"Help me Paul, Help me Paul, Help me I should not have watched this movie. I rather have the rotten a#*hole of a roadkill skunk and down it with beer than watch this movie. Consolation comes in the form of fodder for Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Dr longbone made a nice stew though. It has corn, green pepper, chicken, onions. The unfriendly neighborhood dinoman. Sooo awful it is kinda funny. so in conclusion watch it with mst3k commentary and don't take it seriously. I just remembered another funny mst3k quote pinkfully sleeping. wordplay. This is worth talking about as a warning and a suggestion please only watch the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version. What else is there? I am afraid i have ran out of things to say but unfortunately there needs to be more lines. OK one interesting thing is this is the 68th movie that i'm watching from the IMDb bottom hundred. and i have watched 245 movies of the top 250. So i have started checking out the top250 TV shows as well.

I gather this film gained prominence through mockery on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Understandable I guess, laughter is a quite reasonable defence against the coldness of the universe, its scorn for our trouble. Paul is a lonely man, we see him first biking to a ridge for mineralogical study, he finds some kind of relic and is assailed by howls and a ceremonial mask. A disturbance in the force we might think, man drawn inexorably to some ill fate but it turns out to be a prank. The tension lifts but respite is temporary, as he makes his moves upon a lovely new friend a cosmic cock-block strikes down to deny even brief pleasure. See, a meteorite has recently collided with the moon, unleashing a swarm of fragments, one of which becomes lodged in his brain. And hence he is doomed to become the titular moon beast, and even make tracks. Well one. What makes this film really work is the way nothing is urgent before it gets too late. No one gets too bothered about Paul's injury, so it takes a while before he goes to a hospital. There are improbable murders, but people just go with the flow at the even more improbable explanations. An folk rock tune appears (California Lady) and even though the plot starts moving again before the end of the song they keep playing it over the drama. Its a cracking song and I like that they kept it in. Paul's new gal is devoted to him even though they only just met. Photographer, blonde, only a couple of expressions and even that may be an exaggeration. They're nice expressions though and she's quite a sweetheart, I felt for her. Paul is something of a tragic character, I felt for him too. He doesn't have much presence on screen, but that didn't detract. Aren't we all pretty fleeting on the screen of life after all?Then there's Johnny Longbow, American Indian professor and all round cool customer, with a great soup recipe. He's awesome, and if there were any justice he would be the star of a chintzy TV series about his ongoing exploits. People keep cool and its all soothing and strange, but then the downers kick in. The horror set pieces are too short to impress so its difficult to get a bead on where the film is going for most of the way, but then it all becomes clear. To the vastness of space people are an irrelevance, the lonely even more, mere specks of dust for arbitrary games. And as things built to an end I became rather sad. Afterwards I tried to laugh but somehow it ain't coming. The sky is no comfort to the lonely ladies and gentlemen, so throw down your telescopes. B minus film, but worth a watch.

Why are so many crummy movies filmed in the desert? Is it that the sun turns the directors mental, or is it that nutjobs naturally gravitate to the sparsely populated areas to escape persecution? We may never know.Regardless, this movie is pretty simple B-movie fare. Imagine a werewolf movie with all the Gothic horror trappings removed, and native American nonsense tossed in as a replacement. A boring yet hunky guy meets a dim blonde, the talk for a bit and then he's smacked on the head by a micro-meteorite. He then spends the rest of the movie feeling dizzy, while constantly trailed by his blonde and a native American professor called Johnny Longbow while complaining about headaches.When not being dizzy he's busy being a moon-creature, ripping apart clichés and stereotypes in the night. We don't see much of this, concentrating instead on the blonde's legs as she wears a variety of 70's fashions which make her look alternately like a skank or a playmate.To be fair, they do make a nice couple, if a bit dim. The guys plight elicits some sympathy, but not too much since he's had it easy. Johnny Longbow is OK, but lumbered with all the wordy speeches and exposition for the all too small plot. The rest of the characters are stereotypes and cardboard cutouts, and the story lurches along with little real pacing or cohesion. Not boring in the same way Manos or Monster-a-go-go, but no thriller. Two stars for this, one for Johnny and his bow, the other for the blonde bomb-crater.

I wanted to like this. The people who made it worked hard and, bless their hearts, did the best they could. But it still is a mess, despite some promising material that just isn't developed.In the first act we meet Paul. As in most of the movie his shirt is off, and he's digging in the desert. He encounters Johnny Longbow, two of his students, and a photographer named Cathy who has blond hair and a low room temperature IQ.One of the few surprises is that the two students aren't future victims. They're just there.We learn that Johnny got his Indian name because of his skill with a bow and arrow. Hmmmm? Could that come into play later? At the same time a huge meteor is headed toward the moon, and a spectacular meteor shower is promised for that night. Paul and Cathy go up in the mountains to get a good view. A meteor lands very near them, grazing Paul's head. Considering its speed and temperature that should have killed him, but I digress.In the long second act Paul's relationship with Kathy becomes more intense (I can't use the word deepens here, just won't fit) and we learn some back story. Paul's parents are divorced, he lives with his mom and she's in Europe, leaving him to roam around a huge house. Johnny's Indian background and the world of science often conflict. OK.Paul turns into a giant lizard that looks a little like the one in THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE from the seventies. He kills off some people who have no connection to the story. Say a few lines of dialog, scream, dead. We find that a shard of the meteorite is lodged in Paul's brain. Worse yet, it's fragmented and is spreading, rendering surgery impossible and a neurosurgeon introduced into the narrative superfluous. There are a few attempts to deal with a twenty-four year old man's confronting his own mortality, but that goes nowhere.In the third act Paul runs off to the desert, Cathy follows him, as does the rest of the supporting cast. Johnny fires an arrow with an arrowhead made from a piece of moon rock, strikes the monster in the middle of the chest causing it to melt into a puddle.The acting isn't really bad, but it's acting. None of the performances feel natural. Their work would be considered good, even excellent, in a community theater group in a small town. But make a movie and you're playing in the big leagues.The worst thing about the movie is the sound. I think every scene was re-recorded because voices sound the same whether people are in the desert, a house, a museum, a hospital, wherever.The print of the movie on my DVD (a Chilling Classics box set of fifty movies I got at Best Buy for $20) was very worn. The night scenes were splotchy and there were imperfections in the film print. Sorry, but it reminds me how films with equally low budgets look great today because they're shot on digital video.That said, I'm sure that here thirty some years later everyone involved can open conversations with, "Hey, do you know I made a movie once?"