EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS’ THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (2009) is marginally more competent than Asylum’s usual mockbuster, as it has a simple, no-frills plot: C. Thomas Howell and his friends crash through a Bermuda Triangle time rift into the dinosaur age where they and similar arrivals struggle to survive and escape, or backstab and escape. No worse than Irwin Allen did in my childhood.
I’LL BELIEVE YOU (2006) has the host of a late-night UFOlogist call-in show finally draw attention and ratings due to a mystery caller babbling gibberish. However it turns out caller Patrick Warburton is not an alien but a time-traveler trying to use the show to contact his home era. Some nice touches, but too self-conscious how quirky it is. Fred Willard plays the station manager. “Everyone dresses like this in the future—what, you think we wear silver jumpsuits?”
THREE DAYS (2001) is a mass of Christmas schmaltz in which a grieving workaholic gets to live over wife Kristin Davis’ last three days and thereby rediscovers their love, reconnects with his dying father and learns he’s going to be a father. Too syrupy and predictable. “This was nice but it wasn’t the perfect gift.”
THE PENITENT MAN (2010) is one of those time-travel movies like Little Miss Sunshine that favor talking about time-travel to actually time-traveling: Lance Henriksen spends most of the movie talking to his shrink about how his time-travel discoveries destroyed civilization (“Even atheists lost hope for the future when we saw Jesus was just a man.”), the theories of time-travel and whether it’s possible to actually change the past. Mind-blowingly dull, and the big reveal would have been obvious even if I weren’t paying such attention to time-travel twists right now. “We would have been better off if a meteor had struck and forced us to wipe the slate clean.”
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