Once upon a time, upstart producers fought their way up from the trenches with nothing but charm, good looks and a knack for finding the lowest common denominator in entertainment. Having associated with various aspiring effects artists, I learned about the Hard Knock Life they led before the Star Wars effects revolution. Some of them had contact with Charlie Band’s exploitation program. Band was particularly good at attracting star names. Christopher Lee wasn’t exactly hurting when he agreed to star in the inert Sci-fi groaner End of the World, with Sue Lyon, no less. The stop motion devotees I knew first checked in with Charlie for Laserblast, a low, low, limbo-stick low-concept show about a zombified JD killing folk with a ray gun from outer space. To create cameo appearances by a pair of alien lizard men it briefly employed a gaggle of effects guys associated with animator David Allen’s effects shop. Laserblast came out not long after Star Wars and snared kids looking for something to see after watching Luke Skywalker for the 20th time. Hoyt Yeatman told me he was suckered into Laserblast, and that the kid audience cheered its only really successful shot, an angle of a Star Wars sign being laser-exploded.
George Lucas fever caused a lot of awful sci-fi pictures to receive real releases. Lean-budget producers were inspired to think bigger — Roger Corman invested in his own effects shop, giving opportunities to more future high achievers. Charlie Band bought into an idea by his steady makeup effects wrangler Steve Neill: a triple supernova incident opens a portal in the desert, subjecting a family to a barrage of mind-blowing phenomena from a different dimension. The Day Time Ended was born. Band put forth sizable funds to get the visuals going, and a crew of artists and technicians came together. They were mostly longhaired guys in their twenties waiting for ILM to gear up, and itching to do good work.
I’m writing this before listening to the disc’s audio commentary, which will keep me from putting in too many details. I first heard about the show when it was called Vortex. My boss Greg Jein showed me plans for a futuristic house miniature he was going to construct on his ‘free time’ after working a crew on 1941 48 hours a week. Always the last to know, I visited David Allen’s shop, located in a converted meeting hall out on Olive Avenue in Burbank. Two close friends were there, Steven Nielson and Randall William (Randy) Cook. I’d met the rather intense David Allen several times, and he did his usual thing of corralling me at a Movieola to complain about what some producer wanted him to do, and lecture me about effects in general. Allen always behaved as if I were more important than I was, which was flattering. Dave was working with a green pixie-thing being stop-motion animated standing on a brass bedpost. Randy Cook was happy sculpting something, if I remember correctly. Vortex was allowing these artists to practice their craft, but amid the jokes and laughter was the kind of surly, anti-authoritarian attitude you’d find in a sweat shop. Somebody referred to the movie as Kotex.
Somewhere along the line it was discovered that another company had registered the Vortex title, and the movie became The Day Time Ended. I remember somebody joking that the new title belonged on an obit for John Cameron Swayze. That really shows my age. Filming took place way out in the Apple Valley to accommodate an elaborate scene with vintage airplanes, only for that deal to fall apart. The filming could have been done closer, even in Bronson Caverns, but the expanse of real desert on view is a plus. I hope the commentary covers a story Wayne Schmidt told me, about an on-loan ‘picture car’ that got used as an equipment carrier by the crew and all but destroyed. The result was that Wayne ended up being literally taken for a ride by some ‘unsavory characters’ that demanded his signature on a document holding him financially responsible.
The Day Time Ended is a ‘strange phenomena’ epic vaguely in the mold of Close Encounters, although the author also mentions The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits as inspirations. A lot of weird stuff issues forth from a Time-Space Warp. Little of it makes sense unless one decides that the portal in question is sucking things through from more than one parallel dimension. The unnamed family spends a scary night simply reacting to things that come at them from all directions.
Paterfamilias Grant (Jim Davis of Dallas, Monster from Green Hell and The Big Sky) picks up most of his family at the Los Angeles International Airport. In its 1979 pre-makeover state, LAX has more of a ‘time machine’ feel than anything else in the movie. We hear talk about strange astronomical phenomena, which the family ignores. Then all the weird s___ begins to happen. It starts when they return to the futuristic, solar-powered house Grant has built way out in a desert nowheresville — someone has trashed the downstairs living room. Little Jenny (Natasha Ryan) is given a pony, but also finds a bizarre pyramid structure behind the barn, that takes her pony away and then gives it back when she asks. The pyramid shrinks to the size of a pocket toy, but still glows green. Jenny apparently remains in good graces with the magic pyramid, because it undoes various problems at her request, like a broken mirror on the staircase. Son Richard (Chris Mitchum) must go to work a few miles away, leaving Jenny, her mother Beth and uncle Steve (Marcy Lafferty & Scott C. Kolden), Grant and his cheerful wife Ana (Dorothy Malone) behind on the new homestead, just as everything hits the fan.
That ‘triple supernova’ phenomenon manifests itself with lots of glowing, swirling lights, that buzz the house like swarms of flying saucers. Jenny is visited by a pixie-like creature that glows green and thus might be associated with the pyramid. More menacing is a flying probe ship with mechanical arms and a blowtorch; it burns its way through a closet door to get to Jenny, but does nothing to her. Later on it menaces but does not harm other family members.
Also keeping everyone up past their bedtime are a pair of oddly shaped monsters with gnarly skin. They do battle in the dirt yard, tooth and claw. The victor smashes its way into the barn in an attempt to reach the family. Meanwhile, Richard must struggle to get back to the farm in the middle of a windstorm. The aerial disturbances cause the power to go out and halt communications. When his car crashes Richard ends up riding in on one of the horses, which has escaped during the chaos. In the morning, with several family members lost to the Vortex, Grant finds his property littered with a graveyard of ruined vehicles: jet planes , trucks and wrecked alien spacecraft. Beth is transfigured by a new discovery, and tells her parents that they’ll have to adapt to an altered reality. But something miraculous awaits, just over the hill.
Director John ‘Bud’ Cardos got the job on the basis of his hit picture Kingdom of the Spiders, which I’m told is not bad; his The Dark has fans as well. Cardos had a strange career, working as a stuntman and even handling birds on Hitchcock’s avian suspense classic. He also worked with and acted for the Z-picture non-mogul Al Adamson. Cardos chooses okay camera angles in some cases but not in others. His blocking in the interior of the futuristic house is good, but he fails to impart mystery or surprise to the weird scenes. The sudden appearance of a glowing green pyramid out ‘back of the barn’ is treated as if Jenny were taking out the garbage.
The actors don’t get much directorial help. Chris Mitchum and Scott Kolden are properly concerned throughout, but Dorothy Malone seldom registers an appropriate level of fear — downplaying things that would make a real person go catatonic, or hide out in the rocks, hoping that the green gremlins from Planet Potato will eat somebody else instead. Cardos’ lack of attention makes it seem as if all have been infected with the Galloping Complacency Virus. As every inexplicable crisis passes, poor Dorothy Malone reverts to a lower level of distress. I would have freaked out the moment the mirror magically repaired itself.
Natasha Ryan is just okay as the supposedly naive child for whom fantastic events are business as usual. After her reports of bizarre happenings are dismissed, it should have been cute when she stops telling even Gramps about new miracles. I was really expecting Jenny to fix everything by using her toy pyramid like Dorothy Gale’s ruby slippers, and rebooting reality back to default mode. As directed by Cardos, Jenny instead maintains an out-to-lunch state of disengagement. Marcy Lafferty’s young mom is properly distressed, even though no sane mom would let their kid sleep alone considering what’s happening. Ms. Lafferty is tasked to deliver the ethereal Sense of Wonder speech at the finale, which would have been fine if director Cardos cared enough to match her words with some expressive direction.
Jim Davis had weathered countless movie gigs worse than this one, and remains a committed pro. His contribution is solid and consistent. He reads the film’s weakest dialogue with his usual dry conviction: “What we’ve got here is a Time – Space Warp!” For the record, I’m told that line wasn’t in the script. It was invented on the set, and something tells me that Cardos approved it to let all and sundry know that he was above the material. I guess The Day Time Ended wasn’t intellectual enough for the auteur of Mutant and Gor II.
True, the movie would need a real stylist to fully express its spacey vibe of, ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore, everything you know is wrong.’ A Jacques Tourneur or Joe Dante would have injected human values into the family scenes, and enhanced the proceedings with sincere humor, suspense and moments of real shock. Cardos didn’t even bother to imitate Spielberg, with allusions to Biblical miracles and wondrous faces filled with awe.
The Day Time Ended is too ambitious for its budget and resources, even though Band (augmented by $$$ from Irwin Yablans and Michael Wolf’s Compass International Pictures) eventually spent about $750,000 on it. Line producer Wayne Schmidt delivered a lot of effects work for that cash outlay, but not all of the visuals achieve the intended impact.
Nobody cheated on the effects. Lyle Conway’s animation monsters are unique in appearance. One creature could be the result of a pachyderm and a sloth getting their genes scrambled in a matter transmitter: it walks erect, but has semi-useless elephant-like forepaws. The pixie creature is less interesting, and not all that impressive; it’s not a good outing for animator David Allen. The animation is quite fluid — Randy Cook gives the battling monsters s-l-o-w movements , perhaps to seem other-worldly. The bigger, elephant-like monster ends up being overcome in combat similar to the elephant-Ymir fight in 20 Million Miles to Earth. Come to think of it, the other beast is jabbed with a pitchfork, just as was the Ymir.
Greg Jein’s house model is a good match for the house and barn constructed full size. Something about the design is off, though — the on-location buildings look as if they are half scale, until people walk right up and reveal that they are full-sized. The need for opticals probably multiplied as the filming progressed. Some are excellent, some are desperate, and some are ‘good enough for A.I.P.’
Jim Danforth had a history of helping out filmmakers with matte paintings, which meant that weak but sincere efforts like The Aftermath and Planet of Dinosaurs were each graced with a couple of isolated, sophisticated matte vistas. Danforth contributes two, maybe three fantastic visuals to Ended, a sky with a giant moon and the final image of a ‘City of Light.’
Coming off very well are animated swirls of lights and similar zip-zapping UFOs. All were created by Peter Kuran, who did all kinds of effects work but often concentrated on slick animation details– ray gun blasts, ‘living light.’ Night shots often add kick lighting to surfaces near the light source. The swirling Vortex light effects are less magical in the Daytime, when superimposed over Kuran’s trick widescreen composites of the house.
Apparently the show came up short in the running time. The credits crawl is unusually slow. An expendable preamble with a portentous speech puts on the brakes with dull images of star fields and planet views. Richard Band’s music score feels more generic than generic, only fitfully adding to the suspense.
