Rating: D+
Dir: Jacob Leighton Burns
Star: Nicole Fancher, Ashley J. Mandanas, Jamie Brewster, Leesa Neidel
There’s a big gap here between the concept and the execution. It feels like this is trying to be a time-travel version of Cronenberg’s The Fly. Which seems like a great idea. So what went wrong? Just about everything. We have Theresa (Fancher), who lives on the family farm alone, following the death of her father after a long illness. She has a job in a warehouse, and potters about in the barn, assembling a time-machine. She has got it to the stage where she’s testing it on animals – specifically, her beloved kitteh Bernard. Or maybe not-so beloved, considering her willingness to make him a guinea-pig in a potentially lethal experiment. Next step? A human subject, and at least she has the guts to take the responsibility for this herself.
There’s a meme about the differences between how men and women would use a time-machine. Here, Theresa’s first act is to go back two hours to get revenge for an awkward date. Girls, huh? However, as the comparison to The Fly above should indicate, the jump leads to nasty effects on Theresa. Blotchy skin, weird glowing and bumping into alternate time-line versions of yourself are among the problems. As well as throwing up. So. Much. Regurgitation. Approaching a Slaughtered Vomit Dolls level. [Not that I’ve ever seen it, but given the title, I’m inclined to feel on solid ground there] These gradually accelerate in severity, and the more she uses her machine, the more it accelerates the disintegration of her existence.
Well… the above sounds considerably more gnarly than the film is able to deliver. It has some reasonable CGI for the skin condition, which flows across her body like an oil slick. There’s an attack when she’s at the movies watching Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera [conveniently public domain – hey, at least it’s not Night of the Living Dead]. But you’re mostly watching a not very likeable character self-sabotage her own life and relationships. The latter include college librarian Blake (Mandanas), who has absolutely no clue about the increasingly more unhinged and temporally challenged nature of her other half. Rather than the expected SF/horror, it turns into unconvincing millennial soap-opera.
Bolted onto this is what seems like clumsy attempts at gender-based social commentary. By which, I mean “men = bad”. They’re all uncaring, such as the father who had the temerity to fall ill and die on her, or predatory, even though – let’s be honest – Theresa is nothing special in the looks department. [Her date calls her the Towering Inferno, because she is “tall and hot”. Um…] This might have fitted in at the peak of the #MeToo era when this was made, but has not aged well into an era more critical of such sweeping generalizations. I simply wanted a basic, “There are things with which mankind should not meddle – and time is certainly one of them” story. I did not get it.