Reeling Backward: Dark Star (1974)

Careers were launched with this student film-turned-sci-fi cult classic, blasting the genre into hyperspace (almost literally!) without actually being an especially good or interesting flick.

”Dark Star” was John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s first feature film — though it probably shouldn’t have been.

As the lore is now well known, the movie got its start as a student film at USC thrown together over a couple of years for a few thousand bucks. After the pair wrote the script about a lonely crew of astronauts on a 20-year mission to blow up unstable planets, they used bargain-basement effects and sets to shoot it, with O’Bannon cast in two of the film’s only eight roles (including robot voices).

Like most student films, its reasons for existence were to act as a sort of graduate thesis to assure their professors they’d properly absorbed their lessons, and to have something to show Hollywood types in order to land their first real jobs.

As it happens, it got enough notice that a distributor ponied up to shoot more footage to pad out the 45 minutes to an acceptable feature length. Then John Landis, a friend of theirs, showed that version to a producer who bought the distribution rights, but had them shoot more stuff and cut out some of gunk added for the previous guy.

So rather than a single production, “Dark Star” was shot and re-shot in bits and pieces over 1970-74, with Carpenter and O’Bannon tag-teaming post-production roles like editing, visual effects and music. A pair of cast members who had since cut their long hair had to wear wigs for continuity.

Altogether it’s estimated around $60,000 was spent to make it. (About $400k in today’s dollars, still a pittance by even the standards of the most modest indie.)

The 83-minute version that landed in theaters in 1974 got good reviews but made little box office. However, its popularity with the midnight movie crowd was evident, helped by a pretty overt marketing appeal to pharmacological accompaniment — “The Spaced Out Odyssey” was its tagline, spoofing on Kubrick’s 1968 film — and its status as a stoner cult classic was soon assured when it became an early favorite on VHS.

Both Carpenter and O’Bannon would go on to storied careers in the horror and science fiction dramas. Carpenter created the “Halloween” franchise, creaking but still stalking today, along with “The Thing,” “Christine,” “They Live,” “Escape from New York” and its sequel, and many other indelible films.

O’Bannon wrote the original “Alien” — and continues to cash checks from its many sequels, remakes and crossovers — and stories and/or scripts for “Heavy Metal,” “Lifeforce,” “Return of the Living Dead” and “Total Recall.” I have a deep affection for all of these movies that caressed erogenous zones of my fecund adolescent brain in ways both carnal and grotesque.

“Dark Star” had nonetheless escaped my attention all these years.

I tried and failed to get a review copy of the “Hyperdrive Edition” when that came out on disc some years ago, which includes both the theatrical version a shorter 68-minute one. O’Bannon also did his own re-edit for a 1992 director’s cut on laserdisc (an interesting label, since Carpenter is officially the director) that runs 72 minutes and reportedly removes most of the final round of production footage.

So I’ve finally watched it — the original version — and have to say the movie is notable for having launched a pair of essential careers, but managed to do so without actually being an especially good or interesting flick. O’Bannon himself has commented that it probably would have been better left alone as the modest student film it was intended to be.

Its influence on other filmmakers, however, is indisputable, both thematically and for its visual effects.

George Lucas was so impressed with the camera effect O’Bannon effect came up with to represent a ship launching into hyperspace — where a static field of stars lurches toward you suddenly and then morphs into a streaming tunnel of lights — he hired O’Bannon as a visual effects guy for the first “Star Wars” film, where they enhanced the gimmick further.

Think about that: this effect has become so ubiquitous that it’s a staple of virtually every movie set in space for the last 50 years, right up to MCU flicks and the like. Astonishing.

Carpenter and O’Bannon also stood out for being among the first to depict existence in space as rather moribund and dehumanizing. The four hippieish men have been on their trek aboard the titular ‘scoutship’ for 20 years now, though only aging three due to some vague science-y reason, and are thoroughly bored with themselves, their mission and each other.

Their job is to clear the galaxy of planets that might veer off into their suns and create a supernova event, even if millennia into the future, in order to pave the way for human colonization of space. Also, to investigate other evolved species, though that’s become less of a priority as time has gone by.

“Don’t give me any of that intelligent life stuff. Give me something I can blow up!” one barks at his colleague.

Originally a crew of five, their commander, Powell, died fairly recently in an accident, and the next-in-command, Lieutenant Doolittle (Brian Narelle), is so uninvested in his duties the ship is literally falling apart around them. They’ve moved their sleeping quarters into the dining area, and Dolittle mostly spends his time dreaming about having his surfboard back, even if just to wax it, or playing a strange musical instrument he’s created of bottles filled with water.

Andreijah "Dre" Pahich plays Talby — though dubbed by Carpenter because of the actor’s thick accent — who barely sees the rest of the crew, staying in the observation bubble in the top of the ship. Boiler (Cal Kuniholm) is a blond oaf who likes to trim his mustache a lot or practice shooting holes in stuff with the laser rifle.

Sergeant Pinback, played by O’Bannon, is the comic relief, a hypersensitive type who likes practical jokes and keeps a video diary about how nobody likes him. It turns out he actually flunked out of astronaut school, got assigned as a fuel technician and wound up on the ship in a case of mistaken identity.

He gets an extended sequence to himself where Pinback goes to feed their “mascot,” a strange balloon-like alien with foot claws, that they acquired somewhere along the way.

The alien — played by a costumed Nick Castle, who would guy on to portray the Shape aka Michael Myers in “Halloween” — is sentient but non-verbal, emitting various squeaky noises as he leads Pinpack on an extended chase through the ship’s bowels that soon turns deadly.

As comedy, this part isn’t terribly entertaining. But you can clearly see the roots of “Alien” in this sequence, with air shafts and dark corners of a spaceship used as the maze for a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with a threatening outworlder. James Cameron would lean even further into this aesthetic with his sequel.

Like in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Dark Star’s computer is self-aware, though entirely benevolent and voiced by Barbara "Cookie" Knapp. Interestingly, the bombs the crew drops to destroy planets are similarly intelligent, though more obstinate (and voiced by O’Bannon). They’re up to Bomb 20 — it’s never specified how many they have in total, though each is roughly bus-sized — and it keeps wanting to detonate even when ordered to return to its bay.

Things eventually go bad, as they surely must, with Doolittle going outside in a space suit to reason with Bomb 20 using “phenomenology,” aka using a bunch of kooky metaphysical discourse to convince its robot mind the universe is not really real, and thus he should not carry out his one and only intended purpose. This was suggested by the commander, Powell, cryogenically frozen but apparently still communicative with a technological assist.

Pinback and Boiler die in the explosion, and Doolittle and Talby are left hurtling through space with only a finite amount of air in their suits. Both are saved, in a sense, with Talby merging with the Phoenix Asteroids, a glowing pink celestial body that supposedly makes a circuit around the universe once every 12 trillion years.

(I’m not sure if knowledge of the actual age of the universe, 13.7 billion years, was unknown in 1974 or the filmmakers just didn’t care about scientific accuracy.)

Doolittle finally gets to ride his surfboard, grabbing a panel from the destroyed Dark Star to hang 10 through the atmosphere of the planet they were intending to destroy, in a bit clearly borrowed from the Silver Surfer comics.

I’ll confess: if I didn’t know who was behind the making of “Dark Star,” I’d probably write it off as zero-budget goofball drek. It is indeed that, but just as you don’t judge a chef by the very first full meal they cook, filmmakers should be given time and space to hone their craft before asking people to buy tickets to see it.