Moontrap (1989)

I came home sick from work today and I feel like shit so I've been sitting in front of the TV for hours, waiting for my favorite Fox News shows to come on. I feel bad, but I want to make this review good, and I'd better write it now because my memory is time sensitive. Want to know why the Housegeist review was so brief? I'd watched it a week before writing the review and retained precious little besides my general impression of the film. Brain damage is not the problem. I watch a lot more movies than I review here and I might be maxing out.

Allow me to make a relevant observation. The SciFi Channel sure does play a lot of crappy shows. I don't know the name of the one on now, but it blows. The teenage aliens have spiky hair, tattoos, and piercings, um.. wallet chains, hey I remember arm-warmers. These kids are sooo cool... I wanna be them.

Shitty sci-fi can suck worse than even the second-to-most-recent Hellraiser sequel. Hard to believe, but sci-fi often is that horrible. When I was at my most depressed, renting three videos a day, I'd try to mix it up a little bit by renting an obscure sci-fi tape every so often. I don't think I ever found anything good other than Ice Pirates. Oh yeah, there are classics, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Starship Troopers... that's a given, but I guess I'll get to the point, sci-fi is not half as good as horror.

When the two genres cross over you get the Alien movies. Moontrap is not a rip-off of Alien, which surprised me, because almost every scary space movie is. I recommend Moontrap. It stars Chekov from Star Trek (Walter Koenig) and Bruce Campell. I don't know which of those two actors is more popular. They both have a lot of fans and they all really ought to see this obscure tape. Campell has the goofier character, with the bad catch phrases. I told you about my memory, but I think I've got two of these right. "Don't take no shit from a machine!" and "Goddamn government contractors". I won't put those lines into context, but I'll tell they are first said when their is no danger, and then later when the battles against the machines are in full effect. This corny stuff should have made the movie a cult hit. Expect a DVD release... someday.


Moontrap - I know it's not a very exciting box cover, you just have to trust me on this one...
Models are used for some of the effects on the moon. The astronaut dolls do not move, but at least their rover rolls. If I'd seen this movie in 89' as a kid the effects would probably not be so transparent to me. Good use of robots, killer robots that use human remains for spare parts. They are stationary, I guess the budget was limited, but they do steal the show when on screen.

Moontrap, I told my girlfriend it was awesome, she didn't believe me.