Every now and then a movie comes along that was so clearly assembled from a checklist of things that sell, you can almost picture the meeting. A John Carpenter screenplay? Put his name on the poster. A cool-looking supercar? Put that on the poster too. Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn? Recognisable, affordable, and none of them are going to hold up production with salary negotiations. Budget: three million. Expected return: whatever the video stores bring in after the theatrical run covers its costs. Everybody gets paid, nobody loses sleep.
For the uninitiated, Tommy Lee Jones plays a government-hired thief who stashes stolen evidence inside the Black Moon, a super-car which then gets stolen by Linda Hamilton and her professional car theft operation, run by Robert Vaughn in one of his patented silk-tie villain roles. The man has one expression, and it’s always chilling. Jones has 72 hours to get the tape back before FBI handler Bubba Smith makes his life very uncomfortable.
And the supporting cast is a veritable time capsule for anyone who spent time in the 80s. Lee Ving, the lead singer of Fear, William Sanderson, you know, Larry from Newhart, brother of Darryl and his other brother Darryl. Dan Shor, Keenan Wynn and Nick Cassavetes, son of John, who would one day direct The Notebook, but in 1986 was turning up in everything. Including The Wraith, the other 1986 movie that revolved around a cool car.
Carpenter wrote the original script early in his career when he was still an unknown with only Dark Star on his résumé. It was apparently the first screenplay he ever sold. The thing sat in development for years, until Carpenter was famous enough that studios were digging through his old filing cabinets looking for anything with his name on it. The same producers had already turned another early Carpenter script into The Philadelphia Experiment for New World, and that did well enough to justify another pass at the drawer.
For the most part, this film fell behind the video store shelves along with Runaway, Dreamscape, and a few other mid-tier 80s genre movies that hit and ran, but just didn’t hit hard enough to leave much of a dent.
Still, if the movie catches you just right, it’s a sweet ride. -Pop
Black Moon Rising arrived on Home Video this week in 1986, after a January 10th theatrical release.