Dark Star

Dark Star – 1974 – United States

Someone once described Dark Star as a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That’s not a bad summary. Dark Star is about a crew of bored astronauts on a 20-year mission. Their job is to pointlessly bomb uninhabited planets, and their superiors back on Earth are totally uninterested in them. Nothing much happens. They banter wearily. One guy gets stuck in an elevator. They run out of toilet paper. Their pet alien gets loose. And in the end, the ship blows up and they all die after one of their sapient bombs goes rogue.

Ghosts of Mars

Ghosts of Mars – 2001 – United States

John Carpenter made some great movies: The Thing (1982), Escape From New York (1981), The Fog (1980). In some ways, Ghosts of Mars might be as good as any of those, except it was made 20 years later, which means it’s much less novel to watch.

Ghosts of Mars leans hard into some common John Carpenter themes. A disparate group of people is trapped in an isolated, confined location, and they must band together to fight off an encroaching enemy. In this case, the location is a rundown Martian mining encampment, and the enemy is an alien virus that turns people into psychotic killers with body piercings and kinky leather gear. The encampment has a grungy, industrial look not unlike the spaceship in Alien, and the bad guys look pretty cool too. They resemble goth versions of Mad Max freaks.

Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness – 1987 – United States

I’ve seen every movie John Carpenter has ever directed. Of course, there are some real classics: The Thing (1982), Escape from New York (1981), Big Trouble in Little China (1986). But it might surprise you that all of his movies are actually pretty good, even Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1996), a romantic comedy starring the ever-annoying Chevy Chase.

Prince of Darkness is one of my favorite John Carpenter movies. It isn’t his best, but it is his most esoteric and cosmic. In this story, Satan is a vat of prehistoric slime, and the Vatican is hiding him in the basement of a condemned church. Some physicists from a local college are studying the slime, and all hell breaks loose as they start getting possessed. People collapse into puddles of insects. Ooze is vomited directly into people’s mouths. In the end, one of the protagonists sacrifices herself by diving through a mirror into Hell.

Vampires

Vampires – 1998 – United States

Vampires (also known as John Carpenter’s Vampires) is about vampire-hunting mercenaries who work for the Roman Catholic Church. That’s a pretty badass premise, and everything else about this movie is pretty badass too. The protagonist is Jack Crow, a foul-mouthed hombre who hates vampires, smokes cigars, and wears sunglasses and a black leather jacket. He and his crew of hard-partying vampire hunters (including a priest) cruise around New Mexico in their armored jeep, killing vampires with outlandish weapons like harpoons with floodlights on them. One of these weapons is awesome that I can barely describe it. It’s a crossbow, but the arrow has a chain attached to it, and the chain is hooked to a winch on a truck. When the arrow sticks in a vampire, the winch activates and drags the vampire into the sunlight so they explode.