At one point, the character named Boiler, while aiming a laser gun at a target, licks his thumb and then flicks the sight at the end of the weapon’s barrel - a gesture made famous by Gary Cooper in Hawks’ 1941 masterpiece Sergeant York.) For me, the film is pure enjoyment. (It also contains what I believe to be the first of Carpenter’s many, many nods to the films of his idol, Howard Hawks. Dark Star, made when both men were quite young, nevertheless evinces a subtle understanding not just of science fiction, but of horror, suspense, comedy and even the western. In it are planted the seeds of Carpenter’s and O’Bannon’s career-long celebrations of the conventions of American genre films.
If you don’t know this cult classic, I strongly recommend you give it a look.
#DARKSTAR ONE STUTTER MOVIE#
The movie is famous for, among other things, turning a painted beach ball and a pair of rubber monster gloves into a more or less believable alien. Though Harris’ investment in the film certainly brought it to the attention of many more people than would otherwise have seen it, Carpenter has reportedly stated that he felt the additional scenes were so much unnecessary padding.ĭespite its small budget, Dark Star boasts some clever special effects and set design of the “less is more” variety. Harris chipped in with the money to make 15 minutes’ worth of additional scenes, which boosted the film up to proper feature length.
After it received a bit of attention, a film producer named Jack H. It was shot on 16mm film, and ran just 68 minutes. That goes well for a time soon it goes horribly, but humorously, wrong.ĭark Star was made when Carpenter and the film’s cocreator, Dan O’Bannon (who would later write Alien and Total Recall, among other excellent films), were still attending the University of Southern California film school. Doolittle gives the bomb a crash course in phenomenology: His intent is to convince the bomb that the sensory data on which it makes its decisions are arbitrary and unprovable, and that therefore the bomb should consider not blowing up while still attached to the spacecraft. The comic highlight of the film is the scene in which Lt. They do so with the help of powerful, sentient, friendly bombs that are capable of obliterating entire celestial bodies.Īll goes well until a computer malfunction results in one of the bombs failing to detach from the ship before its detonation sequence begins. Since the semi-death of their captain, the ship's remaining crew members have fallen into a rut of destroying “unstable” planets out of sheer boredom. The five human members of the titular spacecraft are a sardonic, ennui-ridden bunch. Harris Enterprises / University of Southern California Like those films, Dark Star addresses the mental-health repercussions of protracted interstellar journeys on those who undertake them unlike those films, it plays that subject for comedy. I hadn’t seen this particular movie in 15 years or so, and was delighted to find it as clever and enjoyable as I remembered it.ĭark Star is an ultra-low-budget (about $55,000, a pittance for a feature film, even in 1974) sci-fi comedy that skewers such overly serious science fiction films of the day as 2001: A Space Odysseyand Solaris. I dislike jam band music, but I’m a longtime fan of Dark Star, and of John Carpenter in general. To my knowledge, the existence and the music of this band were entirely uninfluenced by this parodic 1974 film, and indeed the two entities have little in common other than that the band sings in English, which is also the chief language of the film. This film has nothing whatsoever to do with Dark Star Orchestra, the jam band that operates under the credo “continuing the Grateful Dead concert experience.”
0 kommentar(er)
