IDAHO TRANSFER (1971) is Peter Fonda’s very low-budget film in which federal teleportation researchers secretly use their tech to send teens into the future after an upcoming eco-collapse, only to have several recruits on a test trip stranded when the project shuts down. Unfortunately their activities consist of walking across the wilderness and chatting around the campfire, so there’s no real sense of an apocalypse or even a future until the incomprehensible ending. Poor (all rights to image with current holder) “It could be 50,000 gallons of chartreuse high-gloss enamel—we could paint Portland!”
FUTURE HUNTERS (1986) has a traveler from a post-apocalypse Road Warrior-type future come back to the present where he enlists a couple (one half being Robert Patrick pre-Terminator II) to prevent Nazis from using the Spear of Destiny to bring about the world’s destruction. Even if this wasn’t a Philippines movie (and so outside my mandatory range) it might go in the appendix for how little the time-travel matters: after the opening scenes, it’s a straight Indiana Jones knockoff with the protagonists racing the Nazis to the Spear and encountering pygmies, Amazons, gunmen and martial artist Bruce Li. It doesn’t help that the female lead is useless except for screaming, nagging, getting rape threats and getting semi-naked (say what you will about badly written strong female characters, I still prefer them to badly written wimpy ones).It’s just like riding a bike except for two little things—takeoff and landing.”
CAMP SLAUGHTER (2006) has a group of college-age friends stranded at a woodland summer camp discover a slasher systematically butchering the campers, then doing it all over again when the day reboots. The low budget and poor acting are undeniable, but more money probably wouldn’t have this the next Scream as the concept is so poorly handled (even those who are aware of the loop never try to change things). And the obnoxious leads are simply puzzled by the characters’ 1980s slang (the murder took place in 1981), they react like they’re talking Serbo-Croatian (it’s not so far back they’d find it that alien). And the repeated emphasis that they’re knocking off Jason Voorhees gets old pretty quick. “Please tell me the date is not Friday the 13th.”
TIMESLINGERS (2013) has a time portal not only drops two squabbling teenage siblings back into the Old West, it does so just as a stranded baby ET needs help rescuing his captive mother from a sheriff who plans to sell her to a Barnum-type exhibitor. Cliched and unimpressive. “I know we have to save Jiffy’s mother, but we’re dealing with a psychopath!”
TIMEKEEPER (1998) has a trio of kids discover too late that their spooky neighbor is actually a guardian of the timestream, the Too Late part being one of them has fallen into the past and thereby erased our reality in favor of a steampunk alt.history. Some nice touches, like time police from the alternate future trying to preserve it, but mostly routine Disneyesque fluff. “If I’d known the entire fate of my world would rest on my shoulders, I’d have checked my watch..”
JULES VERNE’S MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (2010) turns Verne’s book into a Lost knockoff in which Civil War soldiers and 21st century “Jules Fogg” find themselves stranded in the Bermuda Triangle (I suppose we should give JJ Abrams credit for putting his island in the Pacific) due to Captain Nemo’s accidental creation of a time-trap while attempting to rewrite history. Mediocre on pretty much every level, and if they were going to throw in modern women, why not make them more than just damsels in distress? With W. Morgan Sheppard and Mark Sheppard as different ages of Nemo. “We aren’t traveling in time—we’re lost in it.”
FIRE TRIPPER (1985) is a good anime fantasy in which a toddler time-jumps from a fiery death in feudal Japan to the present, then jumps back as a teen and becomes involved with an Obnoxious and Irritating village warrior (the manga is by the same writer who later created Inuyasha). This has a couple of nice twists, slightly confused by my conviction the two leads were siblings and finding it implausible how fast the girl accepted incest. “Oh, no, it’s like an indirect kiss!”
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