Moontrap (1989)

Too much of everything

Simply A Masterpiece

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

MOONTRAP has the perfect genre cast: THE EVIL DEAD's Bruce Campbell and STAR TREK's Walter Koenig team up as a pair of astronauts who are busy investigating a robotic mystery on the surface of the Moon. That set-up sounds great, but in reality the execution turns out to be quite pedestrian; this has the look and feel of an Albert Pyun movie, say, rather than a 'proper', well made movie.It looks cheap and it is. About the only thing MOONTRAP has going for it are a series of robotic creations which are pretty good in a cheesy '80s kind of way. The animation is fairly decent, with some scenes bringing to mind the likes of ROBOCOP, but it's the story that also lets this one down. There's little to no scope here, just characters wandering around aimlessly and fighting repetitively.Campbell is given short shrift by the script and that awful haircut of his doesn't help. Koenig is, somewhat hilariously, playing a youthful hero type (his character appears to be at least 20 years younger than the actor), the sort of guy who gets the girl at the end, which is a little weird and unworkable. But really, there's not a lot going on here, especially for fans of the sci-fi genre who will have seen it all before.

Here's some life advice you need, make yourself a nice bowl of chili and settle down to watch Moontrap. This is low budget, but all full of love, just like that good ole bowl of chili. They got Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell with guns in space, wandering around the moon, following the thread of a mystery. I just love how someone worked out that Koenig and Campbell would make a perfect pair of chums for battling against incomprehensibility. The special effects are mostly done with some really great model work. The whole movie feels like an elongated dream, and is helped along by a superb industrial/synthesiser soundtrack.Quintessential tripe, as cockamamie as you like, but as lovable a movie as you can find. It's a truly a pure sci-fi movie that puts most of the big budget stuff to shame. It's really difficult to say why, but there's something about Bruce Campbell that makes him the ultimate hero, as deficient as his characters are, they just have spectacular attitudes. The mystery of this film lingers long, it reminds me that we're all struggling against the unknown and all we can do is put our best foot forward and keep our chins up.

As much as I think Bruce Campbell is cool, then it was just difficult to fully get into this movie and be entertained by it. It was cheesy to the point of being painful to bear witness to.The story is about astronauts Col. Jason Grant (played by Walter Koenig) and Ray Tanner (played by Bruce Campbell) who explore an abandoned space vessel and bringing back a several thousand year old corpse from space and a strange pod. The pod, however, contains a homicidal entity though and humans are such easy prey...Storywise, then the movie was campy, cheesy and too much off a rip-off of other more famous Sci-Fi movies, such as "Alien" to mention just one.For a movie of this particular caliber, then you know what you will get in terms of the acting talents and the script, and "Moontrap" does deliver what is expected of it."Moontrap" is boring, rather uneventful and not particularly enjoyable. And not even Bruce Campbell managed to save this train-wreck - or should I say space-wreck - of a movie.

Although the Romans already stated "de gustibus non disputandum" (you cannot argue about taste), I liked this movie very much! It has the kind of atmosphere I am longing for in a SciFi movie! A lot of mysteries (we are fully kept in the dark about the origins of the moon base and the mysterious old spaceship, which the space shuttles encounters in orbit) and presented as such in a way, that my fantasy can jump with giant leaps during the entire movie! I even don't WANT to know where they came from!!! The "human slashing" is a bit overdone for my taste, but then again...it depends on what you are looking for - I guess. The special effects could be better, but they don't disturb me at all: as a matter of fact they are indeed more accurate than in other comparable movies! At the time it really was timed perfectly: a lot of conspiracy theories were posted about Apollo astronauts hiding secrets from us (secret alien moon bases, UFOs, etc.), which made this film even more believable than normal.It really is the kind of movie, which deserves a sequel: maybe we can then get more insight into the origins of the unknown people - or even better: run into new mysteries. Of course Walter Koenig is now a bit too old, but a SERIOUS remake of Moontrap - followed by an equally SERIOUS sequel! - would make me very happy indeed!