Rent Moontrap (1989)

Trapped on the Moon with this lot and I might be asking the aliens to use me as spare-parts. - Moontrap review by Strovey

For me it was hard to believe that this film was made in 1989, if you had said the early seventies on a low budget maybe, but when I think I was nearly 30 years old when this was made and it came well after some amazing science-fiction blockbusters? Such is the world of moviemaking.

I would hazard a guess that a majority of the budget went on Koenig, Campbell and Lombardi’s salaries because there is not a lot else on the screen that justifies any money being spent. Some have made a big thing of the practical effects but much like Dr. Who in the said seventies creating a great big ‘it is really there’ robot-monster on a minuscule budget means that it always, and when I say always, I mean always, stands still in an area whilst the actors prance around it to give the impression of kinetic energy. The Smash Mash Potato robot’s head moves jerkily as it supposedly ‘tracks’ the defenders, the arms moved up and down like a wind-up toy and the actors deliberately run into the superimposed lasers. Some effects are a little better but being cheap there is no feeling of life in them, nothing solid, real or scary. They are slow, Meccano-like and you feel if you skipped around behind one of them fast, pushed it hard it would collapse into a pile of nuts and bolts and bent metal pieces.

The protagonists are mainly the three bigger names with Koenig of Star Trek who at 52 was playing a rather unconvincing younger man, and Bruce Campbell, Bruce Campbelling his way through until about halfway when he probably got a better offer and left the project. Leigh Lombardi is the best of a poor three despite the paucity of material she was given and rather ludicrously becomes the love interest to the creaking Koenig.

Why ludicrous? Not because she was 20 years younger than Koenig, not because there clearly was no chemistry of that nature between the actors, or because she was an alien cryogenically frozen for thousands of years but mainly because in the middle of an invasion by a species that wanted to you use them and everyone on the nearest planet as a spare-parts bin getting it on with the first man you meet, even if it is Chekov from Star Trek, would be the last thing on your mind.

And herein lies the rub, everything is on this scale of silliness, you certainly can find it entertaining and I did laugh aloud at several moments but in the end you have the feeling that the makers' imagination and ambition far outweighed their budget and rather cruelly perhaps their ability.

Even with a much bigger budget Moontrap needed about three rewrites and some judicial editing to give it some semblance of any exciting, scary and action-packed sci-fi that it so desperately was trying to be.

As I said earlier I watched it and laughed but afterward, it did make me feel a little sad.