DARK STAR
Dan O'Bannon, Brian Norelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich. Dir. John Carpenter, Bryanston Distributing, 1975My first real film-nerd buddy was named Tom. We went to the same prep school, where our interest in Monty Python, horror movies, & shooting our own productions with Tom's dad's movie camera (not a little Super8 job, either, it had sound) did not earn us invites to the cool kids' parties. Tom had two legs up on me when it came to movies:1.The financial support of his parents. 2.Cable, including Movie Channel. He had access to infinitely more films, uncut films, uncensored films, foreign films - he had a freakin' movie library living inside his TV and his parents didn't care if he stayed up all weekend watching it.
Tom had seen many more movies than I, but it wasn't competition. It was friendship - that wondrous sensation of mutual delight when you meet someone who GETS IT. Tom loved to share the films Movie Channel & openminded parents introduced him to and these included John Carpenter's first feature, 1976's DARK STAR. I saw many of the films he championed (Herzog's NOSFERATU gave me nightmares for weeks), but the only part of DARK STAR I managed to see was the final five minutes, an image which lingered in memory from 1981 until 2022, when I finally saw it. On the off chance you've missed DARK STAR most of your life I won't reveal that final image, but if you have, you can possibly relate. It's an arresting image.
I've been reading & hearing about both Johh Carpenter's first two films virtually since I got into movies while managing to miss every single midnight showing or dvd reissue of either until last month, when I finally ordered them, like a normal person. I am beyond pleased to finally check those boxes, especially since I enjoyed both so much. (In fact, ASSAULT is shaping up to be another DIRTY HARRY for me - a gritty, low budget crime picture I become unnaturally fascinated by and proceed to watch far more times than can possibly be healthy, but more on that when I get there.)
Back in 1976, audiences for DARK STAR didn't know what to make of it, so much so most of them didn't realize it was - and very much is - a comedy. Trying to imagine sitting through this film in the belief it's a serious drama set on a spaceship is as wearying as I imagine actually doing so must've been for filmgoers in '76, because DARK STAR is a very funny film. It's a film about a spaceship armed with talking "smart bombs" - and the bombs have an attitude problem. How audiences took it as anything other than comedic eludes me, but that's the history.
More than funny, DARK STAR nodded at the path ahead for 70s scifi in at least one respect: the used-universe aesthetic. DARK STAR creator/screenwriter Dan O'Bannon significantly expanded the look and sensibility of space from the working-stiff's eye view in ALIEN, and returned to it in his screenplay for Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL. George Lucas's first set of STAR WARS movies championed a "grimy galaxy" idea, Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is seen from the perspective of a blue collar guy, a lineman for his local electric company, and Scott's BLADERUNNER from the perspective of a former cop.
In DARK STAR, the crew have been in space for 20 years. The living quarters are cramped & squalid. The food's bad. The ship is slowly deteriorating, the captain's in suspended animation, and the central computer may not be 100% reliable. Bannon shows us spaceships as we know they were for crews of the world's great navies:claustrophobic, wearying, spectacularly unromantic, and space missions as of suspect value, at best. DARK STAR's purpose, to destroy destabilized planets that might prevent future colonization of nearby worlds, is a decidedly sketchy enterprise. Indeed, it's not precisely clear ANY worlds have been colonized since the start of their mission, as all their communication & supply is from Earth.
The one big problem in writing about DARK STAR is that I'm doing it as part of a series of writeups of John Carpenter's work and so far I've mostly mentioned Dan O'Bannon's screenplay. Which is apt, because DARK STAR, for all that Carpenter's name is in the director's slot and for all that it's his student film, is Dan O'Bannon's baby. It's his ideas, his characters, his visual effects, his editing, and he's the star. While it's ridiculous to try limiting anyone's participation to just one area when working on a student film, DARK STAR is about as close as Carpenter got to working purely as a hired gun.
Whomever qualifies for most credit on the film, he deserves every accolade which he has ever been accorded. Made for about $30k (Carpenter claims to have "no idea" where they got even that much), DARK STAR is a triumphal microbudgeted genre picture, an hilarious comedy introducing a whole new aesthetic to science fiction films wherein the primitive effects, much like in HALLOWEEN, never distract attention from the great story and facinating (bizarre) characters. In the sense that it renders budgetary considerations irrelevant by telling a great story in as visually compelling a way as money allowed, DARK STAR very much bears the Carpenter imprimatur. In most respects, however, it's O'Bannon's creature, and it's both a lumbering, hapless beast and something much more beautiful and rare.
The same cannot be said of Carpenter's followup, 1976's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, made for the far grander sum of $100k. A paraphrased remake of Howard Hawks's 1959 western, RIO BRAVO, ASSAULT is all Carpenter's and to say he lands on his feet is to sink to hopeless cliche and ludicrous understatement at the same time.
He lands on his feet. As I believe I stated earlier, I'm making up for the decades in which I didn't see ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 by becoming a helpless addict to it, now. I had few expectations going in, other than assuming I'd like it, and liking a film covers a lot of ground, from "but won't watch it again for a few years" to "THANK GOD I NO LONGER HAVE TO REWIND TO REWATCH." This film belongs in the latter category.
Much is written of Carpenter's veneration of Howard Hawks and rightly so. His second feature takes its inspiration from RIO BRAVO, which he manages a nod to in the middle of HALLOWEEN, his loose homage to Hawks's THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, which he'd remake four years later, and he borrows shots from Hawks throughout ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Still, Carpenter's an Old Hollywood guy at heart, like most of the so-called "Movie Brats," like Coppola and Lucas and Scorsese - all of whom he professes to loathe. Like the Brats, Carpenter went to film school, where he learned reverence for the Golden Age auteurs, and not just Hawks. John Ford's shadow lies long over Carpenter's career, as well, to which he nods by casting Henry Brandon, Scar in THE SEARCHERS, as Sgt. Chaney, the film's second casualty. Ford maintained a famous "stock company" of actors he used and reused in his pictures. The beginnings of Carpenter's stock company can be found here in Nancy Loomis as the unfortunate Julie, who went on to play the equally unfortunate Lynda in HALLOWEEN, as well as Charles Cyphers, the hilariously named Sherrif Lee Bracket also in HALLOWEEN & the Sec. of State in ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.
It troubles me how I can heap praises on a film without ever mentioning the plot or characters except in generalities. I assume most know the plot to a movie that turns 50 in another four years, but if not, LAPD Precinct 13, the Anderson district, located in the heart of a youth gang warzone where the cops have just killed a half dozen gang members, is being relocated about ten blocks from its present location. Austin Stoker's newly promoted Lt. Ethan Bishop* gets assigned babysitting duty, running the precinct house on its final night in operation. The gang members who've sworn a blood feud with the LAPD choose the same night to gather en masse and, armed with stolen automatic weapons, storm Precinct 13. Making matters more fun, three prisoners being transferred from the LA County jail to Death Row have to stop and take refuge at the precinct due to a deathly ill transferee. One of the prisoners, Napoleon Wilson, is a notorious mass murderer and rumored psychopath. With the phone lines and power cut and backup units uncertain, it's up to Lt. Ethan to rally such forces as he has and ride out the night. Survival will mean making difficult choices, especially as other officers are picked off.
Where RIO BRAVO was made as Hawks & Wayne's rebuke of HIGH NOON for showing a lawman calling on his community to help protect him rather than being equal to the task, himself, which offended their standard of professionalism, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 works more like a character study of what people will do to survive, whom they'll trust, and what choices they'll make they might not otherwise. While Ethan & Napoleon demonstrate the competence Hawks admired so much, there's little of Wayne's blustering machismo involved here. The men may be good at what they do, and Laurie Zimmer's Leigh (ANOTHER Hawks reference) may be very much the Hawksian Woman, but it's the situation of RIO BRAVO Carpenter's inspired by rather than the specific machinations of its plot. That's part of why I love Carpenter. He doesn't remake old movies - THE THING notwithstanding - so much as he uses their basic ideas and/or structures to tell his own stories. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 succeeds not by reconstituting the Ricky Nelson-Dean Martin duet but by engaging us in the story of how Ethan, a mass murdering psychopath named Napoleon, the guy who played Apollo Creed's trainer in the ROCKY movies, and a secretary can learn to depend on each other enough to survive the full affrontal assault of a small army.
Like Hawks, though Carpenter gives us some satisfyingly violent moments along the way, he gets it done mainly by creating compelling characters we find it easy to suspend judgment of long enough to value and care about them. There's no doubt at ASSAULT's conclusion that Napoleon Wilson is a mass murderer - he proclaims it, himself - but there's at least reasonable doubt that he's a truly evil man. Carpenter has said in commentaries that he seldom storyboards but always rehearses his casts to help him nail down exactly what's happening in each scene before saying "Action." It shows in how incredibly tight his films feel. Pacing is seldom an issue in his work. His stories move fast, but never loose, and never at the expense of audience comprehension.
As I said, I expected to enjoy ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, and I did. I did NOT expect to be blown away by it, to fall utterly in love with it, to want to watch it repeatedly and read everything I can about it, but those have all occurred. Aptly, I had much the same reaction to both THE SEARCHERS & RIO BRAVO when I finally saw them both a few years ago. I like to believe that films find us when we're ready for them, but if that is so then I bitterly regret not being ready for DARK STAR and especially ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 until now.
*Ethan is John Wayne's character's name in THE SEARCHERS, another Ford nod in a Hawks homage.
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Henry Brandon. Dir. John Carpenter, Turtle Releasing, 1976
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