Sunday 9 December 2018

The Day Time Ended (1979)



Not only does the title The Day Time Ended bear no relation to the events on screen, the events themselves often bear no relation to the other events in the film.

The plot, as far as I discern, sees a family moving into their new solar-powered home in the middles of the desert. The bad news is their house in right in the centre of some sort of time vortex. Beyond that, God only knows. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is clearly a big influence that the filmmakers were trying to cash in on, with cute kids, time travel, inexplicable events and alien abductions. The script feels like somebody wrote down every sci-fi trope they could think of, put them into a hat and drew them out one by one, regardless of how much sense they made.

In the right hands - or even the wrong hands - this sort of approach can work, with a delirious energy meaning never a dull moment for the viewer. Director John "Bud" Cardos had previously made some low budget exploitation gems such as nature-on-the-rampage classic Kingdom of the Spiders, but he can't make this mess come to life. The special effects are cheap and cheesy, especially the stop-motion aliens, and at least provide a distraction from the wooden human characters.

The finale is left open-ended and if anything feels like this is a pilot for a TV show that, thankfully, never went anywhere.



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