1976 horror movie
Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Josh: 3/5; Lisa: 2.5/5; Tami: 3/5)
Rating: 4/20
Plot: Some guy named Paul who doesn't like to wear shirts is struck in the brain with a moon rock. It causes him to turn into a goofy-looking lizard monster that kills poker-playing campers and inebriated bowlers.
Our first Bad Movie Club meet-up in a while brought us a Moon Beast, a creature in a cheap rubbery lizard costume that I'm fairly positive the makers of this thing regretted. Action-horror sequences are limited in this. There's an early scene where the violence takes place off-screen featuring a drunk guy with a bowling ball. He's played by Alan Swain, and I'm happy to say that since I've seen this and Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann, I can call myself an Alan Swain completist. Swain's been a location manager for the last several years, but he was also a rigging electrician in 2012's The Avengers. That's right, Alan Swain is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The best action scene has the "moon beast" interrupting a poker game in a tent, and I doubt the director of this (Dick Ashe, who directed nothing else after this atrocity) wanted me to laugh during that. You get the sense that they filmed one of these monster-killing-spree scenes, looked at it the next day, and decided, "We can't put too many of these in there!" and then wrote more scenes where the characters just talk and talk.
Leigh Drake is probably the worst performer in this, and it's a shock that she was allowed to act in two other movies. Every in is delivered in the same monotone, and my bad movie club friends and I really hoped she was the first to die. Unfortunately, she was the love interest, falling madly in love with the titular moon beast because she got to see him without a shirt so often.
Scientifically, this makes no sense at all. There's a character named Johnny Longbow who is a Native American and a scientist, and he just makes shit up as he goes. "Well, let's shoot him with an arrow that has an arrowhead I made out of the same moon rock lodged in his frontal lobe! After all, there needs to be a reason we showed off my character's bow and arrow skills earlier in the movie, right?" His make-it-up-as-you-go stylings seem to be the modus operandi of the pair of writers who penned this screenplay--Charles Sinclair and Bill Finger. Yes, it's that Bill Finger--the one who was a co-creator of Batman. Anyway, these two (yes, it took two brains to write this brainless script) seem to just be making it all up as they go along. More confusing science--Paul has this lizard as a pet, and it breaks out of its cage one night. I thought for sure there would be some twist where it was revealed that the lizard either was the creature responsible for all the killing or had somehow merged with Paul. Nope--the lizard just kind of disappeared and never played any role in any of this at all.
I've spent too much time writing about this movie, but I do want to mention the concert footage of Frank Larrabee singing "California Lady." This was apparently all he ever did, too. Maybe a moon lizard ate him.
Not a waste of time as a good-bad movie if you're interested in that sort of thing.
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