Part of See It Big! Outer Space
Sunday, March 1, 2020, 6:30 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

Dir. John Carpenter. 1974, 83 mins. 35mm (faded). With Dan O’Bannon, Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm. Armed with “thermostellar triggering devices,” sentient bombs that speak their mind, a team of astronauts aboard the spaceship the Dark Star travels the cosmos to destroy “unstable” planets that impede the progress of future space colonization. When Bomb #20 threatens to blow itself and the whole ship to pieces, the crew must find a way to survive their suicide trap. This anarchic space parody from then USC student John Carpenter, starring, co-written and edited by his classmate Dan O’Bannon (Alien), manages simultaneously to embody, as O’Bannon put it, “the world’s most impressive student film and…the world’s least impressive professional film.”