I’ve been on a bit of a 1970s cinema kick lately, having watched Close Encounters of a Third Kind (1977) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) in the theaters over the past few weeks. I find it amazing what these filmmakers were able to do in an era before CGI when all special effects were “practical” effects and had to be done in-camera. Having such huge limitations can force the filmmakers to be careful and creative with their storytelling, often using reaction shots and not showing what’s really going on, thus letting the audience fill in the gaps with their imagination. Famously, in an earlier movie, Jaws, because the mechanical shark kept of breaking down, Spielberg was forced to limit the shots where we see the shark at all, pretty much until the climax of the film, when we’ve already bought into the terror of this monstrous creature. 

And lately I’ve had so much good luck with the clips and presentations that I’ve been fed on my YouTube feed that I decided to give this 1979 movie (which is fully steaming on YouTube) a viewing. Here’s what the blurb in the description says: 

“Their lives became a living hell… When past, present and future collided! A Mind-Bending Vortex of Terror! Deep in the desert, a rural middle-class American family, is forced to endure inter-dimensional, extra-terrestrial terror when a UFO appears over their home, and is suddenly sucked into a time warp that transports it back to prehistoric times.”

Here’s the full movie:

My spoiler-laden review:

The special effects during the opening voice-over are cheap and completely in keeping with a low-budget 1970s film, but what the intro talks about is pretty deep concerning the nature of time… I can’t imagine how they’re going to show these concepts on screen. And then I was immediately pulled out of imagining something profound when the first live-action shot is a station-wagon driving down a desert road with the two male leads talking about the new home they built for their extended family. I think they spent the majority of their budget on the music and orchestration with the rest spent on the futuristic teepee/pyramid home in the desert.  The first hurtle that I had to imagine is that the two female leads, in their city duds, would be happy living so remotely in the open desert. Then there’s the cute but annoying little girl who is first to encounter the strange phenomenon in the desert, but who no one believes until it’s too late. 

Normally I wouldn’t bother y’all or waste your time with a bad movie, but this one is so bad that I found it interesting. I mean, like most horror movies, you have to wonder, why do the characters decide to do what they do? After the older couple encounters the lights in the desert why do they just go back inside and go to bed without telling anyone else in the house? Why does the filmmaker decide to show the miniature alien using stop-motion, kind of going against using reaction shots and leaving us to wonder what they’re seeing until we’re further into the movie. It probably doesn’t help that 20-minutes into the movie the audio gets out of sync from the video so that what you hear is a second or two after the action you see. 

I can’t really tell if it’s the acting or the writing that makes this such a clunker. It has a definite TV-movie feel for it, more than amateur student-film vibe. They spent money putting this together, but none of the reactions of the adults really makes sense, especially when they retreat to one of the bedrooms after “the bad thing” seems to be able to fly through windows and walls and freeze and disable bullets mid-flight. I really thought that grandpa was a goner. 

Speaking of grandpa, you might recognize the actor who plays Grant (grandpa), Jim Davis, from his role as “Jock Ewing” in he long running primetime soap opera Dallas. I’m guessing that over his long career playing in mostly westerns for Republic Pictures, that he probably hasn’t had to deal with playing against characters who are not there in the studio playing along side him (a la stop-motion characters), and this might help explain his just standing there reactions to monsters attaching each other and especially the very slow walk to the barn that eventually turns into a job when fleeing the monsters. I was looking for a shot where both he and one of the monsters were in frame and there was only one (that they looped twice)… yikes. Also, it sadly seems to fall to him to pontificate on everything, even when he has no idea what’s going on. Yeah, I thought he was a goner when the bad alien stopped his bullet.

The Day Time Ended- Grant Watches Monsters Fight
The Day Time Ended- Grant Watches Monsters Fight

The Oscar-winning actress who played Ana or Grandma, Dorothy Malone, was also a primetime soap opera alumnus, having spent four years (430 episodes!) playing Constance Mackenzie on Peyton Place. She won her best supporting actress award in 1956 for the role of Marylee Hadley in Written on the Wind. She might also be remembered for playing the friend of Sharon Stone’s character in 1992’s Basic Instinct. Looking over her very long career, acting in mostly westerns, dramas and soap operas, like her co-star Jim Davis, she probably had very few experiences playing scenes where the bad guys aren’t really there. Her character is weakly written and isn’t much help when things go sideways, except to scream and ask her clueless husband either “what’s going on?” Or “where are we going?” Her biography in IMDB concluded, “She will be remembered as one of those Hollywood stars who proved she had the talent but somehow got the short end of the stick when it came to quality films offered.” Yeah, that sounds about right.

The mom character, Beth, played by Marcy Lafferty, felt like the least cringy character who’s behaviors seemed to be the most understandable, except that she was always losing track of her cute but annoying daughter, Jenny(!). Mostly appearing in guest roles in TV series, she did play “Chief DiFalco” in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and was married to its star, William Shatner. from 1973 to 1996. 

What can I say about the dad character, played by Christopher Mitchum, son of famous actor Robert Mitchum, except that he clearly has his dad’s eyes and did what dads did in the 1970s, he was busy at work and arrived home after all the excitement was over (after crashing his car distracted by a UFO flyover). The long-ish hairstyles with the bangs in front of all three of the guys was very cringy and very 1970s. 

Both child actors started their careers very young and stopped acting not long after this film. The actor who played Steve, Scott Kolden, switched over to the music business, playing in several bands, running several recording studios and currently does audio for his local church. The actress who played Jenny(!), Natasha Ryan, played Hope Alice Williams from 1975 to 1980 (157 episodes) of the soap opera, Days of Our Lives. She also played Young Sybil in Sally Fields’ 1976 TV mini-series, Sybil. As a young actress she played in a lot of drama and horror roles. 

I don’t know why this popped up in my feed. I tend not to look at reviews in IMDB or on social media because it’s just too easy for people to hate on things anonymously online, but this one is pretty bad. As annoying as the little girl is, her reactions are generally understandable and consistent, the others not so much. One of the titles of one of the comments on IMDB was pretty funny: “Well, There Goes Another Hour and a Half of My Life.” Nailed it. But for someone who has wasted whole days scrolling through YouTube shorts and Facebook Reels, at least this one lead down an interesting rabbit hole making me ponder what the filmmakers were thinking when they put this one together, how sincere was the effort and was there any mind-altering chemicals involved in the writing process? 

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Tags: 1970s, good bad movies, sci fi, video Fridays, what were they thinking

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