THE DAY TIME ENDED

What does 'grindhouse' mean to you? Well, at a guess, if you know your stuff, you'll associate the term with lowest common denominator sex and violence. You won't, at a guess, call The Day Time Ended a grindhouse flick, as it contains not even a hint of nudity and no real violence of which to speak (therefore I have no idea why this has received an '18' rating). But, if I explain that the film initially came to us via Charles Band Productions, then this may well tell you all you need to know. Being associated with dear old Charles, what The Day Time Ended lacks in bump, grind, hack and slash, it makes up for with...little monsters, as well as just about anything which would get the film up to the eighty-minute mark! Still, I can't stay mad at him for long...

First impressions here might lead you to believe that you were going to get a fairly straightforward sci-fi romp. As a narrator gives us a brief history of time (minus the Hawking smarts) over shots of gently twinkling stars, my money was on aliens. It certainly looked that way too, as some massive space explosions seemed to lead to a house being menaced by sentient fireworks. Elsewhere on Planet Earth, we find they're discussing what we've just seen – nothing less than a Triple! Supernova! It actually happened hundreds of years before, but is causing pesky side-effects on Earth in the present. This doesn't put off the beige-clad Williams family heading up to their new solar-powered abode in the middle of the desert in California – an abode which we realise is the same place which we saw earlier. Uh-oh. The furniture's all been thrown around, but the family assume this has been done by passing bikers. Well, unless bikers in the late 70s could manifest glowing green pyramids out the back of the property as well, it seems unlikely. Little Jenny sees this structure, but of course no one believes her.

Soon whatever-it-is starts doing other things around the home – some helpful (fixing a mirror, irradiating the upstairs loo with a green glow and some dry ice; well, okay, that's not strictly helpful) and some decidedly unhelpful. It seems there are two lots of extra-terrestrials here, one benign (a little critter which looks a bit like Morph) and one not, although the evil entity just seems to burn tiny holes through plywood doors with its shoebox-sized spacecraft. But is this an alien romp in the usual sense at all? Rather, all the talk of space and time at the beginning points to this being a 'space-time rift'. Which means absolutely anything goes. And you thought you'd never seen a Charles Band Production with several dimensions?!

This falls squarely in the so-bad-it's-good category. Although there are lots of lulls and a decided lack of the sort of excess which usually ensures films don't get boring, the late 70s time capsule effect is in full sway, the script is oft baffling and some of the decisions are endlessly entertaining; for instance, and my full apologies if this is a spoiler, when some sort of Godzilla creature arrives on the scene (or is it a portly dinosaur?) it only goes and knocks at the door of the house! The plot is (as you might have gathered) an utter hodge-podge, a brazen excuse to throw in some SFX, and the old 'space time' motif allows it to be completely non-sequential to boot. Therefore, don't expect to find out who the camp Morph fellow was, or who was driving the slow-mo door scorcher, or indeed, what the hell is going on. This is Close Encounters of the Bewildering Kind. Saccharin lines, silly monsters...if director Jon Cardos didn't expect us to either be as drunk as granddad seems to be as he swigs from a nondescript bottle of something as he cooks his steaks, or to at least feel like we were by the end, I'd be very surprised.

This print of the film is adequate: perhaps you can justify this by playing the 'grindhouse' card again, but let's say it looks very 70s and have done (and that's okay). The DVD is chaptered, and in terms of extras, you get a stack of Full Moon trailers (which, if you have any of Band's other DVD releases, you may already have encountered) and a stills gallery. You also get original artwork, a choice between 1:33:1 and the original aspect ratio, and the original stereo audio mix. All of this can be yours on 17th September...

Review by Keri O’Shea