Il giorno in cui finì il tempo

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.

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.

"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.

Yes, The Day Time Ended does indeed lent itself to many possibilities. Unfortunately, they tried to fit all of them into this one film, and yet despite the many different ideas, creatures, and going on present, there really isn't much of a story to speak of. It's as though the folks behind The Day Time Ended were making these things up as they went along. Some of the acting is fine, while some of it was poorly executed. The special effects weren't really all that effective. The story just didn't have any cohesion and as such never gain ed any momentum to draw the viewer in. Despite the efforts of some of the players here it just didn't amount to enough to recommend.