Search - The Day Time Ended on DVD

A Cult Movie Has Been Ruined By The Poor Transfer To DVD

Ian Mitchell | East Sussex United Kingdom | 01/12/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The quality of this DVD is worse than my orignal 10 year old VHS tape. Movement of characters across the screen is jerky, sound is PCM 48Khz 16bit sick stereo (dialogue on left channel, music on right). Picture format is 4:3 Fullframe.
You might almost think you were watching a Pirate / Bootleg copy it is SO BAD!"

Film is GREAT, DVD transfer SUXs!

W. Stuart | San Diego, california United States | 12/22/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I've always loved this movie and have it on a DVD by Brentwood but i wanted a better copy so i bought this- the print looks about the same (and like my brentwood DVD not in widescreen)and the soundtrack seems to be in stereo but the DVD transfer BLOWS! it has odd vert lines on any movement VERY ANNOYING! wait for a better DVD ver or get a vhs copy. This is going back."

With a bit of a mind flip, you're into the time slip...

cookieman108 | Inside the jar... | 01/28/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"`Their lives became a living hell...when past, present and future collided!' That's the tagline used on the DVD case for The Day Time Ended aka Earth's Final Fury aka Vortex aka Time Warp (1980). I knew how they felt for 90 minutes, watching this film (the DVD case states approximately 90 minutes, but it was more like 70 to 75 minutes)...okay, maybe it wasn't that bad, but you'd think a film credited with four writers could at least have made sense...rarely have I seen a film so lacking in direction or plot...directed by John `Bud' Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Outlaw of Gor), the film stars Jim Davis (you may remember him as Jock Ewing on TV's Dallas), Dorothy Malone (Peyton Place), Natasha Ryan (Kingdom of the Spiders, The Amityville Horror), Marcy Lafferty, who was once married to William Shatner, both of whom appeared in 1977's Kingdom of the Spiders, along with the above mentioned Ryan, Scott C. Kolden (Sigmund and the Sea Monsters), and Christopher Mitchum (American Commandos, Magic Kid), son of actor Robert Mitchum (I'll saw one thing about Chris is that looking at his credits of low budget, schlocky B films, it doesn't look like he relied on nepotism to get good roles).

The film opens with a shot of outer space, and voice over I couldn't hear because of the accompanying music (poor sound editing), and also the sound quality on this DVD was very shoddy. This goes on for like three minutes, and the gist of it is there's a cosmic phenomena, three super novas colliding at once, and now, some many years later, the effects are reaching the planet Earth...the bulk of the film takes place in some southwestern desert, where patriarch Grant (Davis) has built a solar powered home (looking much like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's funky little domicile on Tantooine in the film Star Wars, only not as good), away from all the hustle and bustle. Next we witness Grant and his son-in-law Richard (Mitchum) picking up the rest of the family at the airport, including Grant's wife Ana (Malone), Grant's daughter and Richard's wife Beth (Lafferty), the granddaughter Jenny (Ryan), and Grant's son Steve (Kolden). The group returns to the ranch, and soon strange things begin happening in the form of strange green lights inside the house, light switches not working, furniture in disarray, etc. Also, they begin witnessing lights in the night sky, and even the occasion UFO zipping by...during the night even stranger phenomena begin occurring in the form of really bad CGI and even worse stop motion effects of hostile, misshapen creatures fighting each other in the corral, outside the house. Apparently the effects of the trinary supernova have torn a new one in the time/space continuum, effectively creating a localized vortex on Grant's property (at least that's what I could get, as the film wasn't as forthcoming as it should have been). What's an isolationist family to do? I suppose when the fickle forces of nature give you cosmic lemons, you make cosmic lemonade...

I suppose my biggest complaint with this film was its' confusing, muddled, and utterly pointless plot. It actually took an hour before the audience was let in on what was going on (this was done by the unceremonious dumping of a small but steaming pile of exposition on the audience, as Davis' character, the rural rancher, becomes Mr. Physics during an epiphanic moment when he realizes `we're in a time warp, a vortex, if you will'...later we're treated to a much larger pile as the daughter, who got sucked into the vortex, and later returns relating about as much lameness as I could stand)...prior to that, we were treated to a series of odd (mostly stupid), unrelated events that never really lead anywhere, or had much purpose. I did get the impression there may have been a good, original concept here, but it was obliterated within the execution. The special effects are about as good as one might expect within a low budget feature as this, the main bulk of it being stop motion effects with creatures looking much like those (only not as good) from scene in Star Wars, on the Millennium Falcon, where the characters were playing a chess-like game, and minor effects featuring obvious CGI/blue screen work. The direction was pretty awful, especially noticeable during the scenes where the characters were supposed to react to special effects to be added later. I could almost imagine how it went... `Okay, now act shocked and scared, as that empty space will be occupied by a horrible monster once we insert it during post production'...'okay, I was going for shocked and scared, not perplexed and moronic'. The acting was pretty shoddy, but then I would be more inclined to blame this on the script and the director, as the talent was probably as confused as I was with regards to what was supposed to be going on in the film. Also, I thought the ending to be sort of a cop out.

The quality of the full screen, pan and scan print on this DVD isn't great, but I've seen worse. The real problem lies within the craptacular transfer. The picture has a stuttering, jittery quality that occurs anytime there's movement on the screen. I've never witnessed this particular problem before, but it's incredibly annoying, and lasts through nearly the entire film. The audio's poor, and my player indicates it's PCM 48Khz. There are a couple of extras featuring a montage of trailers for this film, and three more including Laserblast (1978), Creepozoids (1987), and End of the World (1977), along with some Full Moon Entertainment promotional materials. Is this film a cult classic? I'd say more of an oddity...if you're looking for a real cult classic, check out Don Johnson in A Boy and His Dog (1975). Another thing, the DVD case listed this as being rated R, but that's obviously a mistake...PG would be more applicable.

Cookieman108
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Time Warp In The Mojave Desert

Erik North | San Gabriel, CA USA | 12/28/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Even though it is clearly made on a very low budget, I honorably disagree with the previous reviewer that THE DAY TIME ENDED is out-and-out junk. Far worse sci-fi films than this have been made on budgets fifty to a hundred times what it cost to make this film.The story involves a family (led by Jim Davis, Chris Mitchum, and Dorothy Malone) who have moved out to a solar-powered home in the Mojave Desert to escape the terrors of big-city crime in Los Angeles. When they get to their isolated home, however, they discover that it has been trashed. Initially, it is thought that motorcycle vandals were the cause. In fact, however, it is the result of a trinary supernova explosion that occurred two hundred years ago and whose effects are only being felt on Earth now. Alien beings and their accompanying UFO spacecraft have pulled the family and their house into a mysterious time/space warp, full of weird and sometimes terrifying phonomena. The coda finds the family venturing across the desert plains to a beautiful futuristic crystal city, with Davis intoning, "Maybe this was all meant to be."John 'Bud' Cardos, who directed the fine 1977 low-budget horror film KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, has set himself a very ambitious task to make a good sci-fi film on a very slim budget. This film's inspirations are clearly Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND; and while the special effects are, unsurprisingly, not up to the standards of those two masterful movies, I think they hold up pretty well. The stop-motion dinosaurs and monsters are fairly well done, as are the UFOs and the trinary nova explosions. Most fascinating for me was the eerie green pyramid that the family's youngest daughter (Natasha Ryan) sees, which may have been inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" (which provided part of the inspiration for 2001).THE DAY TIME ENDED may not qualify as a sci-fi masterpiece, but it certainly deserves to be rediscovered at the very least as a minor sci-fi gem. One can do far worse than this low-budget film that occasionally looks like a glossy big-budget venture."