IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 22 minutes of Dali time 3.7 from 538 cinemitizens
Having just inherited the vast Stanton fortune, Scott Brady descends on the Stanton Institute for Time Research to get his watch repaired. Brandishing KPIs he demands results! The lab coats there cannot even change the battery in his Rolex! Useless! If they cannot do better he will divert the funding to Weapons of Crap Destruction and start with Hollywood!
Whoa! Under that gun the Senior Scientist skips pages in the Time Traveller’s Manual and throws all the switches. ‘More power,’ Igor, the ever present assistant, cries and more power he gets from somewhere.
They get comfy and tune in the same television I had in grad school with endless horizontal rolling and showing nothing but very old, very tired reruns on the only channel it can receive. They watch about 30 minutes of the film excerpts from public domain stock footage of rubber dinosaurs, fake cowboys, playful cavemen, decent Republicans, forbearing Christians, and other forgotten pre-Fox News relics glimpsed briefly when the horizontal roll pauses. ‘Comfy,’ well there is only one chair. Guess who occupies it? Yes, Scott Bully.
The time lab where they watch television. Note the sunken floor.
The other notable accoutrement of the lab is an elevator that descends two steps to the sunken floor of the lab. Brady makes ostentatious use of it when he comes to crack the eggheads. Later, as below, when he is running for his life, he skips the elevator and uses the steps. Makes sense, but why is it there in the first place. We’ll never know.
Well Brady is impressed that the time travel lab seems to travel in time, but where is the dollar in the past? Let’s try the future. Hmmmm, but it is his dime so Senior and Igor with the requisite female on screaming duty comply. They go looking for Yvette Mimieux and the Eloi in the future. The fraternity brothers cheered.
Whooska, and they flit through time to…. some time. There they find a spaceship and Blue Poles, yes, Slavs standing on plinths. See, it’s like this. Bully Brady, Senior Scientist, Igor, and Screamer are standing in their sparsely furnished time lab blaming each other for forgetting to order Indian takeaway before launching into the future, when the men in blue… No, wait, that is the blue men kick in the door and take them away at finger point. Thereafter the blue men, showing their superiority, climb on top of the plinths to lecture them. Well, it makes as much sense as some of the training seminars I have had.
Then in another empty room they encounter the rest of the Blue Poles who recite gibberish from the script about being in the middle of a war.
Here was Bully Brady’s chance at some technology transfer for his weapons industry. But does he take it? No, he is too busying plastering his remaining hair to his forehead to make a deal, grab a phaser, steal a super secret blue print pinned to the notice board, slip a plinth in his pocket, or anything.
Seeing how useless these travellers are, the Blue Poles send them back to the Time Shed amid a hail of sound effects. Once there levers are levered and switches switched, though what the power source would be out there is unknown to them and to us. They go whirring back to 1967 hairstyles.
But wait, Bully Brady annihilates himself. That was a nice touch, but completely incomprehensible. In short, he played chicken with himself and lost. That was one ka-boom we all cheered.
This film is proof that things can always get worse. After a run B films rated below 5.0 comes this entry. The director, writer, producer David Hewitt came to this movie after his remarkable ‘Monsters Crash the Pajama Party’ (1965) in his own search for the bottom of the barrel. This latter film has proven illusive on the inter-web but the fraternity brothers continue the search during their conscious hours.
Hewitt’s efforts are ably assisted by Scott Brady who exudes bad will with a thuggish air few could equal. He is perfectly loathsome but waiting a long time to see him get his comeuppance was boring. The direction seems to have consisted mostly of Brady turning his head to the left, and then… to the right. Wow! That’s entertainment, not. Was he rolling his brain into the socket, watching a tennis match, feeling water in the inner ear, or doing as he was directed? Decide now!
For most of the cast this is the single entry on their IMDb vitae. The fraternity brothers had no trouble predicting that.
The production values are well below Dr Who. Indeed a Dalek or two would have livened up the otherwise dead script. Moreover, the 1967 Tardis was a luxury craft compared to this Time Shed.
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