Walter Koenig – somewhere between Star Trek (1966-1969) and Babylon 5 (1994-1998) – and everyone’s favourite Evil Dead slayer Bruce Campbell are the top line stars of Robert Dyke’s Moontrap. Dyke was a former special effects man who had worked on the likes of Harry and the Hendersons (1987) and Evil Dead II (1987) which is where, one presumes, he met Campbell and talked him into appearing in his debut feature as a director.
Beginning with stock footage from the Apollo 11 mission, it suggests that when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were taking their first steps onto the moon, they were being spied on by a mysterious robotic eye that briefly emerges from beneath the lunar surface. The story proper begins decades later with shuttle astronauts Jason Grant (Koenig) and Ray Tanner (Bruce Campbell) picking up a mysterious signal which turns out to be coming from a derelict alien spaceship. On board they find what seems to be the mummified remains of a human and mysterious pod (that looks for all the world like a painted American football) both of which they return to Earth for examination. The pod hatches a creature that builds itself a cybernetic body from whatever parts it can find in the lab as well as the mummy and goes on the rampage before being blown up by Grant. Using the last of the Saturn V rockets, Grant and Tanner head off to the moon in search of clues where they find the ruins of an ancient civilization and a young woman, Mera (Leigh Lombardi) in suspended animation. Her people were wiped out by a race of killer robots, the Kaalium who have now stolen the lunar module and are using it in the ship they are building in readiness for an attack on the Earth and it’s up to Grant, Tanner and Mera to stop them.
It’s all a bit drab really. Not especially awful but not exactly riveting entertainment either. The effects are highly variable, the story a bit ordinary and the performances not all that special. It’s always good to see Koenig and Campbell on screen but they don’t have any real chemistry and are hamstrung by Tex Ragsdale’s script which mostly consisted of them exchanging manly “banter” in lieu of anything really meaty to chew on. They do what they can and Lombardi struggles with a horribly under-written role – she’s just a plot device to explain the back story and nothing more – but there’s really nothing of any substance here.
The robots are quite good fun but to be honest they’re under-used and for the most part, not a great deal happens. Moontrap only runs for 90 minutes but feels a lot longer as there are great stretches where the plot is parked to one side to allow some nonsense in nightclubs to get in the way. What few interesting bits and pieces are to be found here are lifted from the likes of Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), Stanley Donen and John Barry’s Saturn 3 (1980) and, almost inevitably, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). It doesn’t really have an original thought in its vacuous little head the poor thing.
It’s not the worst low budget science fiction film you’ll find from the 1980s. Far from it. It’s cheap, not terribly exciting and really only boasts the double act of Koenig and Campbell as a lure for their fanbases but it passes the time harmlessly enough. There’s nothing here that will have you screaming at your television, but nor is there anything that you’ll particularly remember either. It’s just sort of there, doing its thing as inoffensively as it can and then going away to be forgotten forever.
Forgotten by everyone but Dyke it turns out, who inexplicably returned to the Kaalium in 2017 for a sequel that no-one ever asked for, Moontrap: Target Earth (2017). Sadly neither Koenig nor Campbell are anywhere to be seen and it’s really an in-name-only follow-up that presumably chimed with what few fans there were of the first film.
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