And yet more time travel (#SFWApro)

TERMINATION POINT (2007) has Lou Diamond Phillips abscond with a space-time teleporter before the government can pervert it to evil ends, only to have it rip open a wormhole that threatens to suck in the entire world, unless federal agent Jason Priestley can stop it. Basically a hybrid of disaster film with spy thriller, quite mediocre. “He’s brilliant with a god complex—the usual scientist.”

FOXFUR (2012) is a pretentious film that does it’s best to dazzle but falls short as a young woman (constantly played by different actors) wanders among her UFOlogist friends before getting what’s either a bus ride back to 1982 (“Are you with that show Wizards and Warriors?”) or unlocking her buried memories. I’m not sure if the pretension is intentional or not, but either way this only qualifies for the appendix. I find myself wondering what UFOlogists would make of it since I believe some of the theories here are considered pretty fringe. “In your language we’d be known as the Plearan, not Pleaidean.”

STORM (2006) proves Swedish film can bore me as much as American cinema: a mopey journalist runs into weird supernatural beings who force him into his flashback booth but never explain anything about what’s really going on. Forgettable, and not one for the book. “You are to me as life is to death, as day is to the night.”

RETROGRADE (2004) has Dolph Lundgren leading an expedition from 2204 to the present to abort the space pandemic that wiped out Earth after an Arctic expedition uncovered a meteor field. While the time travel element is too big to consign this the appendix, they could have dropped it and made Lundgren a spec-ops leader without changing much (it says a lot that we never learn how renegade Joe Montana plans to exploit his knowledge of the future). Dull. “Max’s condition and the meteors—they’re connected, aren’t they?”

I’d probably have liked the opening scenes of PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986) better if I hadn’t rewatched this for the book, as the introduction of all the characters, their pasts and their issues now feels dreadfully familiar, as does the gasping at being back in the past. That said, it’s entertaining once it gets going as Kathleen Taylor tries to avert her future marriage and divorce to Nicolas Cage, launch a line of high-tech inventions (“For some reason, portable radios get bigger.”) and hit on the school’s Mysterious Arty Loner. The ending holds up better than I thought, not glossing over the marital problems as much as I remembered. That said, I do wish they’d played more with the problems of being a 40something adult in a teen body (there’s a darker movie on that theme waiting to be made). With Helen Hunt as Turner’s daughter, Leon Ames, Barbara Harris, Don Murray and Maureen O’Sullivan as family members and Joan Allen and Catherine Hicks as classmates. “I happen to know that algebra won’t be the least use to me in my future life.”