Bombed out in space with a spaced-out bomb! John Carpenter’s deliberately lo-fi cult comedy Dark Star is a rollicking, anarchic trip into space that sends up Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and other heroic visions of space travel, updating the sci-fi genre for the 70s hippie-slacker-drug counterculture. Instead of valiant space jockeys bravely exploring the unknown, Carpenter and writer Dan O’Bannon – who would later pen the screenplay for Alien – give us “truck drivers in space” stuck on the fringes of the galaxy in a broken-down ship, trudging through the twentieth year of a mission to blow up unstable planets. Pieced together over the course of several years, this debut feature is a highly subversive stuff. In space, no one can see you be weird.
