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1989 American film featuring Walter Koegnig (Star Trek and Babalon 5), Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead and Army of Darkness), Leigh Lombardi, and Robert Kurcz. Directed by Robert Dyke.

Moontrap, although a more recent film than I usually review here, is certainly worthy of some comment.

Moontrap is an odd little mix of a movie. The opening public domain Apollo Moon landing footage aside, the film makes a reasonable effort to tell a story with some interesting ideas. The production values are better than some movies of that time with set design and effects that are actually well done. The movie’s weakest area is in its gratuitous dialog which, I warn you, contains an excessive amount of swearing.

Anyway the story goes that we are not alone. (No big deal there for science fiction.) The twist is that these "others" are stuck on our Moon. This other life form is primarily machine in nature. (Don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly willing to use organic parts where they seem fit.) But they are trapped on our Moon without the resources to launch them selves off its surface. They have watched our coming and goings during the Apollo missions with presumably some envy, if they even "feel" such an emotion.

There is no real explanation offered when an "alien" derelict ship enters Earth’s orbit at the beginning of the movie. Two artifacts are recovered by a shuttle crew (Koegnig and Campbell) just before the ship incinerates during entry into the atmosphere. One of the artifacts is a oblong, organic textured but metal, egg shaped object. (Yes, about the size of a bread basket to answer the first of twenty questions.) The other is a humanoid corpse in a space suit.

It soon turns out the corpse is not just "humanoid" but completely human. Plus it is very old, even ancient to the point of pre-history. So what is a human that is tens of thousands of years old doing in space floating around with an egg thing. We soon find out part of the answer when the artifacts are left unattended and the egg thing revives to take matter into its own, er, um, metal cable tentacles. It uses parts of other machines in the lab to assemble a rather mean looking robot body. After a drawn out battle scene with poor sound effects and equally poor acting the monster robot is destroyed.

After some space policy arguments a decision is made to return men to the Moon to find out just what is going on there. Oddly the trip is made back to the Moon in an Apollo era craft. (Hey, why waste all that good public domain NASA stock footage.) So (Koegnig and Campbell) are on their way back to the Moon.

The big surprise comes when they find an ancient structure on the Moon that has a human hand print shape for an entrance opening mechanism. Once inside they find a cathedral like long hall at the end of which is a chamber where a human woman is hibernating in stasis (what we used call suspended animation.)

Well, without revealing too much more I will simply state that the story, as told, has some glaring holes and leaves quite a bit unexplained. But with a minor amount of fixing up could make for a really neat story and with better productions values (especially better dialog and direction) could be a really good, fun, movie. The movie does set up a good framework and certainly worth watching if for no other reason than to think to oneself you it could be made better.

I mean really, a good story should not close every loose end leaving the audience to speculate and fill in what they like. For example are these mechanical aliens indigenous to our Moon? How are they associated with the ancient humans that apparently had technology somewhat more advanced than ours? Is there an "Atlantis" implication here? I think the film Alien did it best by showing but never explaining the large alien navigator fossilized in its marooned ship.

For those who like a little "damsel in distress" (DiD) action to spice up their movie there is a scene where Koengin and the woman are captured by the robot menace and awaken to find themselves shackled upright. A robot descends on them with a small spinning saw blade and starts to strip the woman of more than just clothing, apparently looking for "parts" that may be of use. Koengin fights free of his shackles and comes to her rescue just in time, as any classic hero should.

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