 USA 1994 89m      Directed by: David Giancola. Starring: Matthew Bruch, Bonnie Pritchard, Peter Harrington, George Woodard, Michael J. Valentine, Jim Rohn, Ted Pendleton, Becky Fenton, Jack McGinnis, Martin Guigui, Peter Beckwith, Ilene Blackman, Daniel Nelson. Music by: Alice Damon Kinzie, Bill Kinzie.
Nick creates a time machine out of an airplane and a Commodore-64, and shows it to his friends by taking them 50 years into the future. Nick sells the technology to Gen-Corp, a high-tech firm run by J.K. Robertson, whose office is in the mezzanine of a shopping mall. Robertson, however, turns out to be Evil, and uses the time machine to plunder the future. With the lives of himself and his friends at stake, Nick needs to use his time machine to travel a week back in time and convince himself not to give the demo to Robertson.
|
This backyard movie has it all: time travel, a heroic cleft chin, an evil corporation, and stocky men in pink suits. The plot revolves around a man who builds a time machine out of a Cessna. He seems like a pretty normal, loser-like guy, so he obviously won't be too concerned time traveling "in style" with a DeLorean like some charmingly eccentric mad scientist (well, he actually has no choice, he can't drive). He takes a reporter and a pink suit man along for a ride into TV static and, ultimately, the future.
"The Future" really has almost nothing special in its appearance, other than a food court, which actually looks pretty normal. The closest thing to a special effect is a sign on a building claiming that it was built entirely out of recycled material. When the evil corporation takes over the time machine and does some vaguely bad thing with it (it is suggested that some futuristic was brought into the present), Our hero finds out that the "future" has turned into a local slum populated by a few hobos with guns (not lasers or anything just normal guns). How cyberpunk.
The movie continues with our hero trying to stop said corporation, romancing the girl, "engulfing her" with his chin-butt, getting unpresentably filthy on many occasions, doing irreparable damage to the space-time continuum, dying while unpresentably filthy, and allowing his alternate temporal self to continue this tradition. A showdown occurs between him and the evil CEO during the American Revolution with a Turtledovesque twist an anachronistic Uzi. The movie ends happily with him getting the girl and averting the whole situation.
The movie has a so-bad-it's-good quality that most older bad movies have, whereas new bad movies are just unwatchable. MST3K does a great sendup of it as well. The movie has its strengths such as some humor (especially in the shockingly accurate insight to a loser's lifestyle). It is also disturbingly prophetic in its vision of a future populated by kids who go everywhere with a cell-phone glued to their heads, oblivious to their surroundings.
Review by Der Himmelhase from the Internet Movie Database.