In short: The Day Time Ended (1979)

Richard Williams (Christopher Mitchum) has built a nice, ultra-modern desert home that looks rather 50s futurist to my eyes, so that he and his family and his grandparents (Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone) can live together. While Richard’s away – expect many a shot of Chris Mitchum driving around and looking confused later on – the rest of the family is hit by a variety of strange occurrences, starting with electrical problems, time slips, the appearance of strange aliens, and finally attacks by various monsters. It’s apparently all on account of a triple supernova 200 lightyears or so away. Eventually, the family will be transported to what may or may not be another planet, until the plot, such as it is, just stops.

And there really isn’t much “plot” The Day Time Ended, as directed by John “Bud” Cardos. Instead this Charles Band (in his Charles Band Productions phase) production is all about the weirdness and the effects work, particularly the weird effects work, so that the film often feels more like a show reel that demonstrates the good and the bad of state of the art (of the day) effects techniques when used on a low budget. Consequently, some of the effects shots look pretty shoddy and awkward, but for every bad back projection, there are half a dozen fun and pleasantly grotesque stop motion monsters, swirly laser stuff and inexplicable nonsense I don’t have the vocabulary to describe but certainly the capacity to enjoy quite a bit.

Also very much speaking to me is the film’s insistence on making not a lick of sense but getting by on just throwing strange visual stuff at its audience, hoping that some of it might stick to our brains enough we can at least pretend the talk about “time space rifts” (and so on) makes an sense whatsoever. If that plan works out, we might even take being transported to a strange new planet with no way home but only a not at all mind-control like feeling that things are gonna be okay in the next alien domed city as well in stride as the protagonists do at the non-sequitur ending of the film. “#lifegoals”, as the youth of today with their Internets and their weird beards would say.

Deliver Us from Evil (1973)

A group of men – certainly acquainted for quite some time, though nobody watching their interactions would call them “friends” exactly unless that watcher is very cynical indeed – are on a hiking and camping trip through rather spectacular mountainous terrain. There’s experienced professional guide Dixie (Jim Davis), a guy who really takes his nickname of “Cowboy” rather too seriously (George Kennedy) with his bullshit macho behaviour and the gun worn outside his pants for all the honest world to feel, Arnold Fleming (Charles Aidman) and his son Nick (Jan-Michael Vincent), the latter under a pall of the divorce blues, Al Zabrocki (Jack Weston) who is not built for this sort of thing, and accountant Steven Dennis (Bradford Dillman). No idea why these guys are spending so much time together, it’s not that they seem to like one another much, nor do they know a lot about each other’s lives.

Be that as it may, when they hear on the radio that a guy we’re not going to call D.B. Cooper/Loki has parachuted earthwards with his ill-gotten skyjacking money, and then witness someone indeed dropping down via parachute, they decide to go on the hunt for him. Cowboy takes that rather seriously indeed, shooting the unarmed man in the back while he’s trying to escape, killing him. Most of the group seem rather more interested in the guy’s monetary plunder than the fine points of murder and self defence, and decide to grab the money and carry it to civilisation. Or they could just keep it? Well, Dixie as well as the audience, know quite well where this is going to go.

This ABC Movie of the Week directed by Boris Sagal looks rather on the costlier side of 70s TV movies. Shot on location in Oregon, the wilderness survival parts of the narrative look really rather impressive, as if at least the people behind the camera were relishing the opportunity to shoot some visual treats for once. In front of the camera, you can find some rather authentically exhausted looking men (no women in this movie at all), the mostly middle-aged plus cast clearly going through a pretty exhausting time.

That’s rather useful for the performances, adding some authenticity to solid 70s TV style performances by most and softening the problems of a script that does tend to the verbally didactic when it comes to the lure of money, even though even an early 70s TV audience would not have been surprised by the whole greed and barbarity angle and certainly needn’t be told quite this bluntly. There are, however, also quiet character moments which also help make up for the too loud moments and provide the actors with some room to do their thing more subtly.

The survival adventure moments don’t just look impressive for a TV movie (or really any low budget film) but are also staged with quite a bit of flair, adding a quality of actual physical danger that makes the very quick mental breakdown of the characters more plausible, and really turns Deliver Us from Evil into a film well worth watching, even if it feels the need to hit you over the head with its message.