Note: This review was published on Epinions. I'm reposting it here with some modification.
I'm always looking for a really bad movie to review. (Yes, I've seen Plan 9 From Outer Space.) I think part of it is that I like to
punish myself. It's as if I don't deserve to watch good movies all the
time. Maybe I was inspired by the first-review contests that Epinions
used to have. (Many of these really bad movies had never been reviewed
before.) I had also always wanted to see Epinions put up a best and worst list
for each category. No way to prepare for that like reviewing every
one-star movie out there.
What do you do if you are a fellow
sadist like me and want to review really bad movies? If you have access
to any sort of on-demand service and they have a free section, this is
the best place to look for one-star movies. This is how I found The Time Guardian. I truly wish I could just tell you to run in the other
direction if you ever see this movie, but you deserve more. If you are a
fellow movie-watching sadist, you deserve to know what you're getting
into.
At the very least, it looked interesting. A city from far
in the future is traveling through time to escape some evil cyborgs.
The movie doesn't give a lot of detail about the cyborgs. We know only
that they want some sort of power source from the human city. We're
also led to believe that this is the last human city left. Apparently,
all the others have been destroyed.
Two people, one being a woman
played by Carrie Fisher, are sent ahead to prepare the area for the
city's arrival, but the two people don't seem to do much other than get
into fights and get hurt. Carrie Fisher's character spends most of her
time in the present resting from having a large sphere land on her. The
guy that she's sent back gets some heavy machinery to move rock. It's
not clear exactly what he's doing, but I guess it's what he needs to do.
This
leads to one of the more confusing scenes. We see the machine moving
rock with some random people helping. It's not clear where the people
came from or why they're helping. The movie uses music and camera angle
to make it seem more suspenseful than moving rock usually seems to be.
I expected something interesting to happen. Maybe have a cyborg pop
out or something. Nothing. Just cut to the next scene.
The use
of time travel is the movie is also a little confusing. There's little
talk of the repercussions of time travel, for starters. Plus, it's not
clear how long this technology has been in use by humans. The movie
opens somewhere in the 43rd century or something, but have the humans
come from beyond that? Have they been bouncing around in time or have
they been working their way back in time? Different parts of the movie
seem to indicate different things.
The movie looks like it was
written and directed by a 3-year-old child. Half way through the movie,
it still felt like they were setting it up. It took me another quarter
of the way through to realize that that was the movie. It's one long
narrative with a battle scene on either end.
I think the only
place you'll find this is in the free section of On Demand. The reason
that Comcast won't charge for this crap is that people would be asking
for their money back and rightfully so. It looks like you can buy a used VHS copy, as the link above would indicate. Netflix doesn't have it
listed and IMDb doesn't have any listings for any releases. I think the
only reason it's listed on IMDb is that it is a movie that was
released, thus requiring an entry.
Don't bother watching this movie. It's overpriced at free.
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