Director – Robert Dyke (Timequest)
Starring – Walter Koenig (Star Trek), Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead, Burn Notice), and Leigh Lombardi (Knight Rider)
Release Date – 1989
Rating – 3.5/5
Tagline – “For Fourteen thousand years it waited”
Everyone has that one actor or actress who they really dig. Most follow the careers of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, and so forth but one of my favorite actors is Bruce Campbell. I grew up in a home with my mom who was mentally unstable.
She was a horror fan and would force me to watch horror films with her. I was about 4 or 5 when this happened. A few years later she was institutionalized and it took me several years before I returned to horror. I was about 9 before I started watching horror movies again. I went to the local video store and rented Evil Dead and Evil Dead II. Once I started watching them I realized that Evil Dead II was one of the films my mother would force me to watch. I really liked the film and now I was no longer afraid of it.
Over the years the Evil Dead trilogy has become my favorite horror films. I love the films so much I have an Ash tattoo. These films was the cause of my love of Bruce Campbell. I try to watch any Campbell film I can but some sneak through the cracks. One of those films is the 1989 sci-fi horror flick Moontrap. Recently, Olive Films released the film on blu and was kind enough to send me a review copy.
**Spoiler Alert**The film follows two astronauts who travel around the moon where they encounter a spaceship. One of the astronauts board the ship where they find a dead being and a red, egg shaped object and bring them both back to Earth. Once on Earth the red capsule opens revealing a robotic being that transforms the corpse into a giant robot. It attacks the NASA base before it is brought down. This prompts a new mission to explore the Moon to see where it came from.
The same two astronauts go back to the moon where they find a hidden moon base. Inside the moon base they find a female alien along with thousands of those red capsules ready to invade Earth. One of the astronauts loses his life against the robots leaving the other astronaut to fight for his life with the female alien while a rescue mission is sent to the moon to pick him up. The astronaut sets the self-destruction button on his ship and flies through space to the rescue shuttle. **Spoiler Alert**
I typically don’t care for the horror sci-fi hybrids. They have a hard time combining the two genres and makes one of the genres weaker than the other. Very few films are able to pull off the horror sci-fi film like the Alien series. However, just sheer moments intoMoontrap I knew this film was going to be more sci-fi than horror and I was right. This actually worked in the films favor. The film worked extremely well as a sci-fi flick with just some minimal horror elements.
The acting in this one is phenomenal by the entire cast. Both Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell did an outstanding job with Koenig outshining everyone. He really did make this film so enjoyable. The story for this one is one we have seen before in film but by 1989 it had only been used a handful of times and never in a manner like this. The film worked very well as a mostly sci-fi flick with a lot of dark elements. If the film would have added more horror to the mix it would have over-powered the sci-fi and the film would have fell apart. The story also flows better using the sci-fi theme. This story was told several more times over the years with the most popular being the Jamie Lee Curtis stared flick Virus.
Finally, the film has a lot of special effects, practical and visual. Both look great and gives the viewer a great sci-fi film but the horror fan will not be satisfied by the film’s lack of kill scenes and gory deaths. Overall, Moontrap is a fantastic sci-fi film that has an amazing cast and perfect sci-fi imagery. Sadly, it fails as a horror film but that does not ruin the movie at all. Instead, it makes it stronger.
