The Day Time Ended

As others have said, this is a film without a plot. It's one of those things where you put a family in a house in a remote place and start doing things to them. There are all sorts of things but nothing is ever explained. There is a big fight between two claymation monsters, but what do they have to do with the swirling lights that keep showing up, or the gunlike thing that points at people. We meet a couple of little creatures at the beginning but then we never see them again. And what does a triple-nova have to do with anything? The closing statement by grandpa is made without any knowledge of anything. And where are they going? And why them? And where is everyone else? I know it has something today with a time vortex, but the principle characters just bumble around. They don't really learn anything. Or do they? They don't bother to tell us.

Normally I laugh uproariously when a movie of this fashion comes out. I normally am not thrilled by dodgy cinematography, flubbed lines, and the like. However, this film, despite its flaws, was great!! I really don't know how I can explain it. There were a number of loose ends, with parts of the movie not making sense, yet with all of this, it still seemed to work! The little girl, Natasha Ryan, really carried the movie and another aspect I liked was the "Close Encounters" type of feel to the movie. Also, the aspect I enjoyed the most was when the family is re-united and they are upon the hill looking upon the fabulous City of Light at the end. There was such a spiritual feel to this scene. Very well done. There were flaws in this film, yet the special effects and the interesting plot seemed to give it a redeeming quality. 7/10 stars.

This is a movie with logic, no sense of cause and effect, and no real plot to speak of. Nothing here makes the slightest bit of sense, and the whole thing is like a hippie's acid trip. The last movie I saw that made this little sense was not only Japanese, but also intended to be surreal and experimental.

In this case however, I suspect the weirdness has less to do with any design or purpose than with none of the people involved having any idea what they were doing or even trying to do. It seems they just threw every idea that was within their limited budget on screen and hoped for the best. I suspect many of these ideas were the result of acid and peyote. The dialogue certainly sounds like something you would hear at an alternative health spa in the California desert.

That still doesn't explain how they found anyone willing to fund a project based on this screenplay, or a distributor willing to show the final product. But some things simply have no explanation, and this movie is certainly one of them. It should be seen - if it is seen at all- as a product of its time and place. And drugs. Lots of drugs.

Hurray, this film exists. I always remembered a film from my childhood that had two stop motion monsters fighting outside a house and there being strange lights. For years I wondered if it actually existed at all, and then I happened to get it on a pack of 50 films! I was not even trying to find this one, I just always wanted to see a couple of the films on this pack and figured a lot of extra movies would not hurt. So I ended up finding this one, and it only took the first time seeing the house in the middle of nowhere for me to recall the film I saw as a child.

The story in this one is just about nonexistent. People drive out to their solar powered ranch home and they come under attack from aliens and other weird things. Every description says they are transported to prehistoric times, but I have never seen the monsters this film features in any science books as dinosaurs. The aliens are sometimes friendly, sometimes play with your mind and sometimes fly around in vacuums that emit death rays.

The acting in this thing is kind of bad. The grandfather is okay at times, but his facial expressions do not fit the situation and the daughter's fretting was getting on my nerves. The grandmother looks like she is in genuine pain when she and the grandfather go to bed and the father trying to get back home is an obvious plot padding device for an extremely short film. To bad no one gets killed in this one.

So no gore, no nudity, basically no nothing. A bunch of cheap effects and a couple of interesting scenes here and there. There is a scene that reminded me of Kingdom of the Spiders, and it turns out there is a tie to that film. It also has a Laser Blast feel to it, but I could not find any ties to that film. The ending is way to happy, the whole thing has a television vibe to it as it almost seems to be a pilot for a television show that never made it beyond its pilot. Still, it is nice to know it exists as an actual movie and not just in my mind. A kid may enjoy it, I remember liking it, but that is because of the monsters that are not dinosaurs.

Have I been watching the same movie as some of the other reviewers here?

The first thing to realise before you sit down to watch this tedious plonker is that it is going to be a totally fruitless and unrewarding experience. The movie is plot free. Don't get me wrong - things happen - but nothing any of the characters do or say affects anything that happens throughout the whole movie. They just bob along, buffeted by a series of unexplained events that are totally outwith their control and they are powerless to change.

Basically what happens is this: after an interminably long montage of starscapes with a pontificating, portentous voice-over - always a dead giveaway that you are about to watch a REALLY bad SF movie - an all-American family move into their new home in the desert. Strange things start to happen, giant UFOs buzz the house, giant dinosaur things appear in the yard and try and eat each other, tiny UFOs invade the house (curiously these appear to have the ability to fly through windows without breaking them but have to use lasers to get through bedroom doors), tiny green people appear and tell the tiny UFOs to go away (bad UFO!). The house is mysteriously hurled into the future. Mom and little girl wander off and are lost in a swirling vortex of bad SFX. Rest of family are hurled even further into the future (?) get on their horses and ride off for no particular reason. Almost immediately they meet Mom, who hasn't died or been eaten by dinosaur things or learned to act, who says "it's all OK!". The end.

Seriously. That's it. Nothing is resolved. Nothing explained. No characters develop. Nothing.

Oh! I forgot the other "plotline". After dropping his family off at their new house, Dad has to go into the city to work. Dad decides to come home. Dad crashes car and finds horse. Dad rides home and witnesses firework display and vanishing house. Dad reacts to his entire family disappearing in front of his eyes with the same slack-jawed sonumbulistic non-acting with which he has shambled through the rest of the movie.

I assumed from the fact that Jim Brown gets to say "My God!" about 27 bejillion times through the course of the film and his "maybe it was meant to be... this is where we will make our new lives" speech at the end that in the end this was some sort of Christian allegory - and a bloody poor one at that.

Students of bad acting - and as a bad actor myself I watch out for this stuff - will enjoy Dorothy Malone's "awe" at the end. She looks like a fish having an orgasm. And since when has anyone in real life taken two steps forward to admire something in the distance? It happens all the time in bad movies. Think about the last time you saw a beautiful sunset. Did you take a step forward? "Oh look, the horizon is 20 miles away, the Sun is 93 million miles away I'll take a step forward to get a closer view." Cobblers!

This is a bad film. Most of it is boring. None of it makes any sense.