Viaggio al centro del tempo

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME seals us into a dull room filled with dull people doing dull things. This is where we are doomed to stay, interrupted only by a few giant lizards and Lyle Waggoner.

This movie is boredom captured on film.

Few movies dare to hit us over the head so continually with utter nothingness. So little goes on that time itself stops, ceases to be, ends forever. Our hearts seem to shrivel with our brains as we watch.

Watch this only if you have lost all reason to live, or if you are among the teeming throng of Lyle Waggoner fanatics.

Otherwise, your soul shall die...

This is definitely one for the books - the book being "Bad movies to laugh and point at." It's simply an endless fountain of badness; bad acting, writing, plot, sets, dialog, special effects - and how wonderful to find all that in one place.

It's quite possible this movie has some redeeming features but who really cares?

Oh an the best line from any movie ever!

Says the handsome, plastic looking scientist guy to the scientist girl in the impossible heels:

"You're very pretty. For a girl."

After that - how can you not love this marvelous mess?

Low-budget romp through the backwaters of time and space. The distant past and far-off future collide in what amounts to a fiery blast furnace of ideas and images. A trio of scientists, on the threshold of a major breakthrough in time travel, race against the clock and a funding cut. Stanton, the main source of cash, played by a blustery Scott Brady, behaves like an ignoramus. He doesn't see a profit margin in such an endeavor. At first glance, this remake of A.I.P.'s The Time Travelers, would appear to be a poor relation. Not so fast. I think there are some good ideas spinning around here. You might notice that Star Trek helped themselves to a few. One plot device, involving a time-displacement and frozen duplicates of the main players in a conference room, was lifted for "Wink of an Eye." And the dark and minimalist set for the alien leader must have inspired "The Empath." Any takers? The one love scene, strangely, involves a time travel limerick and a lengthy kiss. Uncomfortable. The mutant attack has an Andy Warhol feel to it. Abstract. Cockeyed. Out of whack. The door to the lab breaks into quarters when opened. Cool effect. Even stranger is the small elevator that takes Stanton down four feet, when he could have easily walked down the four steps on his own. A very quick shot of the infamous bat-rat-spider-crab from Angry Red Planet, a previous writing credit of the director, is a shout out to that film's director. The opening credits reveal time pieces from the past. Good touch. So where's the original flick. Put it out on DVD now. Let's compare. The sands of the hour glass are running out. At warp speed.

As I understand it, Ib Melchior and Dave Hewitt had a falling out over 1964's The Time Travelers. Both are credited with coming up with the story, but Hewitt left the production and Melchior wrote the screenplay and directed this little sci-fi B-film classic himself. Hewitt wrote his own version of the movie and later directed it as 1967's Journey to the Center of Time, making just a slightly different version. I can't remember ever seeing what is essentially a remake arrive just three years after the first movie's release. But then again, both films were grist for drive-ins where few people probably noticed the similarities. These movies had me scratching my head wondering if I had seen it before on TV where, after repeated viewings, I was able to make the connection between the two films.

Scott Brady is the star and villain of Journey To The Center Of Time, a rather cheaply made science fiction work that compromised mostly of one set and a bunch movie clips to show the past and future on planet earth. Brady is a rich industrialist who wants to shut down an experimental lab where scientists Anthony Eisley, Gigi Perreau, and Abraham Sofaer are working on time experiments. Brady thinks the experiments are a waste of time and his money.

So imagine when things go a bit haywire and Brady finds himself on a rapid journey to our distant past and distant future with the others.

This independent film was apparently something none of the major studios would touch. The usual time travel conundrums are here and the players give rather dispirited performances like they were anxious their salary checks wouldn't clear.

Not the best of the genre, not even close.