Friday Night at the Home Drive-in: Track of the Moon Beast (1976) by #RichardAshe w/ #ChaseCordell #LeighDrake #PatrickWright "The Rising Moon Creates A Monster!" #Horror #SciFi #NotQuiteClassicCinema pic.twitter.com/rmdNpVtJ84
— Angus Kohm (@AngusKohm) November 2, 2019
This is part two of a Home Drive-In On The Road mini-series.
As stated in last week’s post, when travelling, I can’t bring my library of DVDs, Blu-rays and VHS tapes with me. Sometimes I bring a handful of carefully selected titles, especially if I know I’m going to be staying in a place with a DVD player. If it’s a longer trip, with more unknown stops; if I’m crossing a border, where overzealous customs agents may decide to seize things; or if I just need to travel light, I don’t want to bring a bunch of nice, expensive, individual DVDs and Blu-rays. Instead, I’ll grab 2 or 3 discs from a cheap, public domain DVD set, each one usually containing about four movies. The quality of the prints is often bad, and the titles are not necessarily top drawer, and often I’ve seen several of them in the past, but if something bad were to happen, and I lost these discs, it would not be a big deal. They are also light and skinny and can easily be slipped into a full backpack, suitcase, or laptop bag.
Track of the Moon Beast (1976) was on one the public domain discs I carried with me on my recent trip. I had seen it years before, but couldn’t remember it well at all. It turns out that it’s an old fashioned science fiction B-movie, kind of like the ones I used to see on Not Quite Classic Theatre back in the ’80s. It’s ten or twenty years more recent, and several degrees shoddier than those older movies, but the story/concept is not that far off. It goes something like this: a man gets a fragment of a meteor lodged in his brain, and begins to transform into a hideous moon-beast that terrorizes the local area. Scientists and other experts theorize, and make reference to local legends from the indigenous community (yes, it seems that this exact same thing has happened in the past).
The movie gets a 2.3 on the imdb, and is generally lambasted by critics (and anyone else who discusses it). I found it to be charmingly fun in a way that only a great bad movie can be. It’s perfect late night viewing at the Away From Home Drive-in, and 100% Certified #NotQuiteClassicCinema.
