#39 Track of the Moon Beast (Wes)

Track of the Moon Beast

Once again this weeks movie was a movie I’ve heard the name of, but never seen before. Why had I heard the name? It was on MST3K of course. I’m starting to feel sorry for a few of these movies now. I know they appeared on that show because they were awful, but there are probably worse films out there. Besides I liked the title of this movie, it sounded like it could be quite fun. So how far off the mark was I?

During a meteor shower, mineralogist Paul Carson (Chase Cordell) gets struck on the head by a lunar meteorite. Somehow this lodges in his brain (no, really…) which causes his transformation into some sort of were-lizard whenever the moon is out (well at night anyway. It seems everyone but the writers, Charles Sinclair and Bill Finger (comic writer and co-creator of Batman and The Green Lantern!), know that you can often see the moon in the day…) which goes on a nightly murderous rampage. Concerned for his health, Paul’s girlfriend Kathy (Donna Leigh Drake) and his former teacher Johnny Longbow (Gregorio Sala) seek to help him, eventually discovering about his nightly changes. The meteorite has now fragmented though, and Johnny remembers stories from his tribe about how these monsters would eventually explode. Will they be able to help Paul in time? Or will Paul just end up as chunky lizard pieces when he can no longer get on the floor, and walk the dinosaur?

So there we have it. Werewolves are boring, were-lizards are the rage now! Well I guess that was the thinking of the filmmakers, unfortunately the make-up isn’t quite convincing enough. You know when you see a toddler that has found its mums lipstick and has drawn over itself (and the walls, the cat and everything else in reach), that would be a more convincing make up job. You know when the skinniest guy you know rubs green face paint over himself to go to a fancy dress party as The Hulk? That is more convincing. Hell, even the crappy monkey suit in The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek II (see here) was more convincing.

To make matters worse, the transformation scene is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. In other similar films, such as An American Werewolf in London, the transformation looks incredibly painful, in this movie it just looks like Paul has gotten drunk. His vision blurs a bit, he stumbles about, he breathes like he’s making an obscene phone call, then it looks like he’s grabbed a Halloween lizard mask and just put it on and starts snarling for fun.

Talking of acting drunk, Track of the Moon Beast has without a doubt the worst camera work and editing I’ve ever seen in a movie. The camera operator looks as though they spent their entire day in the pub before filming this, with the picture blurring at odd intervals and the camera wobbling throughout. It’s so bad at times it even makes you feel slightly seasick. As for the editing, it looks as though someone has taken each scene and cut the beginning and ending of it in a random place and stuck them together in a way that jars your senses every time the scene changes.

The camera work isn’t actually a problem too much of the time, due to the fact that when it doesn’t look like the movie was filmed with a camera that had its lens covered in Vaseline, it’s often so dark that you expect Mulder and Scully to walk onto the set. The sound editing doesn’t fare much better, either sounding like it was recorded underwater, or in a wind tunnel.

So aside from the awful cinematography and special effects provided by Blue Peter, does the rest of the movie fare well? I’m afraid that’s a resounding no. Apparently the script was written in a weekend, and I’d love to say that it shows, but honestly it sounds more like it was written on the back of a receipt on a short bus journey home. It’s not only poor, but the pacing is so slow that it makes continental drift look like an episode of The Benny Hill Show. It’s also really badly researched (I guess there weren’t many books available on the bus journey). So bad that even a junior school student would be able to point out it’s factual errors. For example, at one point the police consults a biologist/herpetologist over a cast of what appears to be a large lizards footprint. He tells them that they’re looking for a lizard that walks upright “Some form of reptile, closely related to the Tyrannosaurus Rex”. Even a biologist in the 70s would have known that dinosaurs and reptiles were two distinct classes of animals (not to mention that the picture of the T. Rex he has on the wall looks more like it should be stuck to the fridge by a proud parent than the wall by a biologist).

I’m not sure what’s worse, the script or the completely wooden way in which it’s delivered. Chase Cordell says his lines like he’s a schoolchild just learning how to read, which has a nice irony to it, as the lines sound like they’ve been written by a schoolchild who’s just learned to write. The rest of the actors are no better, with Gregorio Sala veering between worst storyteller and worst cookery show presenter ever, and Donna Leigh Drake putting in a performance so bad that it may have actually been the inspiration for Sydne Rome’s performance in The Pumaman (see here).

Track of the Moon Beast really is a poor excuse for a movie. But, to its credit, there is some fun to be had in laughing at how an inept film this is, and I had great fun tweeting along. I’m also looking forward to getting a chance to watch the Mystery Theatre 3000 team riffing it, but I wouldn’t recommend you watch this movie without that in mind. It’s too dull to enjoy as a movie on its own merits and you won’t so much be marvelling at the were-lizard, more asking the question “why-lizard?”