Moontrap: Target Earth (2017) – Review

In 1989, a low budget science fiction/horror film was released, it was called Moontrap and starred genre icons Walter Koenig and Bruce Campbell. Then, thirty years later, director Robert Dyke and writer Tex Ragsdale decided to make a sequel…or remake…or something, and I'm pretty sure that neither of these two gentlemen had any idea what the hell they were trying to do with Moontrap: Target Earth.

Aside from a couple of nods, this film has little to nothing to do with the 1989 original, which dealt with a couple of astronauts finding ancients ruins on the moon and their fight with killer alien cyborgs. Moontrap: Target Earth seems to have been constructed in such a fashion so that viewers need have no knowledge of the previous film, but what this results in is a film that makes little to no sense, which will piss off fans of the original and anybody sitting down to watch this thing.

 

Abandon all hope he who continues with this movie.

In the opening scenes we learn that Brian Carter (Chris Newman) has discovered, buried in the desert, what looks to be a part of a large alien artifact, but before he can get on CNN, he is approached by Richard Kontral (Charles Shaughnessy), who works for some shadowy cabal, and he is murdered by Kontral’s henchwoman Nicole (Jennifer Kincer). Dr. Daniel Allen (Damon Dayoub) and his assistant/lover Scout (Sarah Butler), who are working on their own ancient artifact discovery, are also approached by Kontral, and the two of them are hired to translate the hieroglyphics located on the artifact. They complete the job — the writing apparently being a fourteen thousand-year-old love letter from a woman to her god — and after giving their findings to the mysterious cabal, Nicole is sent to kill them. Daniel and Scout survive this assassination attempt, simply because as killers go Nicole is terrible at her job, and they sneak back onto the alien archaeological site to see what’s going on.

 

Maybe you should put down the iPad and call the police?

Being that Daniel is a complete idiot — which keeps him on par with most of the characters in the movie — he is spotted and quickly dispatched by a helicopter gunship (how this gunship didn’t also spot Scout sitting next to him is beyond me), and thus we get Scout on the run from the evil cabal, with them framing her for Daniel’s murder somehow. She sneaks into one of the meetings between Kontral and his cabal bosses — she got by their security because Nicole was on a smoke break — but she is captured before she can cut Kontral’s throat. Then, just as she is about to be executed by Nicole, they discover that somehow Scout is connected to the alien artifact, and so she is brought back to the archaeological site to see if her presence can trigger some kind of response.

 

I’d say a big red robot qualifies as a response.

The robot kills Nicole and shanghaies Scout and Kontral, taking them both aboard the artifact — which is, of course, an ancient spaceship built by an advanced human civilization that predates recorded history — and they are taken on a fast trip to the moon. Once they arrive on the moon, they are attacked by a big blue robot — don’t ask me who or what this robot is about because I still haven’t figured out the red one’s deal — and soon the red robot is taking Scout on a walk across the lunar surface. While they are out for a stroll, Kontral manages to steal the spaceship (he’d been carefully watching the red robot piloting the craft), but for some unknown reason, he crashes back onto the moon. We then get a Rock'em Sock'em fight between the red robot and the blue robot, and the blue one gets his faceplate knocked off, while the red one falls down, exploding. This allows Scout to continue on her own, where she then comes across an ancient temple.

 

Could this be an Interstellar House of Pancakes?

Once the temple has been activated — she jams a strange stone that the red robot had been carrying around into the head of the temple to do this — and it then quickly terraforms the moon, giving it blue skies and a breathable atmosphere. Scout enters the temple and finds a strange figure in some kind of stasis field; this figure is her Lord God Garen (Tarick Salmaci) — Scout being some kind “chosen one” — and we learn that some space chick named Mya (Niki Spiridakos) had been sent to Earth by Garen to pave the way for the Krell people, but she failed and thus had selected Scout to fulfill her destiny. This destiny amounts to Scout stepping into a second stasis field and going into suspended animation alongside Garen.

 

“Into the River of Time.”

The movie ends with a note written on the exterior wall of the temple, “A New World Don’t Screw it Up — Scout,” and with a shot of a small plant sprouting out of the lunar soil, and then the credits roll. Now if any of that made a lick of sense, then I did better with my recap than the filmmakers managed, as the movie’s brief eighty-five minute run-time is simply a collection of scenes with barely a thread to tie them together, and almost nothing is explained by anyone. Who are the members of the shadowy cabal? What’s with the red and blue robots? Did the red robot belong to an enemy faction? Scout kept getting these weird dream hallucinations, but were these visions happening because she is a reincarnation of Mya?

 

I doubt even Arthur C. Clarke could make sense of any of this.

It’s clear that director Robert Dyke and writer Tex Ragsdale were trying to go with some sort of “Chariots of the Gods” motif here — this idea is directly mentioned more than once — but they didn’t bother to actually put any work into the concept, hoping we would be too dazzled by their Commodore 64 level computer graphics to notice. The writing process is the least expensive element in filmmaking, yet somehow these guys cobbled together a film that not only has bargain basement visual effects — we’re talking effects that would be embarrassing if released in the early 90s — but they also have such “awesome” visual effects supporting some of the clunkiest dialogue ever put to screen, and a script so bad that if someone told me it had been written by a mad hamster after a three day bender in Las Vegas, I’d believe them. I’d bet my shirt that the actors in this film were paid in coupons — and one of them was the star of the sitcom The Nanny, for Christ’s sake — but worst of all is the fact that most of the movie takes place in four incredibly boring locations, which is impressive considering you have to work hard to make an ancient temple on the moon appear boring.

Here are this film’s key locations:

 

Daniel and Scout’s barren warehouse, with its breath-taking big screen projector.

 

The archaeological site with the alien artifact, which could pass for a Doctor Who quarry.

 

The shadowy cabal’s meeting room, which I bet they timeshare with ballroom dancers.

 

And finally, the lovely lunar landscape.

Sadly, Moontrap: Target Earth isn’t even laughably bad, it’s just a tedious and unrelentingly dumb film with maybe an occasional snarky comment from Charles Shaughnessy that almost raises a chuckle, but there is nothing in the film’s brief run-time that could ever get me to recommend this to anyone — not even to fans of bad movies. In the words of the late great Admiral Ackbar, do not go see this movie, “It’s a trap!”

Note: In one of the few references to the original film, the blue robot takes the face of Kontral, which is something that happened to Bruce Campbell’s character in Moontrap, but in this film, there is no logical reason for this happening.