Nice Night For A Moon Beast

High on a mountain in the Arizona desert, a man, trying to get him some ’o that sweet Southwest skank action, is struck in the facial quadrant by a meteorite fragment while watching a meteor shower caused by a comet slamming into the moon and bouncing off in Earth’s direction. NASA refers to this as “lunar pinball.” Suffice to say, though, a real mood bringer-downer. Thus is the plot architecture if the 1976 cheesy sci-fi movie, Track of the Moon Beast.

Over the following days, he’s prone to headaches and blacking out. All this without the assistance of sweet alcohol. His new girlfriend tells her boyfriend’s best friend, a college professor called John Longbow (great porn name). Longbow looks like a Native American version of Bobby Goldsboro and got his name, not from the gals he used to date, but rather his adept skill with the bow and arrow.

At night when the moon’s anointing rays light up the maniac switchboard in the meteor man’s head, he’s turned into a huge lizard-esque creature with three things on his mind: die, kill, bleed. By morning the man is “normal” again, but still having health issues. The cops don’t know dick about lunar metamorphosis as they fumble around looking for a hypothesized animal with a taste for human blood.

Several more nighttime killings and it’s soon apparent who’s doing all the die-kill-bleed. The police finally corner lizard/meteor man and fire bullets into his scaly hide. Like that’s gonna work. Longbow, who earlier had prudently fashioned an arrowhead out of the fallen meteor, fires one off into L-Man’s chest. The counteracting polarities of the magnetically-charged minerals causes the TV screen to flash orange and black, while Lizzy stands there and wiggles his claw arms.

This special effect is meant to indicate Longbow’s positive efforts in bringing the monster’s illegal activities to a grinding halt. This also leaves the door wide open for John’s other longbow to nail his new target, the still screaming and freshly-single girlfriend. It’ll help with closure.