by Garrett Smith, Staff Writer

Welcome to BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGETS, in which I will be examining movies that take big swings with shallow pockets. Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez made EL MARIACHI for $7,000, which is indeed an impressively small price tag for a legitimately exciting action movie. But if you told me you could make a movie about a musician that gets mistaken for a hitman for $7,000, I would believe you. I would, however, be less inclined to believe you could make a movie about a vampire lair that gets mistaken for a bar for that much money, just as a random example (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN cost $19 million). This column will focus on movies that I consider to have “big ideas” at their core and feel even larger when you consider how little money went into making them. I expect that most of the movies I cover will be genre movies, if not specifically science-fiction movies, and that I will be spoiling them in great detail.

This month our subject is the first feature from one of my all-time favorite director:

Dark Star (dir. John Carpenter, 1974)

Say, what’s the big idea?

A team of company men aboard the A.I.-assisted starship “Dark Star” are already going crazy with a combination of power and isolation when a malfunction causes one of their artificially intelligent bombs to go online and attempt to deploy itself. They are 20 years into their mission to seek out and destroy “unstable planets” that might threaten Earth’s goal of interstellar colonization, having since been abandoned by their exploitative government, and they are beyond succumbing to boredom, playing jokes on one another and chasing an alien that looks suspiciously like a beach-ball through the corridors of the ship. With the main computer on the fritz, their only option is to space walk out to the bomb and try to talk it down.

And they did that with how much money?

This figure is tough to fully pin down, but I’ve seen it reported as $60,000 in total. The film had a lengthy production, starting as a $1,000 student film at the University of Southern California, eventually expanding to a $6,000 budget for a 45-minute cut of the film, and ultimately, with the help of distributor Jack Murphy, being given the rest to fund a feature-length version of the movie.

Well how’d they pull that off?

If the plot description above sounded familiar at all, it’s because the screenplay was co-written by John Carpenter (Halloween,The Thing) and Dan O’Bannon. The latter would go on to write the script for Ridley Scott’s Alien, claiming that when audiences didn’t laugh at Dark Star as he intended them to, he decided to re-write it without the comedy, turning it into Alien. They were film students at USC at the time and had an ambitious idea for a student film: a stoner comedy version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Attempting to create a science-fiction movie of this scale for a few thousand dollars means saving pennies everywhere you can, and so O’Bannon did quite a bit of the special effects work himself, including some model work and the development of an animation effect to depict hyperspace travel. The design of the Dark Star itself came from a drawing that artist Ron Cobb (Star Wars, Back To The Future) made on a napkin at the International House of Pancakes. This movie was literally cobbled together, including both cuts and re-shoots that were requested by their theatrical distributor, Jack Harris.

Did it work?

Arguably, the existence of Alien means Dark Star was a significant creative failure. Carpenter would go on to become one of America’s great cult filmmakers, but his returns to science-fiction would all be decidedly Earthbound (or in the case ofGhosts Of Mars, Mars-bound). But O’Bannon would continue trying to flex this muscle, re-working the beach-ball alien segment from Dark Star into the critically lauded Alien, and then becoming a bit of a cult filmmaker himself with films like Return Of The Living Dead and Lifeforce (directed by Tobe Hooper). It certainly seems likeDark Star didn’t work as its creators intended it to.

And yet, watching it now, you’ll notice a significant influence on the genre. There are elements that you could point to as potentially inspiring George Lucas’ grand vision forStar Wars, including the aforementioned hyperspace animation which turned stars into elongated white lines alongside the ship as well as a piece of design that looks a whole hell of a lot like R2-D2. And the stoner-comedy roots of the project would reappear throughout Carpenter’s work, most significantly in a surfing sequence in Escape From LA. While it isn’t among the best work in either filmmaker's filmography, it is among the most interesting from a historical stand-point and does work fairly well on its own terms.

Was it successful?

In the sense that it launched the careers of two legitimately great genre filmmakers, Dark Star accomplished what it intended to as a student film. But this is most certainly a qualified success, as by most other measures (including the opinions of its creators) it was a failure. Box office numbers are impossible to find, but on the 1983 home video release, O’Bannon claims that he and Carpenter went to some theaters on opening night to find them either empty or with “5 people in the house and they looked like they were attending a funeral.”

While the current Rotten Tomatoes score sits at a healthy 78%, initial reviews for the film weren’t very kind. Carpenter recalls that Variety gave him his first bad review for the movie, calling it a “limp parody.” And while Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars when it was re-released a few years later, and its reputation has only increased in the years since, most reviews from the period of its release simply compliment the effects work on its shoe-string budget and move on.

Why should I watch it?

A man surfs through space on a piece of debris until he turns into a comet. Need I say more? OK, fine, I will.

In 2021, with all the critical appraisal of Alien that we have under our belts and the general understanding of Carpenter’s worldview being one in which he distrusts any system that is governed by people, Dark Star is a fascinating piece of art. You can see the groundwork for the political landscape of Carpenter’s filmography here, as well as the “blue-collar space-truckers” vibe of the Alien franchise. But it’s all housed in this funky, psychedelic comedic tone that in the longview of time is ultimately very unique to this movie. The way it portrays these men as having been given a certain amount of power only to then be abandoned by those that gave it to them resonates loudly in a world that is trying desperately to move away from male-dominated power structures and the fallout from them. In the end, it’s a film about incompetence and masculinity, and the black holes that are created when the two meet. It is very much a movie for the new millennium and the changes we are trying to make within and deserves to find a new audience today.