Time Chasers (1994)

Disclaimer time: I have two reasons for reviewing Time Chasers. One, Amazon Prime’s description is hilarious:

Time Chasers, the story of a man named Nick who turns his airplane into a time machine with the help of his beloved Commodore 64.

We’ll get to this in a minute.

Two, Nick’s chin is so sharp he could pick locks with it. I find that intriguing.

Let’s jump into this movie, shall we?

Amazon pretty much summed up the movie for us already, but we’ll just add some frillies: Physics prof Nick has some time off in the summer so he turns his Cessna into a time machine. He operates this handy-dandy device by popping a floppy disk into the Commodore 64 he installed on board. Then things go all Max Headroom-y for a hot second before Nick and his unfortunate passengers have arrived in whatever time period they’re supposed to be in.

Oh, and Nick meets a journalist, Lisa, who’s come out to the airport to ask him about his seventy-something mother skydiving. She gets a little more than she bargained for when Nick shows her his invention and takes her for a cup of coffee in the year 2041. How do we know it’s 2041? Everyone’s wearing neon clothes.

Lisa is so impressed that when GenCorp (as in “Generic Corporation,” natch) comes sniffing around wanting to buy Nick’s technology, she starts firing questions off at them and getting all protective.

Nick meets Lisa again at a supermarket later on, and of course he asks her out. Also of course, their first date involves time travel, and Nick takes Lisa back to the nineteen-fifties, where they have dinner in a diner before strolling down a very generic midcentury street. Nick’s got his Castleton shirt on and Lisa’s wearing cutting-edge Guess? jeans, but no one bats an eye.

After sharing a romantic kiss during their next time jump, Nick and Lisa end up back in 2041, where the world is a dystopia, and after a garbled explanation from the one friendly face they meet, Nick has the bright idea to go back to just before he made the deal with GenCorp so he can warn his past self, the space-time continuum notwithstanding. He’ll have to work fast, though, because GenCorp has already fashioned their own tricked-out Cessna and Commodore 64. And for some reason they all end up in the Revolutionary War period. Why, I don’t know.

Oh, and Nick can’t drive, so there’s an epic bike chase that has to be seen to be believed.

This movie is laughable on so many levels. It’s a pretty blatant rip-off of the Back To the Future trilogy and it isn’t shy about saying so: There’s a Back To the Future poster on one of the walls in Dystopian 2041.

Also, a Commodore 64 could never be an acceptable flux capacitor. My family had a Commodore in the eighties, and it was so slow we could literally make a sandwich while waiting for it to load a program.

And if anyone’s going to turn a plane into a time machine, why a Cessna? I’ve heard that Cessnas are notoriously finicky as far as weight and balance go (what plane isn’t?), so it’s odd that Nick would load one with unusual equipment while putting it through such unusual paces.

Then again, budget constraints. And it’s just a movie.

What’s really laughable is the acting. Nick and Lisa have painfully awful romantic chemistry, and when she recoils from him in one scene it doesn’t appear to be acting. And the ADR tech must have been a major fan of reverb, because there’s so much of it in the first scene that I expected Nick to pull out a sword and yell, “I HAVE THE POWER!”

As far as the rest of the movie goes, Time Chasers is too boring to be so-bad-it’s-good. Not even the RiffTrax guys can save it, although they do get the credit for bringing it out of Turkey Movie Hades. It now has a cult following, which I totally understand. I just prefer Birdemic.

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Time Chasers is available to stream on Amazon Prime (RiffTrax version only). Rated: PG-13.

My grade: F

Principal cast: Matthew Bruch, Bonnie Pritchard, George Woodward, Michael J. Valentine

Directed and written by: David Giancola