Black Moon Rising

1986, d. Harley Cokeliss - AmazonPrime

A common trope of boredom through to the turn of the century was channel-flipping.  Just thumbing the remote one channel at a time, pausing for moments to catch mere glimpses - a few lines of dialogue, a mid-sales pitch on a shopping network, a cheesy action sequence - before moving onto the next thing that probably doesn't interest you.  The equivalent these days is thumbing our way through our streaming services to add things to our lists, but taking a good long time before pressing "play" on something.  The difference here is we don't tend to catch those mere glimpses of the show or movie, just a picture and a brief 1-2 line synopsis (some, but not all, Netflix apps now have a preview feature if you pause on a selected title for a moment).  AmazonPrime has, for some productions, a prominently featured "Play Trailer" beside their "Play Movie" button.  And that trailer for Black Moon Rising is what suckered me into watching this decidedly middling, obviously forgettable mid-80's Fast and Furious franchise precursor.  I immediately paraphrased Troy from Community, "That looks terrible...I want to watch it twice."



There's definitely a 5-minutes-into-the-future vibe to that trailer, with the Lalo Schifrin synth score and the titular "future car", the Black Moon, and of course name checking John Carpenter as co-screenwriter, but it's all a bit of a smokescreen.  This is such a vintage 80's also-ran action movie, it's almost painful.  Yet it is still quite watchable, mostly thanks to the charisma of Tommy Lee Jones, here a very lithe 39-years-old, complete with a topless scene that'll make you say "damn, Tommy Lee Jones was cut!"  I know I had never, ever, even momentarily, contemplated Jones' sex appeal before.  That changed.

The film's plot is very convoluted.  There are three competing stories.  The first finds Jones' master thief, Quint, being blackmailed by the FBI (Police Academy's Bubba Smith) into obtaining evidence for a case they're pursuing (pretty sure that would get thrown out in a court of law, so why bother?).  He gets caught, but escapes and is on the run from some bad people. 

The poster screams Blade Runner.
It's no Blade Runner...  I actually stayed
awake watching this one.

The second plot has to do with an experimental supercar, the Black Moon, developed by a former NASA engineer and piloted by an expert driver, and maintained by a mute Larry from Newhart (no brother Darryl or other brother Darryl though).  It runs  on water and can go faster than any other car in history, and has a light composite frame never before seen.  They're courting auto manufacturers who are dubious about the whole thing.  Plot A dovetails into Plot B when Quint, stalled out at a gas station, stashes the data tape on the Black Moon, planning to retrieve it later in Los Angeles.

The third plot has to do with Linda Hamilton's Nina, master car thief and the right hand woman in Robert Vaughn's car theft/development scheme that makes no sense (he's stealing cars to display in office buildings for criminals?  Is that what's happening?).  Of course, she steals the Black Moon before Quint can recover the tape and then the story gets going...kind of .

There's car chases, fist fights, gunplay, uzis, big hair, and sex...so, typical 80's action movie.  Everything is so sub par, however.  The car chases are more tedious than exciting, 80's gunplay was mostly about people jumping out of the way of submachine gun bullets or cars getting shot up, and the sex scene so perfunctory.  That said, Tommy Lee Jones has charisma to spare, here.  It's easy to think of him only as the old cranky guy from almost every movie he was in post 1990, but seeing him as a bit of a younger buck, making sweet time with a lady and it's a revelation just how charming he is.  He's got a real knack for delivering dry wit and sarcasm. 

The film's weaving of the three plots is rather forced, and Cokeliss' execution of the film is so mechanical.  There's little actual excitement.  Some of that might be in comparison to today's standards of blockbuster, but I think if this were any good for its time, I would have heard about it before two weeks ago.  The opening credits had some nice composition and framing, but after that it routinely feels like an episode of The Rockford Files.  It's TV quality. 

There is a scene, however, of a car jumping from one tower to another, which should be spectacular but is exactly as cheesy looking as you'd expect from a modestly budgeted 80's action movie.  Not a forgotten masterpiece, not even a forgotten curiosity, just kind of forgotten for a reason.