Post by ronnierocketago on Mar 16, 2009 4:15:36 GMT
MOONTRAP (1989) - ***
"It's a base! It's a god damn base!"[/i][/size]
I've been rewatching the entire STAR TREK film series and taking my notes for those inevitable reviews, but you see I only own a few TREK movies on VHS (like TREK V) and when I was searching through my old box of VHS tapes for them, I accidentally found this one. The question I'm asking myself is, when and where did I get fucking this? Usually its a bad sign when you, especially me, can't even remembering buying such a silly looking direct-to-video release that I doubt anyone on this website has ever heard of. Hell I didn't, and I owned the goddamn thing.
So yeah I'm reviewing MOONTRAP today mainly because longtime STAR TREK sidekick Walter Koenig is the star, so right there MOONTRAP has that automatic kitsch curiosity factor in its favor. If you remember Koenig on TREK, he was the Davy Jones-inspired token Russian kid with the stereotypical exaggerated accent who usually got his ass kicked or vaporized on a weekly basis, which Kirk and Spock then rescue him. So after many years of being William Shatner's bitch, and needled endlessly by nerds to utter "Nuclear wessels!"[/i], no surprise that Koenig was properly enthusiastic in MOONTRAP to kick some sci-fi ass for once, instead of the other way around, and without his trademark tongue. I mean he even gets a DIE HARD-esque sequence where he's crawling through air ducts with a shotgun in tow during a major firefight between a rampaging robot and NASA Security, and explodes it up real good. Yeah that'll teach those bitches for mocking Chekov.
The other incentive for me to check out MOONTRAP was his co-star an actor the Internet has never heard of in Bruce Campbell. A pity that rabid nerds haven't like dedicated websites idolizing him, stalked him at geek conventions for an autograph, or annoyingly quote him endlessly for he's done some good work from THE EVIL DEAD movies to his current gig on that USA television program BURN NOTICE. Maybe Aint it Cool News should like highlight sometime or something. In his great autobiographical book IF CHINS COULD KILL, he recounts briefly about MOONTRAP in only that Koenig relished his opportunity to play the hero and nicely told Campbell, "This time you are the second banana!"[/i] So like BURN NOTICE, Campbell is the comic foil sidekick here and if we know anything about The Chin, its that he's good at hamming up appropriately.
He even gets a great line. OK not as good as anything from ARMY OF DARKNESS, but it's still groovy in a way that only Campbell could pull off without sounding lame. Right before that robot brawl down on Earth, a coffee machine won't cooperate and he kicks it hard, which then starts working again. "Hey, we don't take no shit from a machine!"[/i] What else would one expect from an archetype who's jock nickname is The Penetrator?
Koenig takes his opportunity seriously and Campbell equally playing up his shtick, both which are nice because with most such Z productions, the people involved usually just don't usually give a a shit about the project beyond working just another paycheck. Look at their opening scene in the space shuttle. I mean admit it folks, as a kid at one point or another you fantasized about being an astronaut when you grew up, right? Well those two live the dream, and they're bored out of their fucking skulls, snoring and moaning about not getting to command a real space mission like the Moon. Be careful what you wish for fellas. I liked that little humorous office bitching detail, of which you laugh at them taking something awesome for granted, and yet you can't blame them either.
Yes MOONTRAP has a very dubious plot about Astronauts re-awakening killer extra-terrestrial cybernetic monsters who've been waiting 14,000 years to escape their prison and slaughter humanity, and as well shamelessly rips off Ridley Scott's classic ALIEN from the basic outer space alien menace device, astronauts bringing back a pod which escapes the lab and wrecks havoc, and harvesting people for their own nefarious biological needs. You've seen this movie already without actually seen it.
But I could say the same about the Jamie Lee Curtis creature feature VIRUS, which also featured zombie cyborgs and which in a review I dismissed as "I a Sci-Fi Channel Movie of the Week in another dimension, but in ours it escaped television and someone at Universal Pictures was stupid enough to sink $75 million into it."[/i] Both VIRUS and MOONTRAP are loud dumb science-insulting predictable junk B-movies, but if VIRUS is a forgettable waste of time, then MOONTRAP is a surprisingly fun cheesy time. While the cast and crew go through the cliche thrills, there are some scenes of which there resides a subversive, charmingly hokey level of comedy that isn't too obvious nor too subtle. In some ways I'm reminded of Campbell's own EVIL DEAD, which was more serious and restraint in poking fun at itself unlike say EVIL DEAD 2.
I mean take the opening when one of the robots nearly destroyed the Apollo 11 lunar module back in 1969. So they also failed by inches to snatch the 5 other successful Apollo missions? Or that killer bot down on Earth using a 14,000 year old skeleton as the backbone of a new body. Wouldn't that fragile corpse have been crushed like crackers by all that heavy electronic equipment? Koenig and Campbell then reach the Moon to confront the robot fortress, and they pull out machine guns from their moon buggy. What good are they when bullets wouldn't have been fired in space? But my favorite is when after Koenig wakes up an alien humanoid woman (Leigh Lombardi) from a multi-thousand year hibernation, they then blow up an air tent and umm..."talk"..., which afterwards one of those asshole cyborgs in slasher movie style rip into the tent with a knife.
Yes, a killer cutting his way into the tent after some sex on the fucking Moon!
MOONTRAP just might be the only lunar-based slasher movie in existence for all I know, but hey my knowledge of that genre is I admit sketchy. Still, with all those moments, its like the makers of MOONTRAP kept nudging you time to time, with a grin on their face, and daring you to criticize the physics. And you can't help but smile back of sorts. When most expensive summer blockbusters violate the laws of reality, they usually do it because they figure their audience is too stupid to know any better. MOONTRAP though, it's such a sly tongue & cheek style...I just can't hate it.
Plus, they obviously enjoyed making MOONTRAP, which I can appreciate.
For a no-budget effort like MOONTRAP, the special effects, models, puppetry, and art direction are all surprisingly impressive and never truely feel cheap or goofy, much like another B-cheapie sci-fi/thriller from around the same time in Mark L. Lester's CLASS OF 1999. Interestingly enough, director Robert Dyke previously worked some of the FX for EVIL DEAD 2, so maybe of course he would know better, and MOONTRAP apparently won a few FX prizes at film festivals.
I also liked the casting of Lombardi. Her career wasn't much outside of MOONTRAP, but she has that exotic face like you would expect from an alien within a human body, like David Bowie in Nicholas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. Plus she never speaks until the ending, so we're spared from the low-quality female acting we get in such pictures. You know, scream, boobies, scream, get cut, scream, maybe one more boob. I dug how the movie never makes clear, nor bothers really, what exactly her people's backstory is regarding those damn cyborgs. Are they an ancient far-technologically advanced Earth tribe, or doomed space colonists from another world? God knows too many pictures worry about expanding or explaining a story that (usually) isn't good in the first place.
But the best scene in MOONTRAP is the ending, with the last robot pod crashing onto a junkyard on Earth. It's probing head at the sight of all this metal and steel at his disposal, he just rattles with obvious excitement. How many movies you know of where a robot has an orgasm? See, everyone wins in MOONTRAP. Also, who knew that the world-shattering announcement that America is going back to the Moon would be made at a titty bar?
Did I enjoy this alot more than I should have? Oh hell yes. Will you? Maybe, if only you're up for a laugh or two and get kicks from a good cheapie decent B-movie time to time. Unfortunately, MOONTRAP aint on DVD due to copyright issues. Supposedly its on bootleg in Germany, but otherwise you're stuck having to find this baby on VHS in a Mom & Pop video store. Or, you can just watch it on YouTube. Yes, I will take shit from that machine!
