Dark Star

Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974) By the time I first saw Dark Star, a decade after its release, I was already a firm John Carpenter fan. And, not surprisingly, I loved it. Years passed, and I wondered if my love for it had more to do with John Carpenter than the movie itself, so I went back and watched it again recently. No, it wasn't nostalgia or a blind adherence to John Carpenter (which I, like most folks, lost right after They Live, his last great film), it's just that Dark Star is a wonderful film that, like many great things, manages to both parodize and celebrate at the same time. The story concerns a bunch of guys in a spaceship far, far away from Earth. Their mission seems to be to go around blowing up unstable planets, for which they have a large supply of semi-intelligent bombs. They've been wandering the universe for twenty years with everything going along about as usual. But, of course, once the cameras start rolling, everything goes belly-up. The ship's mascot goe... Read more

I am a big fan of John Carpenter, who has directed three or four of the best horror movies of the past several decades, and at least two of the greatest ever made; and who is one of the smartest guys in the biz (his film commentaries are among the best, even for mediocre movies like Ghosts of Mars). Nonetheless, though I really wanted to like this movie, I have to come down on the side of the minority and give it two stars. I understand the film's place in cinema history, FX history, the history of indie cinema, and it's place within the Carpenter canon; but it is only intermittently funny, and surprisingly boring in parts - surprisingly, because Carpenter is a lot of things, but this is the only instance in which I found his work boring. For Carpenter aficionados, you owe it to yourself to watch this flick at least once, just in principle. Fans of ironic camp may also like it, at least for a rental. But the average viewer, I fear, will be annoyed and mystified. (If it had a co... Read more

It is what it is but I love it! Seriously, it is a cheezy, low budget, slapstick, sci-fi flick that is definitely not for everyone but what a classic. More please?

Whoduh thunk that Sergeant Pinback would oneday go on to help write and create one of the greatest sci-fi- franchises still going strong today - of course, I'm talking about the Alien franchise. Which pretty much comes from the same structure played out in this movie. An excellent low-budget "student film"...And John Carpenter helped a great deal too! Still hilarious, still quoted and certainly still re-watchable! Well done boys.

These days, $60,000 will buy quite a nice home on the crashing market; in 1974, it was a sufficient amount for John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon to expand a USC student film into a fully-fledged B-movie. In the mid-21st century, the film's titular spacecraft is home and transport to a weary, hapless, stir-crazy crew tasked with the mission of destroying unstable planets with sentient, high-powered explosives. Even by Carpenter's standards, his debut feature is exceptionally crude, but it's imbued with a modicum of humor, suspense and imagination that exceeds that of so many films with far larger production budgets. "Dark Star" is required viewing for Carpenter fans and '70s B-movie addicts; for everyone else, it's a cheap but well-crafted curiosity, the appeal of which depends entirely on how much one enjoys this sort of kitsch. Of course, this "2001: A Space Odyssey" parody isn't exactly a good film, but it certainly wasn't made to be taken seriously, The performances are uniformly f... Read more