Time Walker

The mysteries of ancient Egypt have tantalized the greatest and most fertile minds of fantasy literature, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Robert Bloch, including celebrated writers such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Algernon Blackwood – none of whom immune to the allure of thousand-year-old curses and dusty mummies.

The history of the Seventh Art is littered with attempts to exploit such an exciting motherlode of storytelling, with a wide range of results. This film from novice director Tom Kennedy (who fortunately never directed again) is undoubtedly one of the least commendable of these attempts. Kennedy opts to imbue the familiar subject matter with sci-fi overtones, which is a great idea on paper, but from the very first frames, the film runs headlong into a lethal combination of technical and expressive incompetence, not to mention the presence of gigantic conceptual plot holes regarding the rules of the genre (hearing dialogue blatantly confusing sci-fi with supernatural must have taken a few years off my life).

Unbelievably boring and totally lacking in pacing, the film feels more like a “Time Waster”. The green-tinted POV shots of the monster are interminable as the plot gropes it way along, poorly supported by a screenplay that’s so moronic and disjointed that it seems to have emerged from a stoners’ late-night rap session. We get a cause and effect relationship stretched to the breaking point, a profusion of temporal inconsistencies, stultifying character motivations, and ridiculous repartee. To illustrate, the plan by law enforcement to capture the suspected mummy thieves reaches such a level of improbability that it deserves to be quoted in its entirety.

Making matters worse, “Time Walker” takes itself so damned seriously that it excludes the possibility of playing the irony card, leaving the film even more tedious than it already was, irrespective of the recurring and heart-felt homages to sci-fi classics of the 1950s, especially “The Quatermass Xperiment” (1955) and “The Blob” (1958).

In light of such a ghastly cinematic misfire, the words “To be continued…” at the end sound almost like a threat. Lucky for us, no one has followed through as of yet.