Dark Star (1974)

Title: Dark Star (1974)

Director: John Carpenter

Writers: John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon

Cast: Dan O’Bannon, Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich

Review:

Dark Star is fun to watch simply because it was John Carpenter’s training wheels as a director. Same as THX-1138 was for George Lucas and Sugarland Express was for Spielberg, Dark Star was John Carpenter’s student film. It evolved into a full length feature film thanks to producer Jack H. Harris, the guy who decided to put some money behind Carpenter and O’Bannon’s then unfinished student film. He decided to believe in this crazy bunch of filmmakers, he saw something there. So he financed a couple of extra scenes to expand the films running time so that it could be released theatrically. Watching films like these is a joy because it’s the equivalent of seeing baby pictures of an old friend whom you’ve known your whole life. I’ve been seeing John Carpenter films since I was a child, and watching Dark Star showed me a Carpenter who was a directorial infant, just getting started, fresh out of film school, but as future films would prove, with talent to spare.

Story concerns four guys who travel across the galaxy on their spaceship called Dark Star. Their job is to fly around the galaxy looking for unstable planets which are considered threats to future colonization. Once they find these unstable planets, their job is to blow them up with “exponential thermostellar bombs”. Unfortunately, when they are not blowing up unstable planets, they spend too much time completely bored out of their minds! So they play pranks on each other, catalog their journey on a ship’s log, stare at the universe for hours and hours and play dangerous games with the ships mascot, an alien that looks like a Killer Tomato/Beach ball. Seriously!

Essentially, this film came to be because a bunch of film school students wanted it to. You have to have a certain amount of balls in order to get this kind of film made. I mean, its no easy task to make something out of nothing and you could tell these guys had next to nothing when they were making this one! Still, these guys had the gravitas and they went ahead and made chicken salad out of chicken shit. Spacesuits were fashioned after toys, because said toys were used as miniatures for some scenes. The sets were extremely claustrophobic because some of them were made inside of closets….and the buttons on the spaceship were made out of overturned ice cube trays. Miniatures for the film were made out of re-fashioned model cars, and aliens were made out of repainted inflatable beach balls. So it’s that kind of a film where you can tell it was made on a shoestring budget. But what we can admire about this kind of film is that the guys behind it went out and did it none the less. I mean, anybody else would have said “no way, this can’t be done!” A sci-fi with no budget? But these guys had the ‘cojones’ to do it, so I salute them. Best part is that the film is actually watchable and entertaining.

The filmmakers behind this film came out of USC’s film department and at the time, the big story that came out of USC was how George Lucas had turned his student film THX-1138 into a full length feature film. This story excited the hell out of the rest of the student body in that film school, many of whom followed Lucas’s example and did the same thing. Amongst those that followed suit was John Carpenter, only difference being that Dark Star was a much smaller film than THX-1138 and it got very little exposure when it was first released on a limited amount of theaters. It was a bit misunderstood at the time, because it was marketed as a serious science fiction film, audiences werent expecting a comedy. I mean, one look at the films poster and you'd never get an idea that it was a comedy! But like all films of merit, Dark Star eventually found its audience and well, here we are still talking about it after all these years.

Can you spot the cup cake mold?

I’ll be honest, Dark Star is not the most exciting film ever made, but I guess that was the whole point. This movie is about as laid back as its main characters are laid back. This isn’t a movie about interstellar wars, with battalions of spaceships and big budget special effects. Nope, this film is the complete opposite, it’s so low key. It’s a movie about four bored guys flying through space. Four working class heroes, bored with their lives, bored with their jobs, with nothing better to do then talk amongst themselves, philosophizing, asking the big questions. You could say the film flies by without a heck of a lot happening except these four guys just passing the time. One look at these guys and you can tell that the actors (including Dan O’Bannon himself) were a bunch of hippies in real life; the kind that would rather just sit back and smoke a fat one, if you know what I mean. Carpenter himself would have fit in nicely in this crew of misfits characters had he decided to act on the film. Back then, he looked like a hippy himself. Actually he still looks like one if you ask me. Hurray for eternal hippies man! Hurray!

Excitement comes along when the ships alien mascot/killer tomato decides to take one of the crew members for a ride, hiding in the spaceship, playing games. It has been said that those scenes with the alien tomato mascot were the inspiration for Alien, which O’Bannon was responsible for writing, so that makes sense. The other exciting moment in Dark Star comes when one of the bombs that the guys use to blow up planets called ‘Bomb #20’ (wow these guys have blown up 19 planets before this one!!?) gets jammed and wont drop. Problem is that since the Bomb is essentially a thinking computer, it decides that it has to follow orders and blow up anyway, even though it’s still attached to the ship! How hippy is this movie? I’ll tell you how hippy: one of the crew members decides to philosophize his way out of this tight jam by convincing the computer about the existence of the universe. Ha! So this is a film made by true blue hippies, for true blue hippies. In fact, some have gone as far as calling this one “the last great hippy film”. Another trippy element that the film has is that it was inspired by 2001 (1969), obviously Carpenter and O'Bannon were huge Kubrick fans. There are a lot of elements here that come straight out of Kubricks film, like for example the use of classical music, trippy space traveling visuals and the use of an intelligent computer that turns on its crew members. The film also has elements from a couple of sci-fi novels, these guys obviosly loved Phillip K. Dick. So essentially, Carpenter and O'Bannon payed homage with this movie to everything they loved about science fiction, but in a funny, ireverrent way. This movie was fun times, and it goes to show just how much film is an illusion. If Carpenter and O’Bannon took a closet, a couple of ice trays, toys, car models and cup cake molds and made a science fiction film out of them and got said film released in theaters, what’s to stop you from achieving your dreams? Exactly!

Rating: 2 1/2 out of 5

Starman (1984)

Title: Starman (1984)

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen

Review:

John Carpenter’s specialty is horror films, there is no denying that that’s what the man does best, it’s what he is good at. But often times he is seen only as a horror film director, when in reality, he has directed many types of films that have nothing to do with horror. Dark Star (1974) is essentially a sci-fi comedy, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is an action/suspense film, Big Trouble in Little China (1986) is an action/adventure/fantasy film. And believe it or not, Carpenter even dabbled in making a romantic film. As fate would have it, it’s a damn good one! Circa 1984 Carpenter directed Starman, which is not the kind of film you would expect John Carpenter to direct. Why? Because it’s a freaking love story that’s why and love films aren’t exactly what Carpenter was known for. But, there it is, and if you ask me, though a bit derivative of other films, this sci-fi love story stands as one of Carpenter’s best films. Go figure!

Box Office success is that way, follow me!

Story goes like this: one night, a lonely widow mourns the death of her husband by watching super-8 films they made together. In this home movies, they appear doing all sorts of happy things together. Essentially, she is torturing herself psychologically. She can’t seem to move on with her life. But one night everything changes when an alien being lands right smack in the middle of her living room as she sleeps! The alien looks through some of her picture albums, and finds a picture of her dead husband, the proceeds to morph into his image! So now, she has to deal with the fact that this alien being in her living room looks exactly like her dead husband! What does he want with her? Will she help the alien get back home? Or will she turn him in to the authorities that are after him?

They dont call him Starman for nothing!

As I saw this movie, something immediately came to mind. This is essentially the same story we saw a couple of years before in E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982). The only difference being that this alien doesn’t look like a walking turd with hands and feet; the alien in this film looks like Jeff Bridges. But seriously folks, this is the same damn movie, only with a better looking alien. You know the drill; the alien is stranded on earth and needs to get back home before the men in black get to it. The alien sends a message to his race to come pick him up, and so he must wait for them to get here. And he must arrive at a predetermined destination to meet up with them, so he can go back home. If he stays on earth, he dies. She what I mean? It’s the exact same story! Hell, you know how E.T. resurrects a dead plant in Spielberg’s film? Jeff Bridges resurrects a whole deer! The similarities are too many to mention here, just watch it with these similarities in mind and you’ll see what I mean.

But there was a reason behind all these similarities. You see, the script for Starman was being written at the same time as the script for E.T. The Extraterrestrial. So suddenly there was this tug of war over which of the two scripts was going to get made. The head honcho at Columbia Pictures needed to chose between producing E.T. or producing Starman, and he chose Starman. So E.T. went to Spielberg and Universal, while Starman went to Carpenter and Columbia Pictures. It was one of those situations where two studios were involved in making extremely similar films. And eventually, one fed on the success of the other. Same situation happened when Fox was making The Abyss (1990). When other studios smelled success with underwater films, they all started producing their own underwater monster features. Suddenly Tri Star Pictures was making Deep Star Six (1989) and MGM was making Leviathan (1989). Or when Tom Hanks made the child turns into an adult film Big (1988) over at 20 Century Fox. Suddenly other studios produced similarly themed films like Columbia Pictures’ Vice Versa (1988) and Tri Star Pictures’ Like Father, Like Son (1987). The phenomenal success of Spielberg’s E.T. had a lot to do with Starman getting made a couple of years down the line.

Spielberg, I'll steal your formula for success yet!

Essentially, I see Starman as a more adult version of E.T. What would happen if an alien came to earth and instead of looking like a walking turd, he actually looked good? What if instead of him befriending a little boy, he falls for a super hot chick? Basically, they made a few changes on the formula established by E.T., making the story more adult oriented and not so kid/family friendly. I have to say that it works like magic. It gives Starman a unique adult feel that you don’t get from Spielberg’s take on the same theme, which let’s face it, can get sappy at times. I mean, Starman ends up banging the human he befriends! So this film has more balls (pun intended!) then E.T. ever did. And I'll go even further still with this E.T./Starman thing: In 1982 John Carpenter made The Thing and we all know what an awesome movie that is. I mean, its great an all grounds, suspense, effects, gore, horror. I feel its Carpenter's best film, yet in spite of all its awesomeness, The Thing failed to connect with audiences in 1982. It was a HUGE failure for Carpenter and that failure can be attributed to the fact that The Thing went up against Spielbergs feel good alien flick at the box office. Any film going up against E.T. that summer was going to die a quick death, and that's exactly what happend to The Thing. Now, here comes Carpenter with Starman in what feels like vengeful venture and says: "Im gonna do the same damn thing! Im gonna copy your formula for success! And its gonna be awesome! And its going to be for adults!" Carpenter wanted to prove he could also make a feel good movie, and at the same time he ripped off the film that had cost him his first big failure at the box office. So I completely understand where Carpenter was coming from by making this love story.

But dont get me wrong, I don’t mean to bash on Starman. Even though it has some similarities with E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1979) Starman still manages to conjure up some originality with its situations and images. For example, how awesome was that transformation sequence in the beginning of the film when the alien being suddenly starts to morph into a human? A very outlandish sequence, freaked me the hell out. Kudos to Stan Winston and Rick Baker for pulling off that unique effect before CGI ever existed! And how original was that sequence where Jeff Bridges uses his alien spheres to float in the air while sending a message to his alien pals? I thought that was such a unique image. Plus, Jeff Bridges character is one of those characters that makes everything alright, he is sort of god like in that sense. The dude is so freaking powerful that his powers extend to resurrecting the dead and making an unfertile woman pregnant! God like in deed!

After we get past the sci-fi angle the films turns into a love story. Karen Allen (looking super-hot by the way!) falls for the alien, and really, can you blame her if the alien looks, talks and is 100% anatomically similar to her husband? I felt like I was watching Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost (1989) because even though it’s a love story, it still has a freaky angle to it. It’s a film about an alien and a human girl falling in love, and that’s freaky anyway you look at it. Yet all the right notes are played out to make it a good love story. Kudos to Carpenter for pulling that off! Carpenter’s only purpose for making a film like this one was to make up for the huge box office flop that The Thing (1982) ended up being. He had to do something or else his career as a Hollywood director would have gone down the drains! So he went with Starman. Good thing for Carpenter that Starman ended up being a moderate box-office success, making a little more then its budget back. Another thing that helped Carpenter’s career was that Starman received a bunch of awards all around, including an Oscar nod for Jeff Bridges’ performance. After Starman, Carpenter continued trying to hit box office success by getting away from horror. He ended up making Big Trouble in Little China, which to Carpenters chagrin, also ended up being a dismal box office bomb. How did Carpenter manage to stay afloat as a director when his rate of success was so uneven? He played it safe by making two low budget movies back to back, thats what he did! These films ended up being They Live (1988) and Prince of Darkness (1987). He sure knew how to juggle his carreer between his box office lows and downs thats for sure. Gotta give Carpenter credit for that!

Rating: 4 out of 5

 

Jeff Bridges, enjoying success next to his father (Lloyd Bridges) on premire night