Twenty years after the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, Colonel Jason Grant (Walter Koening), and Ray Turner (Bruce Campbell) are piloting the Space Shuttle Camelot. They encounter what appears to be a derelict space craft. Jason investigates the ship. On board he finds the remains of a humanoid corpse and an unusual alien pod-like object. The shuttle crew brings both back to Earth to analyze. In a lab, scientists determine that the humanoid came from the Moon at least fourteen thousand years ago, but that is about all they have been able to find out.
The pod opens up and mechanical tentacles emerge. Using pieces of the corpse and metal items from around the room the pod creates a cyborg. The head of the creation is the pod. The cyborg goes on the attack killing anyone it comes across. Jason manages to destroy it by shooting the pod.
The event spurs the government into making another trip to the Moon. The government pulls the last Apollo rocket out of mothballs. Jason and Ray volunteer to go to the Moon to try to investigate where the dead humanoid came from.
On the moon, Grant and Ray find the ruins of an ancient base. They also find a woman in suspended animation. The woman doesn’t speak English, but Grant and Ray manage to find out that her name is Mera (Leigh Lombardi) and that the alien life forms that can reconstruct themselves into cyborgs are called Kaalium. When they try to get back to the Lunar Module, they find that the Kaalium have taken it to use to repair their ship. The three of them are now stranded.
The Kaalium kill Ray. Jason and Mera end up as prisoners on the alien’s ship to be used as spare parts. On board they find thousands of pods. Jason understands that the aliens needed the Lunar Module to complete the repairs on their ship. Now that the alien ship is functional, they can launch their attack on Earth.
“Moontrap” was released in 1989 in the U.S. and was directed by Robert Dyke. It is an American science fiction movie. A sort of sequel called “Moontrap: Target Earth” was done in 2017.
Even though the film is serious, with Koenig and Campbell in the mix, the movie has a wonderful unintended camp atmosphere. There is also a “If we can only communicate with it” moment that was amusing.
The movie starts out with some stock footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The dust used to represent the Moon was quick-setting concrete. Because of this, liquids were banned from the movie set. The Enrico Fermi nuclear reactor in Michigan was used for NASA’s control room. As a touch of reality, the moon scenes don’t have any sound other than the astronauts talking to each other and the background music score. And of course, the best part was the tinker-toy-human-combo cyborgs. They were really creepy, especially with their skull-like pod heads. There are some unanswered questions, but altogether not a bad little film.
During the ending credits there is a voiceover by Jason asking if there is any wreckage that may have landed on Earth. Jason is reassured that any debris from the alien ship would have burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere before it would ever reach the surface.