Alien Meets Red Dwarf In John Carpenter's Most Underrated Movie Streaming For Free On YouTube

Published Sep 13, 2026, 5:30 PM EDT Padraig is a Senior Features Writer and has been part of Screen Rant since 2017. Padraig is a writer, editor and retired Game of Thrones extra who has been writing about movies and TV online for over a decade. He has also written for The Irish Times, Den Of Geek, Little White Lies and many more. It's pronounced Paw-rick, BTW. John Carpenter's most underrated movie plays like a mash-up of Red Dwarf and Alien. The John Carpenter movie run of the 1970s and 1980s would be the envy of most filmmakers. During that time, he wrote, directed and even composed the music for movies like Halloween, Escape from New York, They Live and Assault on Precinct 13. He also had one of the all-time great actor/director relationships, with the John Carpenter/Kurt Russell movie collaborations yielding The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. Rewinding to the start of the 1970s when Carpenter was a student at USC, he began working on a sci-fi short film with his classmate, Dan O'Bannon. They dubbed this microbudget effort Dark Star, which followed the crew of the titular spaceship as they go around destroying planets. After spending two years putting their student film together, Carpenter and O'Bannon secured some money to make it feature-length. Despite wobbly sets, amateur visual effects and stilted acting, Dark Star is still a sci-fi gem, and one that is now streaming for free (with ads!) on platforms like YouTube, Pluto TV and Plex. This sci-fi misadventure also dirtied up space long before Star Wars came along, and helped put Carpenter on the map. John Carpenter's First Movie Dark Star Is Incredibly Underrated It's a great irony of Carpenter's career that most of his films failed to find an audience when they first arrived. The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China are two examples, while Halloween was initially lambasted by critics and was predicted to bomb. So, in a career where about half of his films have been labeled "underrated," Dark Star is the one that earns that title the most. This is understandable in some regards. With its dry humor and sitcomy tone, it doesn't feel like most of John Carpenter's sci-fi movies. It also has a decided lack of scares or genuine horror - despite the presence of an alien monster onboard the ship. For those willing to overlook Dark Star's cheap look and student film origins, it's an intelligent and oddly profound existential comedy, following a group of misfits floating through the vastness of space performing a meaningless job. The movie has its celebrity fans (including Danny Boyle and Quentin Tarantino), but it feels like the true definition of a cult favorite. Given its lack of gloss and polish, it's liable to remain that way for now, but for Carpenter completionists or sci-fi fans, Dark Star should be required viewing. Dark Star Later Inspired Both Alien And Red Dwarf Dark Star bombed upon release in 1974, and the grueling, four-year experience of making it marked the end of the creative partnership between Carpenter and O'Bannon. However, as the years passed and the movie was rediscovered on TV airings and VHS, it developed a major fanbase. A key section of the movie, where O'Bannon's character Pinback chases an alien beachball around the ship's vent system, later inspired the writer to pen Alien. That's right, without this goofy comic interlude in Dark Star, the Alien franchise may never have existed. There's a lot of DNA between the two projects, including their grimy aesthetics and the loneliness that comes with being stranded in deep space. The villainous Pinbacker (Mark Strong) from Sunshine is a reference to Dan O'Bannon's Pinback in Dark Star. If that wasn't enough, movie's comedic, absurdist tone was an influence on one of the BBC's greatest sitcoms, Red Dwarf. This sees the supposed last human being alive stranded in space with a misfit crew (including a hologram and an disfunctional mechanoid), with the show blending classic sitcom tropes with creative sci-fi concepts. In truth, Red Dwarf is even better than Dark Star, but there is endless charm to Carpenter and O'Bannon's endlessly inventive sci-fi offering. It's not often a student film leaves such a profound impact upon pop culture, but it's a mark of both men's talents that their no-budget calling card still works over 50 years later. Release Date April 1, 1974 Runtime 83 Minutes Director John Carpenter Cast Brian Narelle Lt. Doolittle