As I’ve mentioned countless (countless!) times before, the early-to-mid seventies was definitely the weirdest period for Sci-Fi films, with the two biggest successes—and influences—on the genre being the heady 2001: A Space Odyssey and the grim Planet of the Apes. I think I can safely argue that this was the only point in time when a movie like Phase IV would be made at all. These bizarre and downbeat visions of the future would more or less be put out to pasture when Star Wars debuted, but the subsequent era of Sci-Fi movies still bore the mark of what had come before, sometimes in very direct ways.
Like previous subject Equinox, Dark Star was a short film picked up and expanded to feature length by The Blob producer Jack H. Harris, but this one was probably a much harder sell, and was only distributed briefly and in a small number of locations. Also like Equinox, Dark Star is the career beginnings for some of the most important people in creature feature history: director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (with a special shout out to the late concept artist/designer Ron Cobb, who designed the titular spaceship), who a few years after their first project came and went would go on to separately redefine the horror movie. That’s all fairly well-known stuff at this point (as is the story of their tense working relationship and subsequent falling out, as told in Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value), and while Dark Star developed a cult following based on its initial showings, it would gain a bigger one after Halloween and Alien made the minds behind it famous—and it’s also fairly well-trod territory to suggest that Dark Star would become an antecedent to some of their more famous movies, Alien especially. It’s still an interesting thing to look at, though, and while it’s only partly a monster movie, the ways it reflects on (and parodies) present and past Science Fiction trends makes it one of the missing links that illuminates the through-lines of multiple genres’ histories.
Dark Star is mostly a comedy reinterpretation of the Discovery One section of 2001, with a group of astronauts on a mission in their confined spaceship, trapped in the routines of a technological environment while a parental computer talks to them. The big difference is that the ship Dark Star, whose main job is to find “unstable planets” to blow up for the benefit of eventual human space colonization, seems to be falling apart (the crew sleeps in their former food storage room—also, in keeping with the “food pill” image, they seem to mostly eat what appears to be unfrozen freeze pops), and the crew’s listlessness and irritation with each other has clearly driven them varying degrees of insane. Everything about the ship looks cheap and is barely holding together, with the small monitoring room and the narrow corridors seemingly designed to make day-to-day living uncomfortable in one way or another—it’s a concept that works with a low budget Sci-Fi movie full of non-actors, with sets built from parts they could find laying around (even so, the sets and the shots of space, while not realistic, are surprisingly stylish.) This dilapidated, monotonous vision of the future was very much in keeping with the tone of post-moon landing Sci-Fi at the time (and I think the budget-consciously degraded look of the ship had a bigger influence on Star Wars’ visual design than George Lucas would like to admit), but taken to a logical extreme, all the wonder of space travel and amazing technology worn down to the banality of a boring job, where you constantly have to find your own mental escape, even if it annoys everyone around you.
The crew consists of Doolittle, Pinback (played by O’Bannon himself), Boiler, and Talby (whose voice is dubbed over by Carpenter), while their commanding officer is stuck in suspended animation after suffering a fatal injury from a faulty electrical panel. The crew seems to enjoy the process of blowing up a planet with one of their intelligent bombs (voiced by O’Bannon as well), but that seems to be happening less and less over the years. Doolittle attempts to stave off boredom by reminiscing about his California surfing days and playing an instrument made of empty bottles; meanwhile, Boiler enjoys shooting a laser around in the hallways, Talby stays in his observation booth and watches the stars, and Pinback plays pranks and is seemingly hated by everyone else (and, in a video confession, reveals that he actually stole the identity of the original Pinback after he took his own life.) Little details, like the number of pin-up model posters scattered on the walls throughout the ship, add a feel of both an oil rig and a college dorm room, and the cast consisting of amateurs means that these are not so much performances but raw and more grounded portrayals of the universally bearded young men who would get stuck together in an occupation like this (you can also see the beginnings of the working class crews that would be at the heart of Alien and especially John Carpenter’s The Thing.) I think most people saddled with random roommates could probably sympathize with them.
Structurally, the movie almost feels like a collection of skits centred on these characters, and while there is a definitive creature feature part of this movie, I could also be charitable and call the talking bomb stuff creature feature adjacent—it’s also some of the funniest material in the movie. Because of how flimsy the whole ship is, the bombs repeatedly receive incorrect commands to begin their process, with the computer getting into pithy arguments with them to get back into storage—a battle between AI with crossed wires, which is a genuinely original concept for a Sci-Fi movie (for its budget level, Dark Star effectively executes more than a few good SF concepts, such as the conversation with the mostly-dead Powell.) Later, a bomb gets ready to blow up while the release mechanism is malfunctioning, and Doolittle is forced to go out and teach it about Cartesian doubt so that it would choose to overlook its own programming—which works, until it doesn’t, leading to a darkly comical ending.
The monster-focused segment comes right in the middle of the movie, and was one of the sections that was added after its initial completion in order to lengthen the running time. This has Pinback being set to care for an alien that they decided to adopt as the ship’s “mascot”, likely as another attempt to make their interminable mission more interesting, which is portrayed by a beach ball with webbed hands (portrayed by future Michael Myers Nick Castle.) The alien here is maybe the ultimate parody of a low-budget movie monster, made to be as intentionally absurd as possible, and is the kind of thing I can see Carpenter and O’Bannon coming up with by dredging up all their memories of the hilariously shoddy monsters of their youth during the heyday of fifties B-movies. While they’re obviously going for laughs by only barely pretending that this thing is not a beach ball, I appreciate the inventiveness of the scenes with it and the ways Castle uses his very limited acting tools to give it some personality (even just by tapping the floor.) When the alien gets out and it and Pinback stalk each other through those previously mentioned narrow corridors, you can see how this would inspire O’Bannon’s concepts for Alien—the thing can appear and disappear quickly and clamber up walls, and there are scenes that could easily be tense in a claustrophobic environment like that, especially during the part where Pinback is threatened by a moving elevator in a shaft. But, because the monster is a beach ball with hands, what could be scary becomes silly, and moments such as Pinback chasing it with a broom or the alien pulling away the board he was using to cross a gap bring a manic, Looney Tunes energy, culminating with Pinback shooting the alien and watching it deflate and fly around…you know, like a beach ball. “I guess it must have been full of gas”, he tells the other crew members, a final coda to one of the weirdest monsters to ever show up in a motion picture.
It’s only part of the movie, and only barely contributes to the overall plot (at one point, the alien further damages a laser panel that is a big part of the climax), but it’s also one of the parts with the most lasting impact, if you think about it. This sequence is basically the basis for the definitive take of “alien monster on a spaceship” (or even the broader “alien monster in an enclosed space” i.e. The Thing) and while in this case it’s being played as an affectionate parody, the design of the environment and the moment-to-moment filming of it is still there—just change the look of the alien and you have a very different sort of movie. Much like the Xenomorph itself, it’s an idea that went through multiple very different metamorphoses to get to where it is today.
From its inception, one could easily see how Dark Star is lampooning the moroseness of contemporary Sci-Fi (while also wholeheartedly agreeing with it), as well as the less-respected parts of older Sci-Fi that likely supplied the impetus for the alien. From that angle, it’s a memorably idiosyncratic piece of work. For us looking in hindsight, it is also rather obvious how it was also the first draft for so many other big developments in multiple categories later on, monster movies in particular, which is why I thought it was worth writing about in the context of this site. For such a weird, unassuming movie (really, for as inventive as it is, you still wonder how it managed to get a wide theatrical distribution at all), the kind you’d expect a bunch of pot-smoking smart alecks who liked science fiction would make, Dark Star had an outsize impact, leading to multiple important careers in the film industry just like Equinox did. Just remember: it all started with a beach ball.
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