The Dark Side of the Moon (1990)

This is a film which deserves an award.

To be precise, it deserves this site’s first presentation of the coveted gilded Immanuel Velikovsky medallion for Excellence in Science.

We’ve seen far too many films which have absolutely horrendous science errors, but here is a film which stands out like a beacon among them.

A filthy, foul-smelling beacon, spewing out vast oily black clouds, that is.

It goes something like this: a spaceship on a routine maintenance run is drawn towards the dark side of the moon, where they find the Space Shuttle Discovery, which vanished thirty years earlier after it crashed in the Bermuda Triangle on its way back from its mission to ummmmmmm…

Drill core samples on the dark side of the Moon?

Right.

At any rate, the salvage crew boards the shuttle which is, well…

Full of lots of rooms, passages and big spaces, with heavy steel doors?  There’s even a cargo hold almost big enough to put a Shuttle in?

Okay…

Now let’s get this straight: the Shuttle can not reach the Moon.

In fact, it could only reach fairly low Earth orbits, and had to use extra boosters to put a lot of satellites into the right orbits.  They certainly couldn’t land on the Moon.  Nor could they take off again if they did — even if they weren’t carrying big bins full of very large — and heavy — core samples.

Let’s face it, the real shuttle only has two rather small and cramped compartments and the cargo bay, none of which have any big “I” beams or high ceilings to hang bodies off!

The rest of the film isn’t anywhere near as bad.  We get a bit of nonsense about the Devil snatching ships from the Devil’s Triangle, and before you know it, he’s on board the salvage ship, taking people over one by one.  As you’d expect, it steals a lot from Alien and The Thing, throws in a bit of gore, a little sex and a bizarre ship’s computer/android who looks like a beautiful young woman but sits alone in a chair in a fairly large room until she is needed.  Weird.

Naturally, I like that part.

Still, as these sorts of films go, I enjoyed it.  It isn’t a great Science Fiction Horror film — and large portions of it don’t make a lot of sense, but let’s face it, we don’t expect a horror film to make perfect sense, anyway.

Or a Bermuda Triangle film

Or any film with the Devil in it.

But don’t get your expectations too high — and make sure you have lots of extra popcorn.

You may need it.

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