For this month’s revisitation of a classic cult flick, we’re turning the calendar back 26 years to 2000, where a modest scifi-action-horror movie called Pitch Black put an up-and-coming actor named Vin Diesel on the map.

Drake: So I caught this one in the theater (hey, Al!) with a group when it came out. None of us knew anything about it so we went in having no idea of what it was about, other than it was a science fiction movie.

The cast was a pleasant surprise. We were watching Farscape, so we knew who Claudia Black was, Cole Hauser had been in Dazed and Confused a few years before, and Keith David is always great.

No idea at all who that Vin Diesel guy was, though!

This was a fun one to see. Definitely some Alien space/horror vibes, but it was very much its own thing. Director David Twohy did a nice job gradually shifting the emphasis of the film towards Diesel, and Diesel himself proved able to carry Pitch Black as it progressed.

It was a nice mix of science fiction and horror, but Twhohy’s filmography is pretty solid that way. He wrote Critters 2: The Main Course, which I found a lot of fun, and one of his earlier films as both writer and director was The Arrival, which I think I enjoyed more than most.

Pitch Black obviously had a decent if smallish budget, but it worked well as a very encapsulated movie. A starship crash, desperate survivors, weird alien predators… I like the mix of sci-fi and horror, and Twohy carried it off here, right through to the end.

This one is obviously best known as an early starring role for Diesel, who was about to hit movie stardom over the next year, but I think the cast as a whole is great here.

I know they’ve expanded the franchise (the Riddickverse?) with the sequels, but Pitch Black still works very well as a standalone movie. It was a fun surprise to watch a sci-fi flick that relied on a harsh location and dangerous conditions rather than space battles and galaxy-spanning threats.

Justin: One of the most underrated success stories of ’90s cinema was the sheer strength of its mid-budget scifi scene. The ’80s made it acceptable (and profitable!) to venture into this genre, and we got so many great movies in the next decade because of that. This spilled over into the early 2000s with the delightful surprise of Pitch Black.

On a budget of only $23 million, scifi director and writer David Twohy (make sure y’all check out Timescape and Below, by the way) put together a movie that was an absolute buffet of tastes. It’s a mystery movie, a horror film, an actioner, an elimination flick, a bit of a prison movie, and a showpiece of scifi ideas and effects — all wrapped up into a tight package.

A transport ship crashes onto a planet, the captain’s dead, and the pilot ends up being the highest-ranked crew in command. But now she’s got some unruly prisoners, an unstable bounty hunter, a few innocents, and a shameful secret in her back pocket. Oh, and the planet on which they crashed is about ready to enter into a days-long eclipse, which will usher out the murderous light-adverse critters from the underground to eat them all.

It’s. So. Good.

And part of what makes it good is that both Fry (Radha Mitchell) and Riddick (Vin Diesel) are anti-heroes vying for the main credit. Sure, we know how popular Diesel became, but back in 2000 he was more of an unknown entity. He looks and often acts the part of the bad guy, sleek and dangerous (and so cool with his see-in-the-dark eyes), and if you’re coming to this film blind and without knowing of his future career, you might well think he’s going to be the main villain above the aliens rather than a reluctant savior.

Pitch Black features a stacked cast — Cole Hauser, Keith David, Claudia Black lend their excellent talents — and clearly lays out the threats and stakes while gradually revealing more of these multilayered characters. Everyone’s got a secret going on, and this is the absolute worst time for all of those to come bubbling to the surface.

Again, what I love here is that it’s not a predictable movie where you can see every beat coming and only show up because you’re going to get CGI shoved down your throat. In fact, the CGI here is mostly portrayed in darkness, which is a smart decision that Jurassic Park understood back in ’93, because that darkness hid the shortcomings while integrating into our imaginations better.

This was a modest hit but strong enough, especially on the strength of Vin Diesel, to spark a continuing franchise. Two sequels, an animated movie, and two video games later, Riddick’s tale continues, and I’m certainly not upset about it. But it all started here.