Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Dan O’Bannon, Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. In my head, this movie is playing in my dorm room at some point, but any memories beyond the malevolent bouncing rubber ball (Nick Castle) have dimmed over time.
Did I Like It: I try not to look to other reviews as I begin my own. Too much seeps in and I wonder if I’m offering my own views. I couldn’t help, however, noting that star, screenwriter, production designer, and special effects technician Dan O’Bannon felt as if this collaboration with Carpenter started out as the greatest student film ever created, and ended up being one of the sloppier professional films ever released. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more aware self-assessment from a filmmaker.
And it’s interesting enough on that front. I would have loved to see more of the filmmaker Carpenter was about to become, but that doesn’t really come into play until <Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)>. Maybe if he had decided to remake <Forbidden Planet (1956)>* instead of <The Thing From Another World (1951)>, but that wasn’t the world we live in.
Thus, it ends up being a a pretty strong argument against the ubiquity of the auteur theory. This is largely O’Bannon’s film, and while it certainly reflects the work he would soon do in <Alien (1979)>, but there’s more than enough of <Total Recall (1990)> and his optical computer display work in <Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)> to see just where this film crawled so others could run. In fact it is the test run for so much of what becomes Alien, that those aforementioned fuzzy memories I had of the bouncing ball I thought were the crux of the film. Unfortunately, there are more than a few bits added in to pad out the running time, and not all of them work wit hthe same embryonic interest.
*A prospect which I’ve never found any evidence was ever on Carpenter’s radar, but he jammed two movies into <Halloween (1978)>, so don’t tell me I’m just pulling that thing out of nowhere.