And this week's Friday night movie has been... Dark Star!
Here's a question: Can anyone tell me, without looking it up, who created the Alien franchise?
My experience with sci-fi nerds - or any nerds for that matter - is that they tend to venerate creators who come up with successful IP. By way of example: George Lucas gave us Star Wars, Gene Roddenberry gave us Star Trek, J. Michael Straczynski gave us Babylon 5 and Joss Whedon gave us Firefly.
All recognisable names to be sure - so who created Alien?
The answer is two people: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The former wrote a movie called Dark Star and it impressed the latter to a point that they joined forces, worked on some of the ideas from said movie and gave us the horror/sci-fi hybrid that we all know.
And if that isn't enough, this movie was the directorial debut of one John Carpenter. It was originally a student film but, with some additional funds, it was expanded upon.
Quite a pedigree one would think.....
Let's get this out of the way: This is a B-Movie. The sets look shoddy, the sfx are cheap, the premises are ludicrous and there is no attempt to hide it. The monster in this movie is a beachball and the cast act like they're stoned. Certainly there are some elements that will crop up again in Alien - blue-collar space-farers working for a faceless corporation - but both films are so removed from each other it's hard to make the connection both came from the same writer.
And yet, this movie still works: There are plenty of laughs and the cheap nature of it makes it endearing. It certainly does say a lot about doing a lot with limited resources and you must give props to a student film that made the leap into a full feature.
Funny how big things would come to those behind a mere student film....
