Customer Reviews

Science Fiction 2: Journey to Center of Time

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Poor quality film. Poor DVD transfer. No Extras. Waste of time. At least I didn't throw a lot of money away on it. Terrible film.

I was disappointed of the visual quality of this dvd. Also the scenario and the cinematography is way too bad to watch this film. I don't recommend you to buy it. The only good thing is its cheap price...

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME is one of those cheaply made science fiction films whose miniscule budgets are matched only by an equally miniscule plot, direction, scripting, and acting. In this clunker, Scott Brady is your typically beefy industrialist whose only connection to the advancement of science is the financial bottom line. His unwillingness to open the vaults of further funding forces his scientists, lamely played by Gigi Perreau and Anthony Eisley, to prematurely loop ahead to the future in a time machine. Naturally, there is a mishap that lands then squarely in a nuclear war, whose own weirdly made up leaders (Lyle Waggonner and Pouppe Gamin) do little more than prance about for their few minutes of screen time. Brady and his time travelling cohorts travel back to 1,000,000 BC where they meet dinosaurs. Apparently, the script writers failed to indicate that the dinosaurs died out when a comet smacked into the earth 65 million years ago. At this point, whatever plot coherence there was dissolves into a misty mess of chintzy special effects whose only apparent purpose is to divert the viewer's attention from the T-Rex size plot holes. Further complicating matters is a series of potentially interesting temporal paradoxes that might have engaged the viewer had the script respected his intelligence to the point of incorporating them into a coherent plot. By the final reel, the viewer is asked to accept yet again another dopey science fiction cop out ending of How We All Began. JTTCOT had the potential to be more than all hands concerned made it. But because it groped, however dimly, toward Saying Something Interesting, I gave it two stars.

Thanks to the 1967 low-budget film Journey to the Center of Time, I now know the secrets of time travel. I'm even willing to share them with you and spare you the burden of actually having to sit through this film. Now all of this is going to sound more expensive than it really is; if you follow the designs laid out in this movie, I think you're probably looking at less than a hundred bucks for the whole thing (except for the giant ruby power source - maybe you can steal one somewhere). You're going to need a "time vault" but that can be any room with an automatic door. Then you need a time lab to go inside the vault - this should be a circular room filled with all sorts of dials and gizmos that serve no purpose whatsoever; make sure some of them are housed behind cardboard-like control panels. You must paint the walls of the lab the ugliest burnt orange color you can find - that's important. Now take your big old ruby (no, I don't even want to know where you got it), put it inside a birdcage, and rest it on a stand in the middle of the lab. Buy a camera and put a TV screen on the wall somewhere (black and white, not color) - this is for the benefit of the folks in the "control room" (an even cheaper version of the time lab set); they, naturally, can see whatever your camera shows no matter how many millennia you travel in time away from them. Next, find some scientists; one should look a tad like Henry Kissinger if you want to do this right, but any young man and woman off the street will do for his assistants. Make sure they refer to the space-time continuum, stabilizers, and other fancy words like that all the time. You won't actually need a burly, antisocial misanthrope reluctantly funding the project, but if you have one handy go ahead and throw him in there with the scientists just to shake things up a little bit. There you go. Turn a few knobs, count down from ten, and enjoy your travels back and forth in time.

I'm quite sure your own time travel experience will exceed that of the characters in this film. Imagine traveling five thousand years into the future just to meet Lyle Waggoner (if you do meet him, though, try to spell his name right in the credits next time). The sight of a pasty-faced alien Lyle Waggoner is so repellant, that this film's characters travel millions of years backward in time just to get away from him. This also serves the purpose of introducing a dinosaur into the film; as we all know, any time travel movie simply must have a dinosaur in it. I understand the dinosaur union is very insistent on that.

Journey to the Center of Time basically exists to be made fun of, but the thing that bothered me most about this exceedingly low-budget flick was the fact that the writer started making stuff up at the end. I mean, he went way beyond paradox and half-baked theory and just threw in something completely impossible without even bothering to explain it (which he could not have done if he had tried). That rubbed me the wrong way and ruined the whole effect of the one decent plot twist he had just pulled off.

When the bottom-line industrialist bankrolling their time-travel project threatens to shut them down, a group of scientists push their equipment too far, with the result that their entire lab is thrown through time and space. They become embroiled in a future war, then wind up in the time of Giant Lizards (because that sure ain't no dinosaur). Pretty good zero-budget sci-fi, with a great B-movie cast: Anthony Eisley, Scott Brady and Lyle Waggoner. The sort of picture that used to crop up on TV late saturday afternoons or 3AM in the morning.

I purchased this movie for a measly sum of money, and since I'm a fan of bad movies, I wasn't really disappointed. Made in 1967, this film offers nothing new or interesting to the idea of time travel or science fiction.
The plot? "I just inherited all this money from my daddy, and I want to know what you deranged scientists are doing with it." and they respond thusly; "We're travelling through time with it, here we'll show you right after we bore you with Einstein quotes. Whoops!" etc.
Disappointingly long and oft-times mistaken dialogue, this movie joureys to an extremely boring future that does include, as a highlight, an attractive alien spacecraft and its attractive female leader. This is subsequently destroyed by the low-brow humans of the future. The crew then attempts to go home, but overshoots into the far past with dinasaurs. The film-makers should have taken the cue from 'Journey To The Center Of The Earth' with Pat Boone, and not used a pet lizard to play a dinosaur. It always looks ludicrous, and it is no exception in this film. I won't give anymore spoilers, just don't pay good money to purchase it with out prior knowledge.

Wooden acting, dull dialogue and hopelessly padded this maybe the worst movie ever made. It is almost in the so-bad-it's-good category but too dull for that.

By way of example a scene of the characters traveling back in time is 5 MINUTE montage of stock footage from World War II, Civil War and Roman movies. 5 MINUTES!

There's more techno-babble than you'd get in a year of Star Trek and worse special effects than early Dr Who.

I only saw it because it was on the flip side of a copy of Things to Come. Please, please don't watch it, even as a joke, just stay away.

This old movie used to play at the drive-in and at 4 movie special showing at different theaters. These were fun movies to watch and for 35 to 75 cents for a showing...they were great.
What can i say....I still like this movie cause most
of the equipment they use is now antiques...and the characters
and the story are still very much watchable.
Grab your rocking chair and enjoy...

** Spoilers, but you won't care. Really you won't. **

The boxcover to the old VHS I have of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME features a blonde hero-type guy firing some kind of futuristic weapon, with a dinosaur roaring in the background. OK, first of all there are no lasers or futuristic weapons in this 1967 film directed and written by David L. Hewlitt. Well, none that look like the picture and that are wielded by any of our heroes anyway. And no studly-looking he-man type guys like the one on this boxcover. There is however a dinosaur or big lizard or something - though you only ever see the head of it. All that should give you some idea that you're not going to be getting a top-quality product out of this film you've never heard of made the year before 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

I'm not sure there's much point in my describing the plot, but what the heck. A bunch of scientists are conducting time-travel experiments - they're trying to just look into the past - but their experiments might be in peril because the new owner of the company funding their work, Stanton (Scott Brady, the actor you're most likely to recognize though I wouldn't count on it) thinks they're wasting his money. He's a stereotypical greedy capitalist y'know (guess what happens to him later on). So they push all the dials up to 11, and while Stanton watches the "time vault" which looks a little like an undersea diving bell ends up jetting off into the future with the capitalist, the older scientist who heads the project (Abraham Sofaer who looks an awful lot like Henry Kissinger), the younger impulsive scientist (Anthony Eisley), and the female scientist (Gigi Perreau) who is there to scream and do things she's been told not to.

First they travel 5,000 years into the future. How do we know it's the future? There's a needle-like spaceship, or rather a very cheap model of one in their view screen. Some humanoid (read: human but with pale faces and vaguely metallic clothes) meet them and tell them to warn the past about the war that will devastate the planet. Then all the aliens get killed by the humans of the future in a scene that just shows a bunch of people running this way and that. So our little team goes back to the past but overshoots the mark. There are dinosaurs and volcanoes and stuff. Henry Kissinger-looking guy falls into lava, and bad capitalist commits a sin of paradox trying to take the time machine back on his own (despite having no idea how it works) and also comes to his end. The young couple get back, and something weird happens. I won't spoil this for you in case you have even more tolerance for extremely wooden acting, sets and FX that make the original STAR TREK look like AVATAR, and 25x as much boring fake scientific dialogue as action. In the end it's too boring to be so-bad-it's-good; you're better off watching something like ROBOT MONSTER or PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE for that, and there are dozens of SF films from this era that are better than this one.

To say this was low budget would be too kind. The stereotype acting is not stereotype enough. The stereotype actors are not stereotype enough. Let's face it; this whole stereotype project is not stereotype enough. If the budget was just a tad lower maybe this would never have been made.

Basic premise is an attempt to look into the future and into the past actually forces the lab to go into the future and into the past. The lab is stuffed with good guy, bad guy, and screaming girl. The good guy does good things. The bad guy does bad things. The girl screams a lot. While back at the ranch, they talk of a lot about how they've lost the lab.

This DVD is perfect for testing the fast forward option.


First Man into Space