Savage fish, dangerous waves and philosophical bombs (2024)

In a pivotal scene from Dark Star, John Carpenter’s low-budget send-up of space opera, Lieutenant Doolittle, acting captain of the interstellar scout ship Dark Star, tries to reason with a planet-killing bomb. Armed with nothing but college-level philosophy, Doolittle tries to convince a sentient doomsday weapon, Thermostellar Bomb #20, not to detonate. Things go about as well as you might expect in Carpenter’s pessimistic sci fi satire. Nestled in the back row of the Revue Cinema for a midnight screening of this oddball classic, my mind drew fevered parallels between Doolittle’s white-knuckled parlay with an over-eager explosive and the Revue’s current back-and-forth with its landlord, Danny Mullin, who wants to detonate its tenancy. Like Dark Star’s Damoclean device, stuck in its bomb bay but still eager to explode, Mullin is uncomfortably fused to the beloved rep house, firm in his intent to go nuclear.

However, unlike Doolittle, hanging in space with nothing but Cartesian tropes, the Revue’s board has lawyers. On June 28, one day into Mullin’s attempted takeover, the Revue’s counsel obtained a temporary injunction, blocking Mullin from ousting the board and closing the cinema’s doors, at least until the board’s first day in court. This temporary respite was good news, but had a limited lifespan, since the court date was Monday, July 8. Dark Star’s midnight screening was on Friday night, two days prior to the fateful date. Watching Doolittle surfing a slab of space junk into a planet’s atmosphere might be the last thing I’d see onscreen at the Revue. Little did I know that earlier that day, the court extended the injunction to October 30, during a video case conference. Toronto’s longest-running cinema has managed to keep the movie magic going until at least Halloween.

It was a Halloween kind of night, in terms of tawdry dark tales onscreen. My evening began with a shark film, presented by the small-but-mighty film series, Killer B Cinema, which scours the planet for shlock cinema gems, and presents them upstairs at See-Scape, a sci fi/gaming bar in the Junction. A few hours before midnight, when I would witness things go horribly wrong for four dysfunctional spacemen on a chronically unsafe space cruiser, I got to endure a hack auteur’s efforts to create cinema magic, which also went horribly wrong. L'ultimo squalo, a.k.a. Great White, a.k.a. The Last Shark, was Italian director Enzo G. Castellari’s bid to cash in on the success of Jaws. The film’s plot, characters and every element, including its toothsome, ocean predator antagonist, are all suspiciously close to Stephen Spielberg’s box office monster.

If I’ve learned anything from Killer B’s curators, Lizzie Violet and husband Zoltan Du Lac, it’s that no blockbuster is safe from would-be Camerons or Spielbergs ripping it off for a quick dollar, rupee or Turkish lira. Any Killer B attendee can confirm this, once they finally stop screaming, “Machine Man!” the industrial disco title song for a Bangladeshi take on Robocop (and/or Terminator). This may come as a shock to no-one, but such blatant piracy often pays off. Despite B-grade acting (and a couple of semi-convincing dismemberments), Last Shark grossed over $18 million in the first month of its North American release, before the film was accused of, believe it or not, plagiarizing Jaws and its distribution was blocked.

While the film’s weirdly bobbing shark model was briefly diverting, my immersion was much deeper with the pre-movie cartoon, an episode of the blocky, black-and-white 60s anime show, 8 Man, a Killer B staple that features one of Japan’s original cyborg heroes. In “The Savage Fish!” an episode selected to pair well with a shark movie, 8 Man must fend off robot-devouring piranhas, created by the fiendish Dr. Vicious. This primitive anime’s fight sequences actually rival the action of Dark Star’s alien attack scenes, where Sergeant Pinback (played by Dark Star co-writer and special effects designer Dan O’Bannon) slap-fights a bad-tempered beachball with plastic feet.

Not that I mean to write off Dark Star as mere shlock. Granted, the movie is disjointed, mangy, haphazardly acted, and played to nearly empty houses when first released in 1974. (It took until its re-release on VHS in the 1980s for Dark Star to gain a cult following.) But in several ways, it’s a really smart film (or, if you like, an intelligent bomb). Carpenter’s first foray into film is atmospheric, funny (in a stoner kind of way) and relentlessly original. Its influence can be seen in Star Wars (which copied O’Bannon’s star-stretching hyperspace effect) and every gritty space movie that follows with a blue-collar crew, such as Alien (written by O’Bannon, who also supervised visual effects).

This trashy cinematic dark horse somehow survived to its 50th anniversary, where it remains innately odd. As much as it’s been emulated, referenced and sampled in songs like Meat Beat Manifesto’s techno track, “I Am Organic,” it’s likely uncopiable.

Which brings us back to the Revue, where I stayed up past bedtime enjoying this strange cinema gem, in my slightly creaky chair, in a 115-year-old building, still scarred from its fallen marquee, unreplaced since 2007. I can think of no happier place to participate in the underground tradition of midnight movie watching, while praying a certain millionaire doesn’t succeed with his intentions to blow up this haven of fringe classics and indie film, and make it a bad copy of its former self, like a poorly executed shark film, short on ideas and desperate for cash.