Kubrick meets Americana in John Carpenter’s first film, written by Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon, about a crew scouting colonisable planets in the 22nd century.

If 2001: A Space Odyssey was an acid trip, Dark Star is a stoned oddity; a laconic drift through the stars with a quartet of space-truckers who lost their marbles somewhere between Malibu and the Veil Nebula. Rather than succumb to violent “space dementia” as in Armageddon and other air-schlock, the astronauts wile away the lightyears listening to Muzak in a haze of post-post-post-Vietnam malaise.

This low-key, lo-fi approach makes the 1974 sci-fi satire closer to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy than 2001, especially when it comes to using epistemological reasoning to diffuse its insubordinate ticking-bomb climax. Starting life as a student film, it makes amusing and inventive use of a $60,000 budget, with Carpenter’s clever shots and anxious score elevating the flick to cult classic status.

Otherwise the movie leans into its comic enterprise, full of blooping sound effects, beachball aliens and charming space sequences that look more Wes Anderson than Paul W. S. Anderson. With its unique blend of stoner comedy and Cartesian philosophy, Dark Star (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Dissuade the Bomb) is a stellar 80 minutes; shorter than the Grateful Dead song of the same name.