MOONBASE is a low-end, sci-fi actioner that suffers from a tiresome, limited plot. The film aired on the Sci-Fi Channel prior to its release on home video.
New Years Day, 2065. Criminals, led by Carl Stark (Robert O'Reilly), escape an off-world penitentiary and land at a waste dump on the moon. There, John Russell (Scott Plank) and his disgruntled dump employees are taken hostage. Surprised to find no shuttle to Earth, Stark waits for an arriving
"inspection" team, which is headed by Lt. Caldecott (Billy Maddox) and Russell's old flame Dana Morgan (Jocelyn Seagrave). Caldecott and Morgan alert Russell that Stark and his band are escaped convicts. A confrontation ensues, and the criminals flee. They are joined in their hiding place by dump
worker Deckert (Kurt Fuller), who wants to return to Earth; Deckert divulges Caldecott's real mission to the criminals: to recover ultra-deadly--and very valuable--nuclear warheads hidden there. Dana, Russell, and his coworker Will (Stack Pierce) contact a rescue team, but Deckert destroys the
ship. The prisoners defeat Caldecott's men and Russell is captured. While forming a plan, Will reveals to Dana that Russell once took the fall for her during an ecological disaster. In the ensuing melee, Will is killed, but Russell and Dana escape to the shuttle where they must wait for the ship
to power up. Deckert has a change of heart and flips the power switch just as Stark shoots him. Stark then sets the warheads to go off and chases Russell, who must open the escape doors. Russell tricks Stark using a hologram of himself and sneaks onto the shuttle. The warheads blow as Russell and
Dana head into orbit.
The micro-budgeting of some sci-fi films becomes painfully apparent with a quick look at their cast lists and showcased special effects. MOONBASE is such a base example of the genre that it even stoops to having a Rutger Hauer lookalike playing the kind of bad-guy part that is usually reserved for
Hauer himself. Fortunately, Robert O'Reilly keeps his Mr. Stark performance on the level of a typical Hauer turn, but that's not really saying much.
Most notable are the unintentionally humorous special effects, which at times reach an Ed Wood-like level of campiness. Apparently, in the universe posited by this film, laws of gravity hold sway on the moon just enough so that humans can move about freely, but heavy inanimate objects float freely
in air. The script by Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vindeni is a simplistic exercise in compiling cliches, with no time left for such inanities as suspense or momentum. The hologram-trickery provides the film's only interesting twist, but even that device was already used in TOTAL RECALL (1990). Despite
these basic structural problems, the film does contain some interesting and occasionally humorous dialogue, while the performances are above average, considering the paucity of the material. Paolo Mazzucato, who served as director and editor, shows good raw skills in both areas, making for a
watchable, albeit boring, effort. (Nudity, violence.) leave a comment
