a bit dated but you can see where they were trying a few new cool things, and they beat the Star Wars light speed effect by a few years. Or re-used Star Trek’s. I dunno, I could never get into that one. O’Bannon did get picked up to do some effects on Star Wars because of this, went on to write the screenplay for Alien (which you actually can see some shadows of ideas here), and of course went on to direct one of the best zombie films ever, Return of the Living Dead. That Carpenter guy? Not sure where he ended up after this. Maybe making commercial jingles are something, I think I heard he put out an album on Bandcamp. I dunno.
