Moon Crash (2022) Review

Less than a week after The Asylum gave us Dracula: The Original Living Vampire they’re back with Moon Crash. And while it’s an obvious cash in on Moonfall, it’s also another in a long line of films they’ve done on this theme, Meteor Moon, Asteroid-a-Geddon, Collision Earth, etc. Can they use that experience to deliver a fun mockbuster, or is it just a rehash of what’s come before?

Moon Crash is set far enough into the future that we’ve established a mining operation on the moon, but not so far that anything on Earth looks different than it does today. And people act the same as they do today as well. For the sake of a bigger bonus, the drilling company’s management insists on running the drill at full power, despite the operator’s concerns. Almost immediately, they hit a major fault line and crack the Moon in two.

Back on Earth, Steve (Tyler Christopher, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives) the head of the aeronautics company that got the miners up there and his ex, Amanda (Pauline Egan, Murder, She Baked: A Chocolate Chip Cookie Mystery, Delinquent) must find a way to work with Steve’s brother Logan (Jamison Jones, The Wretched, Hollywood Homicide) and the other survivors on the Moon to stop the largest fragment from reaching Earth, which it’s scheduled to do in twelve hours.

If this sounds less like a low budget version of Roland Emmerich’s forthcoming epic and more like yet another version of the films I mentioned earlier, you’re right. That’s probably because Joe Roche, who co-wrote Moon Crash with Lauren Pritchard (Planet Dune, Robot Apocalypse), also wrote Meteor Moon and Collision Earth. They simply made a few small changes here and there, management hired Jeremy London (Demigod, Mississippi River Sharks) instead of Eric Roberts to play General Madden and handed the project off to director Noah Luke (Jungle Run).

Unfortunately, while he was able to make something fast-paced and fun out of that film’s rather original plot, there’s not much he can do with Moon Crash. Anyone who makes a habit of watching films from The Asylum, or cheap disaster movies in general, will be incredibly familiar with the material, and it moves at a glacial pace. There’s only brief bursts of action and CGI destruction amidst oceans of talk.

Everything just plods along with characters spouting loads of technobabble while looking worried and occasionally throwing themselves around trying to convince us there’s been another meteorite impact. As a result, Moon Crash never builds up momentum or excitement. Similarly, there’s no real tension either because every time something starts to build, the script reverts back to a couple of people talking, and the only danger is of the audience falling asleep.

What effects we get in Moon Crash are mostly decent at least. The miniatures of the mining base looked fairly good and the footage of the spaceship were mostly convincing. The scenes of chunks of the Moon hitting Earth were a mixed bag, however. Several of the scenes of the debris heading toward Earth looked familiar and, like much of the script, were scavenged from other films.

With several of The Asylum’s recent films actually being enjoyable, I had high hopes that teaming the director of Jungle Run and the writer of Devil’s Triangle would produce something fun. But Moon Crash’s recycled script has all the faults of their older films and very few of the things that have helped their more recent output.

The Asylum has made Moon Crash available on multiple digital platforms. You can check their website or Facebook page for more information.

Where to watch Moon Crash