p2pnet news view | Movies:- One of my favourite movies is an old tape of Dark Star, the Spaced Out Odyssey. I went to a lot of trouble to get it — but that was before the net and I’d have no such difficulties now.

It’s a satire featuring an intelligent bomb with a messiah complex.

Alien, Blade Runner and other sci-fi flicks of that ilk just wouldn’t be the same without its influence, and now Dan O’Bannon, who was responsible for the special effects and also starred as sergeant Pinback, is dead at the age of 63.

Dark Star started out as a USC student project and was co-written by O’Bannon and John Carpenter, and one of the funniest parts comes when O’Bannon/Pinback battles an alien with a broom as his weapon.

He was “best known for writing the blockbuster hit Alien” and also “directed and wrote the zombie fest The Return of the Living Dead,” says the Los Angeles Times, going on:

“O’Bannon, whose credits include co-writing Blue Thunder and Total Recall, died Thursday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica after losing his 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease, said his wife, Diane.”

He made his directorial debut with the 1985 Return of the Living Dead, which O’Bannon described as being “to horror movies what Airplane! was to disaster films”, the story says.

What’s equally funny is: the movie was, and still is, taken seriously as a straight-up horror flick.

“You’ve got to ask yourself — if you’re gonna make a movie about corpses coming back, what is there left to do?” the LA Times has O’Bannon saying, adding:

” ‘What possible approach can you take that hasn’t been done a million times with Friday the 13th and Halloween’? he said in a 1985 interview with The Times. ‘The first thing I thought was, well, doggone it, there hasn’t been a rock ‘n’ roll zombie movie’.”

JN

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Los Angeles Times – Dan O’Bannon dies at 63; screenwriter of ‘Alien’, December 19, 2009

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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