You should really check in with your local library and see if they have Kanopy. It’s a streaming service only available through libraries, and is full of a collection of wonderful weirdnesses that you just can’t find anywhere else. My favorite way to use Kanopy is to click on a random movie I’ve never heard of and just ride along with it for a couple hours. This is how I found Dark Star.
In in a way, it’s kind of insane that this is how I found Dark Star. It is, apparently, John Carpenter’s directorial debut. The guy who wrote Alien helped write the script. It was, apparently, hugely influential on a certain kind of nerd. And despite being that exact kind of nerd, loving both Alien and every John Carpenter movie I’ve ever seen, I learned all these facts when I googled the movie to figure out if whoever wrote it was doing a Vietnam War allegory.
Which is a wild thing to wonder about a space comedy in which a giant beach ball with feet tries to throw a man down an elevator shaft. But you have to understand where I’m coming from here. For one thing, half the movies made in 1974 are, at least a little, about the Vietnam War. Sitting here and going ‘oh, what’s with this 70s movie about a bunch of guys who are isolated in a poorly maintained hostile environment, abandoned by their home and superiors, slowly driving each other insane?’ would make me sound like the kind of stupid that wonders what’s with all the pregnancy horror in the last couple years. I mean the opening is a video call from a government representative solemnly telling the crew that Earth had a week of mourning for their mostly dead commander, before saying that Congress wouldn’t approve sending them new radiation shields. Hell, even the mostly dead commander is too busy asking about the Dodgers to really be the kind of helpful that they seem to keep him mostly dead for. So like. Even in a truly goofy movie in which the spaceship has a breathy 70s porno voice, the era’s political background radiation still seeps through.
You really do see the DNA of both Carpenter and O’Bannon’s later work here. Way before I even bothered to check who worked on the movie, I thought, separately, ‘huh. weirdly has similar theming to The Thing.’ and ‘huh. weirdly had similar theming to Alien.’ Turns out! There was a reason for that! It’s always fun to see people’s early work and see which themes follow them throughout the rest of their body of work. Isolationism, indifference from those in power, petty annoyances turning into violence, distrust of technology all played comedic here, when in both the director and writer’s later works they’re played straight for horror. It’s a really cool thing to see, and even more fun when you learn about that halfway through the movie.
I can’t end this review without mentioning what I thought was the funniest gag in the entire movie. Sergeant Pinback, the ship’s resident practical jokes guy and community kick it around, reveals over dinner that he is, in fact, not Sergeant Pinback, and through a wild miscommunication, accidentally took the real Pinback’s place on the ship. His fellow crewmen not only don’t react, they are annoyed because he already told them this story four years ago. This does not alter how they speak to him, the name they call him, or what they have him do on the ship at all. This is later bolstered by a dour video diary entry that Pinback rewatches where he is begging someone to believe he isn’t Pinback and to let him return to earth. As evidenced by his continued presence on the ship, it didn’t work.
There is just something so hilariously bleak about the Pinback situation that it makes me forgive the movie for any other clunkiness. And it is clunky, there’s probably speakers more expensive than the budget was, I would’ve loved more of the sentient bomb weirdness, one of the characters is just kind a There, but that idea, that you could see a man kill himself in front of you and accidentally take his place, only to have no one to believe you, or care, even if they do believe you, that a mistake has been made as that man’s life rots around you, burying you in its collapse, that I don’t care that the studio made them blur out all the nudie posters in the background of some of the scenes. That one joke says something excruciatingly honest, and it delights me.
Anyways, if you don’t mind special effects that are just large balloons, and if I’ve successfully convinced you to watch The Prisoner we both know you don’t, and old movies that look slightly deep fried, you should check out this movie. Even if it’s only out of a sense of John Carpenter completionism or a desire to see the movie that was received so badly it made Dan O’Bannon retool a sequence and write Alien around it under the logic of “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream.” I really do think it has more value than that, and would’ve been delighted even if it was just made by somebody who then went on to make a bunch of Dynasty episodes or something. It was fun! And since I refuse to do star ratings, I’m not beholden to anything beyond: I had fun! Maybe you will too!
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 