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.