The Time Travelers
Director - Ib Melchior
Writers - Ib Melchior, David L. Hewitt
1964 - USA
Stars - Preston Foster, Philip Carey, Merry Anders
A similar adventure to ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ (1960) with a leap into a future to a dying human race, a quick tour of future doom and some mutants to bring things to a head. What differentiates this is the kitsch colourful sets and androids that resemble the first failed line in life-size sex robot-dolls. The pace is a little plodding with an underwhelming first chase, and the film dwells on the android factory, which it is definitely pleased with, accompanied by the kind of jaunty music that makes it feel like an industry information film, setting an odd mood. Often, the effects resemble magic tricks, and there’s an amusing feeling that the film is chuffed with itself for its sci-fi illusions. This, the slightly stilted acting and the half-enthused light relief truly date it, but of course the groovy-on-a-budget datedness is part of the appeal.
There’s a usual post-apocalyptic warning, but ‘The Time Travelers’ differs in its vision that human brilliance will not be stopped by this, that science will continue to try and find a solution to the devastation that it has also wrought. In this case, they’re building a spaceship to try and find other hospitable presumably non-mutant planets. Naturally, it doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny – all that powerful technology and science underground and what about food if they are trapped in a barren landscape? Are the mutants plotting adversaries or simply mindless brutes? Nevertheless, its retro-charm, silliness and scattering of ideas make it interesting. There’s some gratuitous female shower-time and quite nasty android death when things come to conflict that are exploitation-adjacent.
With its portal conceit being influential, it’s the eventual conclusion that does raise it above the norm, committing to its time travel premise rather than going off-world, and leaving a somewhat eerie aftertaste.
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