- Produced and directed by Robert Dyke
- Written by Tex Ragsdale
- Starring
- Walter Koenig
- Bruce Campbell
- Leigh Lombardi
- Robert Kurcz
- John J. Saunders
I’m kind of surprised at the lack of respect for Moontrap. Not that it’s a great movie by any stretch — it only qualifies as “good” by some severely bracketed criteria — but come on! No official DVD release? Only four reviews on the IMDb? This a movie that picks Walter “Chekov” Koenig and Bruce “Ash” Campbell against killer robots on the frickin’ moon, for crying out loud!
And yes, that’s the right order: Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. Koenig is Colonel Jason Grant, shuttle pilot, and Campbell is Ray Tanner, copilot and sidekick. Koenig is the leading man in this one, even if he’s a little long in the tooth. (Fun fact: It’s been just as long — twenty years — since Moontrap was produced as it was between the end of the original Star Trek show and Moontrap.) He even gets the girl; how’s that for Chekov’s final triumph? But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“At last, I get to sit on the left!”
Grant and Tanner are on a routine 1990 shuttle mission when they pick up signs of a huge body entering orbit. (I missed the dialog where mission control justified their not having picked it up before, but I believe it amounts to “Duuuuhhhrrr!”) It is, in fact, a huge alien ship, but it’s adrift and caught in Earth’s gravity well. Grants suits up and spacewalks over to find some handy artifact they can take back to Earth. He finds a rupture in the hull, and a hard mechanical pod just larger than a basketball that looks like a beetle shell. Oh, and he also finds a dessicated human corpse. That’s all he can grab before orbital decay gets too dangerous.
Back on Earth, of course, it’s all kept hush-hush. (Gee, I wonder how they kept a lid on that HUGE FIREBALL IN THE SKY that the ship must have made as it descended into the atmosphere?) The pod proves unopenable; the corpse is that of a human, but carbon-14 dating shows it to be 14,000 years old. And dust on both shows that, at one point, the ship was on the moon. The government liaison, Mr. Haskell (Reavis Graham), half-suspects that it’s all a hoax to up NASA’s funding, but it still gets filed under “National Security.”
I’m glad that national security’s a concern, but local security leaves a lot to be desired. As soon as everyone leaves the isolation room to discuss the find over a cup of coffee, the pod opens up, revealing a mechanical eye on a stalk and various metallic tentacles. It pulls apart the room until it constructs for itself a robot body made from computer components and the 14,000-year-old corpse. And because there’s no security outside or around the room hiding what could be the first extraterrestrial artifacts, it manages to leave the room and situate itself in one of the subbasements before security forces respond.
“Wait… ‘S.S. Botany Bay?’”
Along with the security forces, everyone getting coffee comes along too. There’s a firefight in the corridor downstairs, with the robot proving impervious to gunfire and the security guys proving all too pervious to animated electrical bolts. (The robot itself is not too shabby, with hydraulic arm and neck motion, but it’s pretty clear that it stays standing in one place because the prop wasn’t built to be mobile.) Finally, Grant gets the bright idea to grab a shotgun from one of the fallen and climb up a ladder into — yes — an air duct! The overhead ductwork puts him right above the robot, and will one well-aimed blast, accompanied by the robot’s willingness to sustain damage when The Hero wills it, it blows up and collapses.
Well, the robot attack clinches it. An old but functional Saturn 5 is pulled out of mothballs, and Grant and Tanner, with a third man in the capsule, are sent up. It’s a fulfillment of Grant’s dream because he just missed being on the original moon landings and blah blah blah. The moon, in case you’re wondering, is realized by a set covered with powdered QuikCrete. Word is that there were signs for the crew that read, “No liquids on the set!”
Grant and Tanner find some sort of base or citadel built into the side of a lunar hill, surrounded by human skeletons. From a wide and spacious atrium (hello, matte painting!), they enter a smaller chamber which seals itself and pressurizes. In the middle of the chamber is a dust-covered capsule bearing a single female occupant. Bzing! The capsule activates, and Grant’s love interest is revealed! (I think, really, she’s the only female member of the cast, aside from the administrative assistant slaughtered by the robot, and the stripper in the tittie bar in which the astronauts hang out.) Her name is Mera (Leigh Lombardi), and names are really all they can communicate. But she’s also got a fully-functioning space suit, so she follows them back out.
“Mother.”
Unfortunately, something has been watching them. Several somethings, really; the pods can burrow and travel beneath the lunar landscape, sticking their electric eyes up like periscopes, and they make off with the lander before the rover can get back. They’re stuck on the moon… with killer robots!
Now, there’s quite a bit more that happens, but it’s right here that the movie starts to lose cohesion, mainly because it refuses to answer any of the mysteries which were why we got into this in the first place. For instance, the robots — Mera calls them “Kylium” — have their own crashlanded ship not far away. Grant says, “Now we know what they’ve been doing since they got here.” Oh, really? And what would that be? Simply sitting on the lunar surface, waiting for the people below to develop lunar vehicles?
Or did the people below already develop that technology? No one ever wonders where Mera’s people came from. Were they part of an “ancient astronaut” race which seeded the Earth with humanity? Were they from an incredibly advanced prehistoric terrestrial civilization? Or were they aliens who just happened to be entirely human? When the mystery is introduced with a 14,000-year-old human corpse in space, I think it’s a requirement to pay us off and tell us finally where it came from.
“I know a spoiler would be useless without atmosphere, but it would still be stylin’.”
And the Kylium: Scavengers, yes, but why? Are they an entirely robotic civilization, or are they the invasion/colonization force for another culture? How did they end up crashlanded on on the moon? For that matter, how did the ship that Grant and Tanner first encountered (I think it was one from Mera’s people, but the design bears a lot of similarity to the Kylium ship) get off the moon and into orbit if it’s been a derelict for fourteen millennia?
About the only question that’s answered here is, “What kind of closure do 14,000-year-old humans have on their jumpsuits?” The answer is, None. When things look dire enough that it’s time for some comfort-lovin’, all it takes is one gentle pull on the front and the entire back opens. Convenient, no?
As it stands, the script has a lot of problems (though it’s quite possible that all of these questions, and more, were answered but cut out to bring the movie’s running time down). On the other hand, the special effects are surprisingly accomplished for a non-studio feature. The miniature work is quite impressive, and the replicated NASA props do justice to the originals. The set for the lunar landscape is pretty convincing, if you can ignore the swirls of dust that hang in the air whenever the surface is disturbed. (Alas, the actors can’t quite replicate the effect of movement in zero gravity, even though Space: 1999 did it well a decade and a half earlier: Just slow down the footage!)
It looks like someone’s not April fresh.
I don’t know what the budget was, but I’m guessing that somebody lost a lot of money, since this seems like something that had theatrical aspirations (back in the day when an independent production had a reasonable chance to end up in a theatre) rather than an intention direct-to-video flick. Instead, after the film festival premiere, this movie kicked around for several years, scoring video release in half a dozen countries before finally ending up on video domestically in 1993, without a theatrical run. It’s really Walter Koenig’s only starring role, and it didn’t do great things for the careers of anyone else involved (though at least you could say that it didn’t hold Bruce Campbell back any).
Maybe a Director’s Cut DVD will fill in some gaps, both in the movie and the history around it. Until then, we have only fading ex-rental VHS tapes and bootleggers DVDs of a movie that coulda been good.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 11
- breasts: 2
- explosions: 22
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
- Walter Koenig, obviously
- Judy Levitt (“Intrepid Commander”) played “Doctor #2″ in Star Trek 4, “Military Aide” in Star Trek 6, and “El Aurian Survivor” in Generations
Maybe it’s not on DVD because otherwise, people would noticed how this crapfest called “Virus” (with Jaimie Lee Curtis) ripped it off ?
I dunno, I don’t think Jamie Lee Curtis has that much pull.
I’ll have to track it down again someday-all I can remember
is the “th’Hell?!?” moment at the end when the ____ fits
neatly into the socket in the umpteen-thousand year old
ship…
Yeah, it’s pretty goofy. “Well, I’ll be — what are the odds?”
I thought the “what they’ve been doing since they got here” was repairing their ship. Very very very very slowly, apparently.
This movie was also released on Laserdisc.
Just came across your site from The Vicar and Duke’s Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies and noticed your review of “Moontrap”.
I was on the “Moontrap” effects crew back in ’89, breathing the Quik-Crete lunar atmosphere and working for Effects Supervisor Gary Jones and his company, ACME Special Effects.
Detroit producer/writer Bob Dyke was a busy commercial producer at the time, but always wanted to get into features. His first shot was the 1970-something “Northville Cemetery Massacre”. Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert, and Sam Raimi all worked for Bob years before this – prior to their own success with “Evil Dead” et. al.
I’d been working for a set construction company co-owned by Bob. The company folded, owing me $1500 — a good chunk of cash for a young freelancer just getting his start. So I sued Bob in small claims court, but Bob’s lawyer somehow got the claim dismissed. Gary Jones then hired me onto the “Moontrap” effects crew. We had a several-months-long pre-production period building the effects, then shot for a couple months. I remember Bob sometimes looking at me askance across the set, as if thinking, “Isn’t that the twerp that took me to small claims”?
Yes, the movie was intended for a theatrical release, and there was much talk of a sequel. Everyone was impressed by our effects-work. But the distributor (whose name I can’t remember) lost their ass on a film that they released during the “Moontrap” shoot. So our release was scaled back and money for the sequel never materialized.
I moved form Detroit to L.A, in 2001 and lost contact with Bob, but I see by his IMDb page that he’s cranking along. Gary directed an indie, “Mosquito” in Detroit before moving to L.A. and directing a couple features there. I hooked up with him again and we tried to get a few projects rolling, but without success. Last I heard he was working for an effects company in Ohio.
“Moontrap” alumns of note:
UPM/Co-Producer John Cameron, who’s since worked with the Coen Bros. and is currently an Exec Producer on “Friday Night Lights”.
Designer B.K. Taylor, who prior to “Moontrap” wrote and drew National Lampoon magazine’s popular “Timberland Tales”.
Good info, Michael. Thanks!
Wow! I got it on dvd at sumogorilla.com! Love this movie!
How the picture quality on that? Sumogorilla is one of those outfits that sells movies they “believe” are in the public domain, which means they’re bootleggers; I imagine they’ve got the laserdisc to work from.
I saw Moontrap when I was probably about 11 or 12. It has the distinction of being the first movie where successfully predicted there would be a topless scene (Not to toot my own horn). As you can imagine, at this period in my life a topless scene was a big deal. Every once in a while, I would wonder what the name of that crazy movie with the robots on the moon was. Now I know. Thank you.
/Moontrap/ is in that odd position of being /just/ a big enough movie to cause viewers to expect it to be good, whereas it’s best to approach it as a B-movie. When I first started renting movies sixteen years ago, I had much higher expectations and wasn’t able to appreciate B-movies, so I would see something like, say, /Hardware/, and be bitterly disappointed at how cheap it was, and feel betrayed. (It didn’t help that /Hardware/ was also surprisingly boring–but that tends to happen with SF movies set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.)
Hey, my Gravatar! :-)
Ah, Hardware. Gotta review that sometime…
Hi, I’m a big fan of “Moontrap” from Europe and found this interesting review today. This was one of the first science-fiction films I ever saw, it was the early nineties and I was pretty stunned by the gory imagery in this movie especially because it was on TV early in the morning on Saturday or Sunday.
Ever since I asked myself why nobody around me knew anything about this movie since it had the look of a big production.
It took me many (I mean many!) years to see it again on another (now prime time) TV showing.
I’m proud to own it on VHS and Laserdisc nowadays and I can confirm that “Moontrap” did have a theatrical run in Germany. Another interesting fact is that the Japanese Laserdisc release contains several dialogue scenes that can’t be found in the R-rated US release. It’s nothing
of great importance (talk between Grant and his son and additional dialogue between Grant and Tanner on the moon’s surface) but it runs longer by about 5 minutes and is still THE version to go for. It’s pretty rare and cost me a fortune, but I adore it obviously.
In my book, “Moontrap” not only is an A picture but an immortal classic and will always be the one movie that hooked me to science-fiction when I watched it with my younger bro totally unsuspecting that well-remembered morning almost 20 years ago now.
Ahhhh, so that was the title. Ok, I was watching this on the saturday afternoon lame movie. Was interested in the startup action and the Ex shut off the TV so she could more effectively bark about something her Sister said earlier. I did catch this from about halfway to nearly the end another slow afternoon in front of the TV.
I will have to dig around and see if I can find this so I can set back and watch it uninterupted.
You can download the whole thing for free here:
http://tachyon-city.com/moontrap-1989/
Robert Dyke here. Still “cranking along” as Mike Jarema said in his review of MOONTRAP. Would like to clarify his comments about the money he says was owed him. I did invest in a set construction company (“Swain and Associates”) that eventually folded but had no involvement in its business activities. I was never sued in “small claims court” by Mike. In fact, any claims over $500 were not allowed in that Michigan court. And regarding my attorney getting “the claim dismissed” …. I haven’t a clue as to what he’s referring to. If Mike was owed $1,500 (and that may be accurate) by Swain and Associates, I suggest he pursue the matter with John Swain. Obviously, Mike has misinterpreted my on set glances at him some 20 years ago. I do remember him, however, as a very talented member of the special effects team. Hope he’s still active in the field.
And to Nathan Shumate, I certainly hope you do not know you’re advising folks to participate in an illegal activity when you tell them to download MOONTRAP “for free.”
It’s better that they get this long out-of-print movie, which has never been released on DVD and which is only available legitimately on used VHS tapes over fifteen years old, by downloading it for free than from one of the for-pay bootleggers who are duping the old laserdisc to DVD and charging for it (here’s one such source; it looks like there are at least a half-dozen). As soon as there’s any sort of legitimate DVD release, there will be no need for the Tachyon City version. I’m okay with the ethics of that.
I will of course accede to the request of any copyright holder to take down material at Tachyon City. Is that you?
What you are suggesting is an illegal procedure. One of the reasons that there has not been a “legitimate DVD release” is because of such activities.
Maybe Mr. Dyke could give us a clue as to where the 14,000 year old humans came from. I wondered about that through the whole movie.
The (never disclosed) backstory ….. the humans came from an ancient advanced Earth civilization in which all remnants of their culture has vanished on our world.
Great review of one of my favorite b-movies and the info on the comments is priceless. Cast my lot in with “this NEEDS a dvd release” crowd. I saw campbell live hosting an event and he answered some questions about it , i believe he said he took the job basically to brush up on his acting chops after a period of not working.