Dark Star
Directed by John Carpenter
In director John Carpenter's debut film, space explorers meet a very strange alien shaped like a beach ball, who causes no small amount of mischief aboard their vessel. Years before his alien horror masterpiece THE THING, film student Carpenter directed this creepy and comedic space oddity, with writing help from Dan O'Bannon, who later used elements of the story in his script for ALIEN. Roger Ebert called it "one of the damnedest science fiction movies I've ever seen, a berserk combination of space opera, intelligent bombs, and beach balls from other worlds."
In director John Carpenter's debut film, space explorers meet a very strange alien.
Cast: Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich
Member Reviews
One of the better sci-fi movies which is all the more impressive considering it's budget. The humor is very muted, more irony based and inspired by the crews bland decent into madness. Great fun!
This wild and wonky Movie isn't that bad actually, John Carpenter was on to something here, felt like I was watching a very serious MST3K film minus the commentary. Very good first feature.
This is a straight-up, low-budget sci-fi comedy with absolutely no horror elements whatsoever. (Yes, the captain is dead and in cryogenic freeze, and at one point they talk to him through a kind of neural hook-up, but it's still sci-fi, that scene doesn't even try to be scary.) The only reason the movie's here is because it's Carpenter and O'Bannon's first work, and according to O'Bannon he co-directed it with Carpenter all the way but once it was in the can (after four years' work), Carpenter allegedly hogged sole director credit. I enjoyed it because as a kid, I'd read Alan Dean Foster's novelization before seeing the movie, so I was invested so to speak... but I was also disappointed because despite the admirable effort, the acting and pacing are both so poor there's nary a laugh to be had. Amazing that Carpenter and O'Bannon, each separately, went on to create one of the most suspenseful horror movies ever made....
A relatively incoherent, film-school-in-joke mess. Interesting only to Carpenter or O'Bannon completists.
A huge part of the enjoyment of this movie for me comes from trying to spot the everyday household items the student designers cleverly repurposed to build all of the sci-fi props. O'Bannon's special effects and production design are way better than 1974 student film and the aesthetic looks more like the late 70s science fiction. That being said it's probably a hard watch for people who watch movies and don't geek out over the details and not really horror.