Dark Star HyperDrive Edition [1974] [DVD]

There are some interesting extras included with this Hyperdrive Edition. They include ;

A new text introduction to the film written by Dan O'Bannon who died just before this release.

The original version of the film (68 minutes).

A full-length audio commentary of the final version (83 minutes) by Andrew Gilchrist who tells you everything that is known about the film.

Let There Be Light (115 minutes) is a new, excellent 2010 documentary and includes interviews with many of the surviving cast and crew and archival interviews with John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon. You will find out how the students made the film over three years, exactly where the props and sets came from and how Carpenter and O'Bannon worked with each other.

An interview with Alan Dean Foster (34 minutes) who talks about his novelisation of Dark Star, his meetings with John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon and his other novelisations which included Star Trek and Star Wars, and how he met George Lucas.

An interview with Brian Narelle (40 minutes) who plays Lt Doolittle. He talks about his work on Dark Star, working with John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, and other work in acting and animation.

A 3D Guide to the Dark Star ship which is a short animation showing you around a few areas of the ship.

The original trailer which gives away a few of the surprises in the film.

A trivia section which details 22 text items.

Space. The final frontier. This is the voyage of the scout ship Dark Star. Her twenty year mission is to seek out new worlds, and then blow them up. There's a rogue alien in the food locker, the intelligent stellar bomb has something on it's mind and the somewhat less intelligent crew are bored stiff.

Dark Star was written and filmed by John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon as a student project between 1970 and 1973 on a risible budget of $55K (by contrast, Blazing Saddles, also released in that year, benefitted from a slightly more generous $2.6m).

...and it shows. It REALLY shows. The film seems to have been captured on life-expired Super 8, the lighting appears to be following Dogme Collective rules and the score was (probably) laid down on a Hammond organ. The acting is poor (but not awful) and according to O'Bannon, at least one of the cast was off his face on LSD during filming. The "special effects" (I use that phrase VERY loosely) would make George Lucas weep like a girl with many of the props apparently having been scavenged from the skip behind the film studio (I'm not even going to mention the beachball alien) and some of the scenes obviously having been filmed in the sound stage's boiler room. Consequently, tahe whole thing looks, feels and sounds a little like a 1980's Belgian porno on it's 7th generation VHS rerecord and, taken at face value, this is a film that you would probably return with a letter asking for your money back plus compensation.

In truth however, Dark Star is actually a mother-lode for the modern sci-fi genre. Consider this: Dan O'Bannon adapted the screenplay, called it "Alien" and turned it into a cinematographic icon (so that there is a direct line of descent between Dark Star and the most recent Hollywood sci-fi offering - "Prometheus"). Set designer Ron Cobb went on to work on both Alien and Star Wars and John Carpenter is now one of the most respected and prolific sci-fi/horror film-makers in Hollywood. It's fascinating to watch Dark Star with this in mind, spotting the genesis of concepts and styles that are now so well developed that they are almost cliches, and that alone makes the film a worthwhile purchase. It actually LOOKS like an Alien fan-film, done for laughs rather than screams.

And if it's rough in other ways? Well, to me it doesn't look like the crew were simply fulfilling a film school project on the cheap, it looks like they were trying to make the best film they could with no money. The props and effects are cheap but effective, imaginative and done with care, the plot is a corker (it would almost stand a big-budget remake) and the humour (it is comedy/satire) is spot on, if a little sophomoric.

In this two-disc "Hyperdrive Edition" of the film you get the theatre release which has some 40 minutes of extra footage and the original, student-short as Carpenter and O'Bannon first produced it. For my money, the longer cinematic version is easily the better and most watchable, but it's interesting to compare the two cuts. On top of that is a retrospective "making of" documentary, and various other shorts, including interviews with some of the cast and crew. These interviews are a little "meh", but the documentary is much more interesting if over-long.

In the final analysis, despite its faults (or perhaps because of them) Dark Star is a ground- breaking film with a big heart. It may not ever have been Oscar material (although it's earlier Carpenter produced stable-mate, "The Resurrection of Bronco Billy" did pick up an Academy Award) but it deserves a cherished place on the shelf of anyone who loves modern sci-fi.

Doolittle: Hello, Bomb? Are you with me? Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?
Bomb #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.
Doolittle: Fine. Think about this then. How do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: Well, of course I exist.
Doolittle: But how do you know you exist?
Bomb #20: It is intuitively obvious.
Doolittle: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?
Bomb #20: Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this.
Doolittle: Why don't you have more time?
Bomb #20: Because I must explode in 75 seconds.

A good DVD issue with an accepatble SD transfer, given the old source material. An entertaining commentary track and the informative, if a little padded, documentary "Let There Be Light."