Review of: Black Moon Rising

I was watching a Sci-Fi documentary called In Search Of Tomorrow, and this film popped up called ” Black Moon Rising.” I had never heard of this movie, and after scrolling through the cast and who had written it, I knew I needed to seek it out.

A story was written by John Carpenter, who also did the screenplay, for a film he has never watched. He wrote it while he was doing Escape From New York. By 1986, Roger Corman had already sold New World Pictures but retained some home video rights, and they were essentially making low-budget action, horror, and sci-fi akin to Cannon Group.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Quint. A small-time but incredibly efficient thief whom the government approaches to retrieve tax files from a large corporation involved in a huge court case. It doesn’t go as planned, and he finds himself in the desert, trying to hide the info on his way back to LA. FEAR frontman Lee Ving, a thief for hire and rival of Quints, is following him.

Quint hides the tax info disc in a prototype car that ex-NASA scientists are testing. The car can reach up to 325 miles per hour and is in high demand for purchase by the highest bidder. As Quint goes to retrieve the info, the car gets stolen by a car thief for a billionaire businessman’s showroom. Our car thief, Nina, is played by Linda Hamilton. Complete with her huge Terminator mullet. Perennial henchman Robert Vaughn plays the billionaire.

In his pursuit of the lost disk, Quint falls for Nina and slowly builds a plan with the car’s creators to get in, steal the car back, and retrieve his missing disk. However, the government is not short on surveillance, as Quint is constantly being pursued. Bubba Smith plays the lead government official on Quint’s trail.

Tommy Lee Jones’s smart mouth but smooth demeanor makes you feel like Jones is just playing himself, which is fine. The more sarcastic Tommy Lee Jones, the better. He probably gives the best performance, as everyone else is just playing a character they have all played before.

This film moves at a quick pace, and we don’t have much time to breathe. It’s not rushed by any means; it just gets to the point. Something that made these types of films in the 80s so fun is that the plots have so many angles and points, but they didn’t overcomplicate things. They just wrote a lot of MacGuffin-type situations. This plot point is introduced, and then this one, and things just steamroll. But it’s never distracting. It just is the next step.

The action scenes are frequent and effective for the film—some nice high-speed car chase scenes. Random shootouts with Jones getting the crap kicked out of him. Also, some high-tension building to building grappling hook stunts. Let’s not forget to mention that flying car sequence towards the end, too. Impressive, if not ludicrous. Fast and the Furious before that was even a thing. The final brawl between Ving and Jones is pretty badass and is a solid fistfight for the finale. It’s no They Live, but it works.

Let’s take a second to talk about the car. Apparently, this was based on a Canadian-designed prototype for a car that was never mass-produced. So this film had the only working version of a car that was designed but never saw the light of day. It makes sense, as the car was nearly impossible to see from everything I read. It does look eerily similar to Kit from Knight Rider, though—at least in its color scheme. It’s not pretty and looks very much like something thrown together haphazardly from the 80s, but it’s a lot of fun to watch on screen.

This definitely has moments that feel like Escape From New York, but some of its execution feels similar to the previously mentioned Knight Rider. Maybe a pinch of Tom Selleck’s Runaway as well. A few spots looked like Terminator 2 and Back To The Future filming locations. If you watch it, you will recognize them as well most likely.

The Blu-Ray can be found on Kino Lorber’s website, where they just had the film as part of their fall sale—a welcome addition to an afternoon of lower-budget Sci-Fi films.