Written as a student project with future Alien writer Dan O’Bannon, John Carpenter’s ingenious no-budget directorial debut, named after a Grateful Dead song was the first stoner sci-fi pic. On a scuzzy spaceship far away, four furry freak surf dude astronauts are bored out of their skulls on a long-haul mission to destroy unstable planets, and plagued by troubles when their talking bomb gets ideas of its own and the alien “pet” O’Bannon has smuggled aboard escapes. Sideswipes at Kubrick’s 2001 are entirely intentional; the attack of the munchies the movie brings on pure coincidence.
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