This is one of the more disappointing John Carpenter films. Carpenter is the director of a series of horror and science fiction films, the most famous and commercially successful of which was Halloween. His first film, in some ways still his best, was a science-fiction comedy called Dark Star, about surfers in space. Dark Star was written by one Dan O'Bannon, who later wrote Alien, which, in spite of a much larger budget and the inimitable chocolate-box photography of Ridley Scott, is essentially the same story (mad alien aboard space ship, picking off the crew) minus the very funny humour of Carpenter’s original, super-low-budget film.