It’s not as sexy as it sounds, although Bruce always is. My incomplete Bruce Campbell collection finally caught up with me and determined I was missing two of his sci-fi/horror flicks, so I swiftly added them to my movie shelves. So let’s get into Moontrap and Mindwarp.
MOONTRAP (1989)
I’ll say it up front; this is the lesser of these two movies.
Bruce and Chekov from Star Trek are astronauts that discover the corpse of an ancient astronaut, not realizing they’ve brought an alien robot life form home with it.
After a major gun battle with what turns out to be a pretty damn big robot on their ship, they hit up a strip club for the most 80s scene of the film with a stripper that looks like Frida from ABBA with the best bad 80s horror you could imagine.
Then they head to the moon, where we get a mixture of cool visuals and bad model space vehicles and astronaut dolls.
The guys find a human woman in the aliens’ base, and finally do some battling with the aliens on the moon.
There’s some silly fun to be had, but this is mostly a disappointing, cheesy sci-fi movie with just one cool moment featuring a freaky Bruce face.
MINDWARP (1991)
This is the 1990s doing predictive sci-fi/horror right. A young woman hates that life is all A.I. controlled virtual reality in her world.
Humans simply eat and go to the bathroom in between connecting to a VR system that lets them experience a wonderful life.
But she wants more. She rebels against the system, and as punishment for trying to break her mother free from the same kind of existence, she is thrust into the real world…post-apocalyptic life in a desert land where she is immediately attacked by deformed cannibals.
Luckily, gorgeous Bruce Campbell, a loner living out in the desert alone, saves her…temporarily.
After they quickly have sex (ah, the 90s…or in this case, 2037), they are kidnapped by the cannibal tribe and taken to a nasty underground lair where men are made to do forced labor and women are forced to carry offspring.
Bitch, Bruce was just a warmup. Come to papa.
Not to mention, there’s incest, gross water filled with leeches, and a bloodthirsty leader (literally) played by Phantasm icon Angus Scrimm.
Bruce is a serious hero for a change as he battles to rescue his new woman, the cannibals are gnarly looking, and there’s plenty of brutality and gore, making this a worthy addition to my complete collection of Bruce Campbell sci-fi/horror movies.
