Moontrap (1989) is a pretty creative cheap independently produced SF movie in which it is discovered that there is a 14 thousand year old killer robot base on the moon. They start out as buglike pods that open up and grab any scrap or machinery nearby and build themselves into big death ray killer robots. They don't mind using organic components either, so they are kind of zombie killer robots. The star of it is Walter Koenig who had name recognition from having been in Star Trek on TV, but that didn't give him any real acting talent. They show him thinking a lot. The other big name is cult film star Bruce Campbell - cult film star means he was in a lot of movies but none of them very good ones. They go to the14 thousand year old killer robot moon base and find a 14 thousand year old space babe in suspended animation, and the good part is she gets her shirt off at one point but not nearly enough time was spent on that. I would have cut a few minutes of Koenig thinking and replaced it with shirtless space babe. But that's just me. They did a pretty good job with sets, props, models and effects, especially with sets considering what is involved in a moonscape set, and the story is not just a string of cliches. The least convincing effect in the whole movie was Koenig's hairpiece. Hairpiece technology has advanced greatly in the intervening years. I learned one important fact - that a NASA moon lander, like all good movie spacecraft, contains a self-destruct panel with a beeping five minute red-LED countdown. Moontrap is not a total piece of crap and I will even give it a rating - 6/10
Unlike Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) which I remember making a conscious choice not to go see at the time and I am glad now I did that because I would have felt cheated even if I saw it as part of a double feature at a dollar movie. It was directed by Charles Band, and I had ridden a bus half way across town to see a couple of his earlier movies, The End of the World and Laserblast and it looked like Metalstorm was going to be even crappier. I remember one guy shot me some pretty nasty looks for laughing so hard at Laserblast. I remember also on the bus ride home I was sitting up at the front where the seats face the aisle and across from me was some kind of oddball with a bag of groceries who had a package of frozen fish sticks that he opened up and he'd stick his face down in it and take a big whiff of it, then grin around crazily at the other passengers, and repeat. This drew chuckles from a few of the onlookers, but beside me was a sensitive young man who seemed to take their chuckles as a personal affront. He glared angrily at the other passengers and took it upon himself to humanize the Fish Stick Whiffer by means of sympathetic communication. He started asking the guy questions like, "Are you ANGRY?" "Do you ever feel like you want to SCREAM?" Fish Stick Whiffer didn't seem to recognize that he was being spoken to and kept grinning away and enjoying the wonderful fish stick sensation. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is an idiotic, incoherent half assed piece of crap. What is worse is that it was one of the few entries in the failed 3D craze of the day so it is full of shots of people needlessly pointing things right at the camera. It was filmed almost entirely in an old sand quarry and at Vasquez Rocks, the default location for any cheap-ass cowboy movie which is all this is - a 1930s cheap ass cowboy movie and Road Warrior ripoff which should have been included in my post-apocalyptic series except for the sole fact that there is no introductory narrative telling how many years it has been since the fall of civilisation or the oil wars or the radiation wars or the cabbage patch kids wars or some other fake assed wars that made it possible to make such a stupid lousy movie. The unshaven leather-clad loner is some kind of lawman looking for a bad hombre who is stirring up the natives who in this case are bald headed cyclops guys who have their right eye covered with wrinkly flesh. There is a blonde girl in it who gets captured but she never gets her shirt off so what is the point. There is lots of footage of driving around in the old sand pits, lots and lots of it, showing the crapped up dune buggies or the hero's goony cubemobile driving around, or thrilling point of view shots from the front bumper of driving between shrubs on an old sand quarry road, or of the driver jolting back and forth in a faked up cockpit. Then there is lots of footage of people walking around in the old sand quarry, with something sending up a plume of smoke every twenty feet or so just so there is something happening on screen while they walk and walk and walk in the old sand pits. There is also a surprising amount of footage of the lawman just looking at something. Like twenty seconds at a time of a shot of his face, looking at something. You can't even call it a reaction shot - he is just looking at something like the director said, "Okay now act like you are looking at it! Perfect! Cut! It's a take!" When it comes to the big midnight showdown between the unshaven leatherclad lawman and the bad hombre with the huge black leather boobs on his costume, the lawman abruptly dashes over to a skycycle and suddenly it is a broad daylight skycycle chase with the bad guy Jared-Syn who always looks as stupid as his name, in a completely different costume and man are the blue-screen effects crappy. I am going to ruin the entire movie for you right here and I don't care, but this shows just how incredibly lousy and stupid this movie is - not only is there nothing that could possibly be called a metalstorm in this movie, Jared-Syn is NEVER DESTROYED. He GETS AWAY. Total bullshit. The only thing worth seeing in this entire half-assed piece of crappy bullshit garbage is this shot of the cubemobile jumping over a couple of dune buggies:
You have been warned.
1 comment:
Man, I haven't laughed this hard in a while. I know that's not much of a comment, but it's all I got.
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