Moontrap

Grant and Tanner are on a routine 1990 shuttle mission when they pick up signs of a huge body entering orbit. It is, in fact, a huge alien ship, but it’s adrift and caught in Earth’s gravity well. Grants suits up and spacewalks over to find some handy artifact they can take back to Earth. He finds a rupture in the hull, and a hard mechanical pod just larger than a basketball that looks like a beetle shell. Oh, and he also finds a dessicated human corpse. That’s all he can grab before orbital decay gets too dangerous.

Back on Earth, of course, it’s all kept hush-hush. The pod proves unopenable; the corpse is that of a human, but carbon-14 dating shows it to be 14,000 years old. And dust on both shows that, at one point, the ship was on the moon. The government liaison, Mr. Haskell, half-suspects that it’s all a hoax to up NASA’s funding, but it still gets filed under National Security.

As soon as everyone leaves the isolation room to discuss the find over a cup of coffee, the pod opens up, revealing a mechanical eye on a stalk and various metallic tentacles. It pulls apart the room until it constructs for itself a robot body made from computer components and the 14,000-year-old corpse. And because there’s no security outside or around the room hiding what could be the first extraterrestrial artifacts, it manages to leave the room and situate itself in one of the subbasements before security forces respond. —Coldfusionvideo.com