TV Reviews : ‘Murder by Moonlight’: More Camp Might Improve It

Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Rita Hayworth in “Gilda,” Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch”--all had their grand entrances. None of these legends, though, ever had an entrance quite as remarkable as Brigitte Nielsen’s in the TV movie “Murder by Moonlight,” airing tonight at 9 on Channels 2 and 8.

Amazon-proportioned Brigitte (“Gitte” to her friends and tattoo partners) first steps into camera view overdressed in a clunky space suit and helmet. Stripping off the outer-space hardware in an airlock, however, she’s quickly revealed to be wearing nothing more underneath than a saucy red bustier--with the emphasis on bust, since that’s what nimble director Michael Lindsay-Hogg offers a close-up of before he gets around to showing us her face.

Low-camp fans couldn’t ask for a more promising opening than that. But it’s all downhill from there for this intermittently smirk-filled sci-fi murder mystery set in 2015, which has only about a dozen funny lines to help redeem its rampant feeble-mindedness. The best that can be said for “Moonlight,” which isn’t much, is that at least everyone involved seems to have been in on the joke--perhaps, just maybe, even Nielsen.

She stars as your basic blond, six-foot-plus, femme fatale NASA cop, sent to the moon to investigate a murder in a mining colony operated by Americans in Soviet territory. There, she will butt heads--and inevitably fall for--the equally blond Soviet investigator, Julian Sands, whose exaggerated Russkie cool seems designed to make Nielsen’s natural ice-goddess presence seem lava-like by comparison.

Watching these two coldly make eyes at each other, it’s easy to picture them starting a whole Aryan planet full of fair-haired kids with bad accents.