• Directed by Dick Ashe
• Written by William Finger and Charles Sinclair
• Starring
  • Chase Cordell
  • Donna Leigh Drake
  • Gregorio Sala
  • Francine Kessler

As I mentioned way back in my review of Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake, Congress enacted a measure in the very early ’70s requiring all states to produce their own “local color monster” movie. Determined to be first at something finally, New Mexico got cracking and had their creature feature completed by 1972. It then took them four years to find anyone willing to show it to the public, which resulted in the IMDb’s listed 1976 release date. But hey, the letter of the law was fulfilled. And the law said the movie had to be made; it didn’t say the movie had to be good.

The instigator of our plot is an asteroid on a collision course with the moon. The scientists tell everyone, of course, that there’s no danger to earth; there’ll just be a harmless meteor shower, and then it’s back to business as usual. Of course, the scientists didn’t tell people that the asteroid would look just like a flaming marshmallow suspended by a string, so what else are they hiding?

Our protagonist is Paul (Chase Cordell), a young minerology grad student who has just been introduced, via his old anthropology teacher Professor John Salinas (Gregorio Sala, the single actor who manages to rise above barely adequate), to young photographer girl Kathy. Kathy is “played” by Donna Leigh Drake, in the sense that when the other actors address “Kathy,” they aim their voices toward Drake. I really hesitate to call what Drake does “acting”; the other day in the grocery store I saw a cardboard cutout of Brandi Roderick advertising beer, and while Drake bears a passing resemblance to Roderick, I have the firm conviction that the cardboard cutout could have carried the role with more depth.

Why do fools fall in love? And why must they do it in front of me?

Oh, and before we get too far past this point, I should mention that Professor Salinas is Indian, and is also known as “Johnny Long-bow.” ‘Cause that’s his tribal name, you know. Kathy is in them parts to do a photo-essay on Long-bow’s tribe, though I can’t think of a more ignominious coda to a dying culture than to be immortalized by the photographs of a airheaded blonde.

Anyway, Paul and Kathy spark an instant attraction, in quite possibly the most awkward “instant attraction” scene outside of a fifth-grade Cinderella play. So Paul does what all on-the-make minerologists do: takes her up to the mountain ridge at night to “watch the meteor shower” (wink wink, nudge nudge).

The meteors fall on schedule, and one actually makes it through the atmosphere — so close that Paul has to, uh, land on top of Kathy to protect her (how’d he manage to slip the meteor a twenty?). They get up, no worse for wear, except Paul has a small cut on his temple; and now he has a nifty souvenir, his very own moon rock (which goes from a pulsating glow to cool-to-the-touch in about twenty seconds). Then he takes her home (his mother’s traveling in Europe, how convenient), and introduces her to his lizard. No, really. A monitor lizard named Ty, who manages to break the mood for at least a couple of seconds before they start sucking face.

But by the next day, Paul’s a little woozy, getting headaches and almost passing out when a beam of light from a similar moon rock at the university exhibit hits his head. (I hate it when that happens.) The final straw is the folk singer that he, Kathy, and Johnny Long-bow (you always tag along on dates, Doc?) go to see after dinner. I don’t blame him; he’s butt-ugly, and we get to hear his signature piece, “California Lady,” in its entirety; even after Johnny and Kathy decide to trundle him home, we can still hear the damned singing. Eventually, they get Paul bundled into bed.

“Yeah, I’ll help on the case — but one Tonto joke and I’m outta here.”

But across town, a drunk bowler coming home is attacked by a POV cam, and by the time his wife gets to the door, there’s a pool of blood leaking in under the doorjamb. (Hmm… Time to get some weather stripping, I think.)

The next day, the small-town cop in charge of the homicide investigation calls Johnny in on it because — well, I don’t really know why. The cop blathers on about knowing that he hasn’t seen it all, and needs someone who thinks outside the norm, or something. Anyway, the body shows clawmarks all over, and there’s a weird monstrous footprint in the mud, but there’s also a five-fingered claw print high up on the wall. A trip to the university’s paleontology professor confirms the weirdness of it all: the print is nigh-on identical to that of the Komodo dragon, although it also shows signs of being bipedal, which would make it some kind of relative of, say, a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Because, you know, Komodo dragon feet and T-Rex feet are so dang similar.)

Naturally, Kathy knows nothing of this when she goes back to Paul’s place and finds him collapsed on top of his (made) bed. They head out to the reservation for more photos, but Paul collapses again (right after Johnny gets a chance to demonstrate his prowess with the bow that earned him his “tribal” name — gee, you think that’ll come in handy?). Kathy goes home with him, and stays this time — though out on the living room couch. (Mom’s out of town, why not stay in her bed?)

But later that night, a bunch of guys playing poker in a tent are attacked and one has his arm ripped off by –a Gorn! Well, sort of like a Gorn. Not nearly as convincing as the Gorn (which says a lot), but at least better than the green-painted wetsuit in Rana. In any event, it bears no resemblance to the demon-Yeti creature that appears on the front of the video box. (The suit was both worn and designed by Joe Blasco, he whose make-up school ads traditionally grace the pages of Fangoria. Bet he doesn’t use his work here as a selling point.)

To hell with the Moon Beast — track the bastard that decorated this room.

Kathy finds Paul the next morning, collapsed in the pool house, and Johnny finally opines that it’s time to go to the hospital. (About damned time. If I were getting sudden intense headaches and fainting spells after getting a mysterious cut on my head, I’d be right off to the doctor’s office, no matter how crummy my HMO was.) And the X-rays reveal — a meteorite particle, composed of an unknown element! That’s right, it hit so rapidly he didn’t even feel it, and lodged in his frontal lobe.

Longbow finally has a theory to take to the cop, if you can call it that. He shows slides of a story recorded on deerhide by his people four hundred years ago: A man was hit by some kind of ray from the sky, and became “a demon lizard monster” (his words, folks). He was impervious to their weapons, and rampaged around killing indiscriminately, until he mysterously burst into flames. (Nice of the ancient Indians to record the whole tale in a series of sequential illustrations. Now all it needs is some speech balloons…) The rest of his “theory” is confirmed when Johnny takes Paul’s moonrock to the university collection, and a beam passes between it and the one on display. Obviously, proximity of moon rocks makes energy pass between them — and since the moon is really only “a huge moonrock” (his words, folks), its presence in the sky activates the particle in Paul’s head.

As a final proof, they bring Paul into the hospital and strap him down for the night… and when the moon rises, through the magic of embarrassingly bad time-lapse photography (which makes last week’s Fury of the Wolfman look positively slick), Paul becomes the Moon Beast!

“You can see how poorly Brand X cleaned up the skull on the left…”

The next scene we see is Paul waking up in the morning, distinctly skipping the scene indicated on the back of the box in which the Moon Beast is being shot at in a hospital corner. On the one hand, it’s not like they could afford to cut out a scene in which something actually happens, seeing how such happenings are few and far between. On the other hand, this is definitely a monster suit that should be seen as little as possible.

In any event, two specialists are flown in to help with Paul’s case — a NASA scientist, and a brain surgeon. It should be a simple process, but the most recent X-rays show that the particle has broken up and is spreading through Paul’s body. And, opines the NASA scientist, when the diffusion becomes complete, the element will become unstable, resulting in an obliterating meltdown. (Sounds kinda fishy to me, but hey — I’m not the scientist here, am I?)

Now, Paul wasn’t supposed to hear any of that, but since the door to the consultation room is tissue-thin, he gets the gist of it. Rather than wait for said meltdown, he decides to commit suicide; he thus changes out of his open-backed hospital gown and steals a motorcycle outside the hospital. Kathy, however, figures out where he’s going — back to the ridge where they watched the meteor shower. She takes off, and some time later the police find the motorbike crashed on the way up to the mountain, so they give chase too.

Kathy finds him in late afternoon, struggling up the slope, and refuses to leave him, even though he pleads. And just as night falls, she ends up getting her foot pinned between two rocks. She calls Paul back to help, and he arrives just as the moon rises…

The Moon Beast, in all of its… uh… glory.

Fortunately for her clueless little head, he leaves her alone and instead kills a couple of dumbass cops shooting into the dark. Then Jonny arrives with the other cops and the scientists, and he at least has a plan: he’s chipped an arrowhead from the moon rock, his idea being that shooting more of the unknown element into his body will hasten the meltdown. And it does. A flashing red light (actually an optical effect that makes all the black areas on the screen turn red) signifies his meltdown, and then there’s nothing left but a pile of ash, which the sci-types inexplicably fail to collect before everyone drives away. The end.

Now, I’ll grant you: this is a bad movie. But it’s not painfully bad. Maybe it’s just a weakness I have for lame man-in-suit flicks, but there ain’t no way this deserves the #29 slot on the IMDb Bottom 100 (and, like so many on that list, there’s no way it would have gotten there without being featured on MST3K). Just within the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen movies so appallingly, intensely bad that Track of the Moon Beast seems like a walk in the park.

That’s not like I’m asking for a remastered DVD edition, mind you. And if this one fades away into complete obscurity, well, I won’t be crying.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1 (somehow concurrent with the viewing of the meteor shower — go figure)
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0