It's always thrilling and instructive to watch the first few movies of a great director. We're going to do that tonight with a 35mm double bill of John Carpenter's very first two movies.

First up, Carpenter and co-screenwriter Dan O Bannon (who also co-stars and would go on to co-write ALIEN!) deliver a wonderfully bizarre, funny, satiric low-fi sci fi debut in DARK STAR.

Dark Star tells the story of the crew of the spaceship Dark Star who have been out in space for 20 years looking for hostile planets that might threaten human colonization of the cosmos. Of course, the crew has gone a little loopy in the interim (the captain has even died!) and now play practical jokes on each other, lose their minds.

Shot for only $60,000.00, Dark Star is one of those great debut features that is inspiring for how much Carpenter and his team tried to do on such a limited budget, starting with choosing to make their debut movie one in SPACE!!

Everyone knows the great low-fi special fx including the beach ball with legs and camera tricks to simulate zero gravity/disorientation.

Next up is the movie that really put Carpenter on his path to genre movie royalty: Assault on Precinct 13. Inspired by Howard Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo, Assault tells the story of a police precinct that suddenly finds itself under attack by a gang that has completely surrounded and cut off the precinct from any outside communication.

Everyone inside from the cops to civilians to criminals must band together for their own survival as the gang will stop at nothing to spring one of their own from the prison inside.

A taut, exciting, mile a minute thriller that clearly showed Carpenter as capable of Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, join us for one of the great low budget genre movies of all time.