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.

The Day Time Ended is a late 70's sci-fi b-movie that tells the story of a family who find themselves dealing withseveral close encounters and who are (Complete with their house) ripped through space and time repeatedly.

Consisting of the usual quality cgi and some stop motion creatures the idea behind the movie is sound but the execution is pretty disastrous.

The plot is a mess and is more than slightly difficult to follow, for this reason caring about characters felt like a chore and the whole movie missed its mark badly.

I see what they were going for I truly do, but somewhere along the way somebody suffered with writers block and out popped this half baked effort.

The Good:

A couple of interesting ideas

The Bad:

Plot makes very little sense

Nothing flows

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Aliens can vaporize metal in a second but take several minutes to get through a wooden door

According to the opening credits for "The Day Time Ended", four writers are credited with developing the story and writing the screenplay. And none of them apparently were able to make the movie's story make much sense. I'm not sure even if you can call what's in the movie a story - much of the movie seems to be just a series of random supernatural events, and even the resolution at the end doesn't answer what the intents of the creators of the events are. Though the problems of the movie go beyond the bad script. Director John 'Bud' Cardos makes much of this theatrical movie have the feel of a made-for-TV movie of this period. Is there anything positive to say about this movie? Well, some of the special effects aren't bad for a movie that had a pittance of a budget. But I'd rather have a good script with bad special effects than a movie with good special effects and a bad script.

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.

"The Day Time Ended" is marked by excellent special effects, an interesting musical score, and some competent acting performances by Jim Davis as the patriarch and by child actress Natasha Ryan (Actually, Natasha wasn't just decent, she was excellent. The film would have benefited greatly if her young mug had been on screen more). Natasha gives a performance that brings to mind Angela Cartwright's persona on "Make Room For Daddy". The Angela Cartwright connection doesn't end there, as there is a strong "Lost in Space" influence to this flick. Dorothy Malone gives a June Lockhart-like spin to the matriarch character, and the family-clan-wandering-around in a lunar-like setting, with all manner of strangeness taking place around them, was right out of "Lost in Space". If you imagine their Aztec-influenced solar-powered house (w/matching barn) being a disk-shaped flying saucer instead, then you will get the "Lost in Space" image. Missing is the comic relief that Mr. Smith & The Robot brought to "Lost in Space".

Where this film went wrong -- it has some hokey dialogue, directing gaffs, and some poor editing. Marcy Lafferty (William Shatner's ex-wife) is given a particularly peculiar few lines of dialogue to recite near the end of the film. It is a moment that does real harm to the entire film, as it highlights the confused and muddled nature of the entire flick. Also, there are numerous scenes that seem like campy moments from a "Brady Bunch" episode, but they are not meant to be funny. For instance, Jenny getting out of bed to use the bathroom, Beth needing to sip on her wine while listening to Jenny deliver a line of dialogue, and the grandparents heading out into the desert night wearing bathrobes, are moments which would have fit in fine if this had been a campy comedy film.

By the way, the scene in which Jenny makes a trip to the bathroom epitomizes truly BAD filmmaking. First of all, the scene is completely unnecessary to the plot. Second of all, to be blunt -- it is a stupidly filmed scene, as the child manages to use the facilities in less than 10 seconds.

I notice that "Vortex" is an alternate title for "The Day Time Ended". "Vortex" is a more apt title for the flick -- "Lost in the Vortex" (or "Lost in Time") would have been an even better title, as it would have paid homage to "Lost in Space" while also paying homage to the "lost" nature of the screenplay (especially in the final act). The film brought to mind some better-made 1970s made-for-television sci-fi productions like "Logan's Run", "Isis", "Shazam", and "The Fantastic Journey" (the short-lived television series that Roddy McDowall appeared in).

I agree with IMDB reviewer CaptEcco who wrote of "The Day Time Ended" ending -- "It's like having a water balloon blow up in your hand before you've had the chance to throw it." This was almost a good sci-fi flick, instead, a few missteps turned it into a fair sci-fi flick.

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DVD Note: I viewed "The Day Time Ended" from a 4-film DVD collection titled "Time Travelers". I've already watched three of the four films (the sound and picture quality hasn't been good). "The Day Time Ended" is an OUTSTANDING film compared to the first two that I've watched: "Journey to the Center of Time" and "In the Year 2889". Those two were wretched on so many levels. The one film of the four that I've yet to see is the Peter Fonda directed "Idaho Transfer". I'm hoping it will be the best of the four.