The Day Time Ended

• Directed by John ‘Bud’ Cardos
• November 1980

A middle-class family living in a solar powered house gets sucked into an anomaly where they experience strange events. That Green Agenda will get you every time!

The Day Time Ended starts with a lot of promise and certainly sets out for fulfilling that promise. The promise for me is that it’s something so bad that it moves smoothly into enjoyable. The pretentious and perhaps even melodramatic opening voice over. A young girl asking a glowing rock object to find her pony. You know you’ve got quality here.

This is a story featuring the most white bread of late 70s/early 80s families one could imagine. They border on unrealistically wholesome. Or it could be that some of the actors really could not act that well. Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone may have had good careers but the further down the list you go the more the talent dissipated.

The little girl Jenny (Natasha Ryan) is way too cute to be real. I mean in her personality. Plus she says things that given that they’ve come across a ransacked room should be investigated but get ignored. This is the type of movie where logic is ignored.

Things begin when the light and radiation from a triple supernova that happened two hundred years ago finally reaches Earth and I guess ripped open the fabric of reality. The Day Time Ended strings together a lot of weirdness but that is all it is weirdness. It feels very random. There doesn’t seem to be a purpose to the weirdness as if there’s some answer that could be discerned. Charles Band and friends figured odd was good enough.

There is weirdness in strangeness and things people should bring up and point out but they aren’t mentioned until after they should be. Why? Because then it becomes dramatic and keeps things moving. Then the whole movie just kind of ends. The family is somewhere else and I’m not sure if anything really changed for them other than their physical location in a new universe. Or maybe that’s an unknown universe.

What really gets me is that when the daughter-in-law Beth (Marcy Lafferty) she’s talking weird. There’s just something odd in her performance yet it never plays in to anything. It’s just taken as she’s okay and telling us that everything’s fine. And the family goes along with it. There is the implication that some time has passed between her arrival and her encountering everybody else.

This was meant to be some kind of family friendly adventure. A grand outing on an extremely small budget. It is all the worst aspects of low budget and family friendly. And because of the ending there really feels as if there is no point to the whole story. Nobody ever really cracked the nut of what the story was all about.

I’m a fan of stop motion animation-especially when it comes to creating creatures and what not for film. I feel even today with the addition of computer assistance it still has a place since it’s done with a real physical object giving a certain level of reality that CGI just cannot generally accomplish. Why am I bringing this up? Because there are multiple creatures in The Day Time Ended and they are accomplished using stop motion animation. Perhaps not the best ever to hit film but far from the worst.

What makes this watchable is what weird thing will happen next. That’s what I found myself looking for. I didn’t care about the characters and the story for what there was of it. What bit of stop motion animation would bring something to life? What weird thing would occur next? That’s what mattered to me. And for B-movie aficionados that’s probably what will get them from Point A to Point B in this.

The Day Time Ended really isn’t about time ending. It’s a family friendly adventure that just comes to a stop. It’s not unwatchable but not something you should really seek out.