Review by Oliver Longden
The Day Time Ended is a tantalising name for a movie, but when you spend a lot of time watching old science fiction and horror movies you quickly learn not to get sucked in by a snappy title. As Troma have amply demonstrated over the years, taking a really awful film and calling it something like Surf Nazis Must Die or A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell is all part of the dark art of film marketing. If your film sucks, then a good title may be the difference between failing miserably and picking up a bunch of rentals from people in the video store who just can’t resist the appeal of the name. The Day Time Ended had been previously titled Earth’s Final Fury and Vortex, and that should set further alarm bells ringing.
The Day Time Ended is a re-release of a 1979 independent family sci-fi movie made for a very modest budget in the middle of the desert. The print quality is perfectly acceptable but the bonus features (some trailers for other Full Moon releases) aren’t going to set the world on fire. It tells the story of the Williams family, who have moved into a futuristic house powered entirely by solar panels. The family consists a pair of grandparents, their daughter-in-law and their two grandchildren. A separate plot follows their son as he tries to make his way to meet the family in their isolated residence. As the film begins we are told that an unprecedented trinary supernova has been detected and as the film progresses strange events unfold and time itself ceases to function in a linear fashion. The family witness marvels from other worlds and the distant past before finally being reunited in the future.
That all sounds quite exciting, and on paper The Day Time Ended is a great idea for a movie. A family set adrift in time and space coming into contact with all manner of wonders should make for a thrilling and exciting movie. UFOs zoom overhead engaged in an acrobatic dog fight. A childlike alien dances gracefully through the house, floating through the air and pirouetting across tables. Two giant alien beasts fight to the death like ancient dinosaurs. All of these things are great visual spectacles, even though the special effects are pretty basic. There’s a lot of old-school stop motion work in the film and it reminds me how much I prefer it to CGI for creature effects. There’s a ton of swishing, zapping light effects and it’s easy to overlook the fact that they’ve only got a handful of sets and a tiny patch of desert with which to work.
What really doesn’t work, however, is the human element. The Day Time Ended breaks one of the core rules of drama, that you should have conflict in every scene. It doesn’t have to be characters at each other’s throats, it doesn’t need to be literal violence, but without conflict there is no tension and without tension you might as well be watching a video explaining how to make an origami figure of someone bored out of their mind. Even the most saccharine Disney movies include a few anarchic characters who will hover at the periphery of the action and threaten to derail the musical numbers with their antics. The Williams family by comparison act like they’re in some sort of cult with the craggy faced family patriarch giving orders which are then instantly obeyed by the rest of the family. The only other adult male who might be expected to challenge his authority (this being 1979) is banished to a sub plot about trying to find some gas for his car.
The Williams family are (probably thanks to a brutal regimen of psychoactive drugs) numb observers of the strange events that befall them. When mighty starships flit across the sky they stare mutely up as if paying silent tribute to the really primo shit they have ingested. That a young child greets a dancing sprite with delight and interest is perhaps understandable; children are after all too stupid to fear the unknown or to try and kill it with sticks. That the grandmother also reacts with calmness suggests the handiwork of pharmacology. When I saw the titanic battle between the two alien monsters I was surprised to find myself rooting for the herbivorous looking creature over the vicious looking predator. I was surprised because it was the first time in the entire film I had experienced any kind of emotion whatsoever and crucially it was the first time any serious conflict had been introduced. The Williams family are too homogeneous, they are too passive to evoke any sort of emotion at all.
What The Day Time Ended is crying out for is some kind of Charlton Heston figure, someone who is angry about all the strange things that are happening, someone who wants to find the aliens responsible and punch them in the face. That character could be contrasted against someone who finds the whole experience quite marvellous and wants to explore the strange new vistas further. That would generate conflict and hence tension. As it is we are treated to a moderately imaginative low budget light show and a lot of surreal experiences that we are expected to swallow with the same bovine insouciance as the Williams family. It’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re watching the world’s most tedious psychotic episode. What the film really needs is for the men in white coats to appear at the end and start tasering the family indiscriminately before forcing them into the back of a van. I’d buy that for a dollar.
The Day Time Ended is out now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.