Aside from a few narrative inconsistencies I'm still puzzling over, The Dark Side of the Moon is an effective, atmospheric, and well-paced sci-fi/horror film with strong performances and a wild narrative that ties together space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, and Satan (and a sexy robot). Sometimes the film's low budget is visible onscreen, but director D.J. Webster mostly does a lot with a little, and the screenplay by twin brothers Carey and Chad Hayes is pretty solid. (The Hayes brothers wrote several low-budget movies for years afterward until hitting the big time with the Conjuring franchise.)
Surprisingly, Dark Side is Webster's only film as director, though he also made several music videos. His most well-known work in this medium is probably 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," but he also directed videos for The Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, En Vogue, Amy Grant (in her brief secular phase), The Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson, Restless Heart, Nanci Griffith, Pam Tillis, Little Texas, and one-hit wonders Calloway. I can't find any credits past 1996 (his incomplete imdb page ends in 1993), and I have no idea what he's doing now. Internet searches haven't been any help, unless he became an actual dance music DJ or a biopharmaceutical communications professional, but I'm suspecting these are different D.J. Websters. The D.J. Webster mystery continues. (Podcast idea: Finding D.J. Webster. Get on it, people. I probably won't listen to it, but I'll read a synopsis.)
The Dark Side of the Moon takes place in the terrifying future of 2022. In these days of future past, NASA stopped operating in 1992. It's unclear whether American space travel has been privatized, partially privatized, or simply moved to a different agency. We need answers, Hayes bros. Anyway, our spaceship is operated by a maintenance crew sent out to do some upkeep on a nuclear-armed satellite. Most of this maintenance is automated (but still extremely dangerous), so the mostly sausage party crew consists of two pilots, a jarhead defense and security guy, a research scientist (she's a woman, so she also makes the coffee and tea and endures sexual harassment from at least two of the dudes; don't they know it's 2022?), a doctor, a ship expert and representative of the company who built it, and the ship's inexplicably sexy humanoid robot, who has eyeliner, bright-red lipstick, and a form-fitting S&M-lite outfit possibly made of latex or leather. There must be some technological reason for this. I have to give the spaceship creators the benefit of the doubt here. It's the high-tech future of two years ago. I'm a man of the present. I don't have their science to understand why the robot has to be sexy.
Playing this crew is a strong cast of mostly veteran character actors. "Hey, it's that guy from all those things," you'll say to yourself about two-thirds of these people. Robert Sampson plays veteran pilot Flynn Harding (a quality pilot name). Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen (including The Rockford Files) made between the mid-'50s and 2020 (the year of his death), and his movie credits include Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and Robot Jox. Younger co-pilot Giles Stewart is played by Will Bledsoe, who had a much shorter acting career but has some spectacularly blow-dried hair that's a bit '80s Brian Bosworth if he didn't shave the sides. Good to know there are blow-driers in space. The jarhead security/defense guy, Philip Jennings, is played by Miami Vice regular John Diehl, whose other credits include Escape from New York, Stripes, National Lampoon's Vacation, the egg-yolk-sucking prostitute killer in Angel, D.C. Cab, Gettysburg, G. Gordon Liddy in Nixon, Jurassic Park III, and Wim Wenders' The End of Violence and Land of Plenty. Huge-glasses-wearer Joe Turkel plays ship expert Paxton Warner. Turkel's first film role was in 1949, and he appeared in several cult classics for Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, and, on three occasions, Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining). He was also in Blade Runner and episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Kojak, Fantasy Island, Tales from the Darkside, and Miami Vice. He died in 2022. Ship doctor Dreyfuss Steiner is played by Alan Blumenfeld. If Robert Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen, Blumenfeld was in at least two. To prevent this paragraph from devolving further into a list of credits, I will simply direct the curious to seek out Blumenfeld's imdb page. The guy's been in everything.
The two women in the cast, like the blow-dried Will Bledsoe, had shorter showbiz careers. Wendy MacDonald plays scientist Alex McInny. She was in several erotic thrillers, low-budget action movies, and TV movies in the late '80s and '90s before quitting the business. I reviewed her second movie, the slasher movie Blood Frenzy, on this site several years ago. That one was made by porn director Hal Freeman, who was then being targeted by the state of California in '87 in an initially successful but ultimately failed attempt by the state to destroy the adult film industry using Freeman as the scapegoat/precedent. He decided to make a horror movie while being prevented from directing porn. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, and he went back to crankin' out the smut. But I digress. Sexy robot Lesli is played by Camilla More, who was in a Doublemint gum commercial and the fourth Friday the 13th movie with her twin sister Carey, the second twin named Carey to be connected to this film. Both sisters also played the same character on Days of Our Lives, Camilla from 1986-'87, Carey from '87-'88.
We eventually discover lots of entertaining mumbo jumbo about the connections between space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, 666, and Satan's plan to steal heaven from God, but first, our blow-dried hero Giles has to convince Paxton to give him access to the sexy robot, who functions as a sort of distractingly attractive World Wide Web/Wikipedia/Ask Jeeves/spaceship owner's manual. The robot was supposed to be accessible to the entire crew, but Paxton added a security feature giving him sole access. It's heavily implied that Paxton designed the robot, and since we already know Paxton was creeping on Alex, we finally understand why the robot is so sexy. It's because Paxton is a dirty old man. I won't spoil any of the other reveals in case you check this one out, but I will tell you that we get lots of demonic possession in space, which is always fun.
Some of the spaceship's interiors look a bit low-rent, but the exterior shots (which I'm guessing are of handcrafted miniatures) have a suitably awe-inspiring visual presence. The characters and their relations to each other have a natural and lived-in feel, the story remains compelling throughout the running time, and the narrative inconsistencies didn't bother me much, though I'm not someone who really cares about that anyway. I think of each movie as its own dream, with its own dream logic (yes, even The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal).
The Dark Side of the Moon is a solid, enjoyable movie about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle, and we all need a little of this kind of thing in our lives, don't we? Think about how much better the world would be if we had five movies a year about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle instead of all that superhero shit. I had a good time with this one.
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