Some big-name director, especially these days, would have seen the potential, injected some action and jeopardy, a good dose of awe and maybe more of a hint of a romance. You can’t help but feel this would be exactly the kind of enterprise that might get a more favourable hearing from a contemporary audience that’s sucked up even worse baloney in the multiverse and beyond.
Despite you might thinking concentration camps should not be used for superpower fiction, they were essential to the Magneto narrative in the X-Men Files, a set-up which also involved Captain America and Wolverine. So you can’t really show revulsion at attempts by a low-budget sci-fi B-picture to shoehorn in a concentration camp element. This doesn’t have the budget to “show” and must rely simply on “tell” to get over the essential story element. But we’re also bouncing around the time universe to the extent of the American Civil War and the French Revolution.
When the car of college kids Ellison (Jay Ramsay) and drum majorette Margie (Linda Jenkins) breaks down on a dirt road on the way to a football match, they end up confronting soldiers from the Civil War. The boy is shot and taken to hospital, but the girl disappears, plain vanishing, sniffer dogs finding the trail suddenly stops.
Journalist Jim (James Britton), investigating, discovers the Civil War link because Ellison has been shot by a bullet from that war and the uniform of the Civil War soldiers couldn’t be mere replicas worn by historical re-enactors because the uniform manufacturer went out of business in 1869. Jim hooks up with Margie’s sister, nightclub singer Sandy (Ann Pellegrino). Soon, thanks to a cop, they are on the trail of a time machine created by Professor Von Hauser (Jack Herman) who experimented on inmates in concentration camps, ageing young people and the reverse.
Jim and Sandy fall into the time machine’s orbit and are teleported to Von Hauser’s lab. The professor, a contemporary of Einstein, aims to go back in time and prevent his hero, Adolf Hitler, from committing suicide. Jim and Sandy are imprisoned until freed by an Egyptian serving girl, also teleported from a couple of millennia back, and the professor’s heinous plan is scuppered.
Occasionally, writer-director Russ Marker (Night Fright, 1967) allows himself a bit of visual leeway, a jackboot appears in the undergrowth to stamp out a cigarette, Jim and Sandy running down a hill vanish only to reappear seconds later in a different time zone, Margie practizing her moves while the car is being fixed.
But mostly, it’s dogged detective work, Jim helped along by people who favor the odd interpretation of events, a doctor who collects Civil War memorabilia, the cop whose outfit liberated the camp with the time machine. There’s enough mystery to keep you hooked and if you imagine the likes of Tom Hanks in Da Vinci Code mode uncovering this bizarre collection of facts you’d be far more inclined to go along with the presentation rather than treating it as the kind of baloney that had “cult” written all over it.
I’m not sure I agree with the “dreary pace” – while progress was stately to say the least, it took that length of time to establish the groundwork – and the second half is enlivened not so much by the professor defending Hitler as the look on his face when Jim delivers a coruscating critique on the Fuhrer. I’m always partial to scientists explaining their barmy notions and jargon – nobody balked at James Cameron’s “unobtainium” in Avatar (2009).
This is what comes of trawling YouTube in an idle moment.
Sure, it really is nothing more than two-star material but I enjoyed it more than I expected, and, these days, worse notions have been served up to unsuspecting audiences.
The Magnificent 60s 