Dark Star

• Cat.no: FABD 2001
• Cert: PG
• Running time: 82 minutes
• Year: 1974
• Pressing: 1999
• Region(s): 2 (UK PAL)
• Chapters: 18 plus extras
• Sound: Linear PCM Mono
• Languages: English
• Subtitles: None
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• 16:9-enhanced: No
• Macrovision: No
• Disc Format: DVD 5
• Price: £75.99
• Extras : Scene index, Trailer, Photo Gallery, Biographies
  

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  Director:

  John Carpenter

  (Escape From L.A., Escape From New York, Halloween, Vampires)

Producers:

Screenplay:

Music:

Cast:

Doolittle: Brian Narelle
Boiler: Cal Kuniholm
Talby: Dre Pahich
Pinback: Dan O’Bannon

Dark Staris a parody of old sci-fi films including 2001: A Space Odyssey,for its female version of HAL, with the astronauts going between planets and blowing upthe unstable ones, while coming across an alien and having to carry it back to Earth.Then the ship’s computer suffers a serious malfunction and, as alighted to on the frontcover, only one of the crew remains, having to ‘surf’ back to Earth.

The film is the result of a collaboration between writer-director JohnCarpenter and co-screenwriter Dan O’Bannon when they made a short filmbased on the same premise on a film studies course at the University of SouthernCalifornia. They had no budget so relied on bizarre props such as a beach ball inplace of an alien with a voice that sounds like Pingu, not to mention a teatray used as a life-support machine. Eventually they got the go-ahead – and $60,000- from Hollywood distributor Jack Harris, who co-produced the end result, to

While Carpenter went on to direct a number of films such as Assault on Precinct 13,Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York (and L.A.), The Thing, In the Mouth ofMadness and the most recent, Vampires, Dan O’Bannon has mostly made acareer out of screenwriting on films such as Alien, Blue Thunder, Lifeforce,Total Recall, Screamers, Alien 3 and also wrote and directed one of my all-timefavourite pieces of nonsense, Return of the Living Dead in 1985. Both haveadded other strings to their bow in their time, including Carpenter composing thescore for many of his films, giving them his distinctive moody-synthesizer style.turn it into a feature-length film.

On the plus side, this the first time this film has been available in widescreenin the UK on either DVD or video and it’s the original 1.85:1 ratio, unlike everyCarpenter film to come after it which were all shot in 2.35:1. However, althoughit’s good to see such an effort has been made by an independent company, theprint could use a good remastering as well as making it anamorphic but such can bevery expensive to do and the Region 1 disc doesn’t have this either. Theaverage bitrate is a 6.85Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 9Mb/s.

The sound quality also has its problems. It comes in mono, but isn’t particularlyclear and at times sounds quite fragmented meaning that sometimes you can’t hearthe dialogue clearly. There are no subtitles either which doesn’t help.

The film is in English only, with no subtitles.

And there’s more… :

A Photo Library contains fifteen stills from the film and theBiographies section provides brief information and filmographies onCarpenter and O’Bannon.

Menu :

The menu is static and silent and mirrors an old computer screen with greenwriting. Reminds me of the Tandy TRS80 🙂

Overall, this film didn’t grab me as much as Carpenter’s later film and the pictureisn’t of the best quality, but if you must get it in widescreen then a DVD would bebetter than the VHS alternative.