Time Chasers
Twice now we’ve failed
to find the movie we was supposed to watch, and twice we’ve had to replace that
movie with two from our back-up list. For the third time on our list this
looked like it was going to happen again as Time Chasers was proving impossible
to track down. This time round we had a Get Out of Jail Free Card to play as
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had done a show featuring this movie. Of course
watching Mike and the robots taking the piss made watching this movie way more
enjoyable than it should have been, but don’t you think we’ve suffered enough?
Time Chasers (AKA
Tangents) follows the story of inventor Nick Miller (Matthew Bruch). Nick has
invented a time machine that is built into his small plane. He manages to
licence this technology to GenCorp via its CEO J.K. Robertson (George Woodard).
After he takes his old girlfriend Lisa Hansen (Bonnie Pritchard) on a date to
the 1950s, he takes her to 2041 only to discover that GenCorp have abused the
technology and destroyed the future. After trying to warn J.K. about this, and
then prevent this from happening themselves, J.K. tries to kill them both (Surely this should be the end of the movie?). But no, there's so many past and future Nick's running around it's all looking like somebody married their own cousin. This
mess eventually all ends up with a fight during 1777 in the middle of the American Revolution
and time paradoxes so ridiculous that it made me want to go back to prehistoric
times and stamp on anything that crawls from the ocean in a bid to stop its
ancestors from ever evolving into anyone responsible for this movie.
David Giancola was
only twenty years old when he directed (and wrote) this film, which sounds like
an impressive feat. Unfortunately his inexperience really shows through and he made
an absolute stinker of a movie. It was so unappealing to audiences that only
the appearance on MST3K managed to pull it out of the red. So what exactly did
Giancola do wrong?
Firstly Matthew Bruch
really is a terrible choice for the lead role. In a media where you either have
to have a lot of sex appeal, or be extremely talented to become a household
name Bruch really didn’t stand a chance. There have been many strange and
creepy looking actors over the years who have managed to become stars because
of their acting abilities or just sheer charisma (for example Steve Buscemi,
Willem Dafoe and Vincent Schiavelli), but unfortunately for Bruch he really
didn’t have their abilities. Even though he was cast in the lead in this film
he only managed to get two bit parts after this movie.
I know it’s shallow to
criticise an actor based on their looks. It’s something I usually try to avoid,
but when you have to spend an hour and a half looking at a man who could use
his chin as a bike rack then it really puts you off of a movie. If this man was
doing your tax inspection, then you wouldn’t think twice about him, but in a
film where he’s supposed to be an action hero, you just can’t quite believe it.
He looks like the sort of man who says “yes please” out loud when a filling in
the sex question on a survey. The sort of man whose favourite cheese is “medium”. He’s the
sort of man who thinks that a mullet is great choice in haircut…. Oh wait. That
one was true.
As for the other
actors in this movie, they all possess about the same acting talent as Bruch (or to put it another way, significantly less than the puppet Basil Brush). Bonnie Pritchard is now officially the worst actress called
Bonnie that I’ve ever seen in a time travelling drama (I never thought that
Bonnie Langford would lose that title). Again this is reflected in the fact
that she’s only ever been in one other film, and an episode of Kids in the Hall.
George Woodard is a dairy farmer when he’s not acting. If you look closely you
can actually see him milking cows in this film, because he certainly wasn’t acting in
it. The only actor I liked was Peter Harrington, who plays Matthew Paul, and
that’s only because he looks like Brian O'Halloran
wearing a Magnum PI moustache. In fact he even sounds and acts a little like
him.
Secondly Nick Miller is possibly the worst
scientist ever. Sure some scientists have made some terrible errors over the
years, and some have just been totally evil, but selling the rights to time
travel to a corporation is just ridiculously stupid. It’s so dumb that it makes
the Jack selling his cow for some magic beans look like Forbes businessman of
the year. Surely he knows what the consequences of messing with the space-time
continuum can be, so why would he allow an entity that is only concerned with
making money access to that power?
If he’s really that desperate for money,
why not go down the Back to the Future 2 route of finding out who wins what and
making money that way? Or if he thinks that’s too morally dubious, then traveling
back in time and buying a couple of copies of Action Comics issue 1 so he can
auction them off? Sure every action will have a rippling effect through time,
but surely that would be better than selling the rights to time travel to a man
who would be more subtle in his evil schemes if he was tying somebody to some
railway tracks whilst signing the contract.
Thirdly, the time travel technology looks
terrible. Even on a low budget more effort could have been made than putting a
Commodore 64 keyboard, a crappy monitor, a few wires, and what looks like some
plastic packaging material sprayed silver into a plane. I know Back to the
Future had a much higher budget, but the flux capacitor in that looks much more
like it’s part of some new technology and that’s just a few LED’s in a metal casing.
You could probably knock something like that up really cheaply. But this movie
isn’t ripping off any of the ideas from Back to the Future. They had a time
machine in a car, Time Chasers had a plane that was a “time transport”. Totally
different.
This film is the
motion picture equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail. It runs round in
circles, but never manages to achieve what it wants to. For a first time
effort, Giancola showed enthusiasm, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say
really. When we decided to watch the MST3K version of this I felt we was
cheating a little, but now I’m glad that we did. This movie is so bad that I’m
currently taking flying lessons and trying to buy a working Commodore 64 so I
can go back in time and stop myself from ever watching it…
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| When this baby hits 88mph you're going to see a massive pile of shit... |
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