So begins 2009. It feels like just yesterday that I was finishing out 2008 with my now classic review for the Coolio opus Dracula 3000... when in actuality it was more like 3 days ago. Oh how the time just passes us by. Anyway, in celebration of Father Time moving one more bead on his abacus, badmovies.org has put together a roundtable celebrating man's cinematic molestations of the space-time continuum. Always eager to do our part in the expansion of the bad movie community's waistband, I thought it time to dig out my copy of Time After Time... though the Evil Dead Bride suggested I get freaky on Gavin MacLeod's 2002 Christianity happy sci-fi flick Time Changer. But, there's always next year...

Fortunately, Time After Time is NOT a Cyndi Lauper bio-pic. Then again, given her career crossover with the WWF in the '80s, maybe a Cyndi bio-pic wouldn't be so hard to watch after all. Anyway, she's not in this movie so if you're looking to wank your crank or flick your Bic to the lady you're better off watching the music video for "She Bop" instead. As for Time After Time? One of the most prolific science fiction writers of all time travels through time to fight history's most enigmatic and infamous serial killer. Wow. What a fuckin' wonky way to fire up the new year!

Atheist, Socialist, and free-loving mustachioed hippie author H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell!) has a huge discovery to share with his fellow big brained upper lip gardeners: time travel. Yes, in an effort to make sweet Lady Chronology his bitch, ol' Herbert George has invented a machine that allows him to navigate the seas of history... and had Jules Verne design the blueprints from the looks of it. It's like something he picked up at Willy Wonka's garage sale! The thing probably runs on daydreams and liquefied Oompa-Loompas! In actuality, the time machine runs on solar power, as befitting Wells's flower child mentality... which is still a weird thing to accept given McDowell's infamous raping and pillaging (to show tunes and classical music no less) in A Clockwork Orange some 8 years prior...

Convinced that the world will be one big honkin' Utopia within three generations, Wells intends to scoot ahead in the continuum (using words with a double 'u' make my nerd side tingle) and visit the existence he feels befits his forward thinking philosophies... holy ayatollahs is he in for a surprise. Besides, who would want to leave 1880s England!? The only thing more readily available than the mass quantities of mustaches were the scads of dirt cheap prostitutes! Oh well, sometimes when you're surrounded by the things that make life great, your appreciation for them dampens. Such is the way of man: the grass is never green enough in your own damn lawn. Suckers.

Anyway, it turns out that Herbert's associate and chess nemesis John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner!) is in actuality the Reaper of Whitechapel, not to be confused with my old nickname, "the Reaper of White Castle". That was of course before my arteries started hardening like they were getting the "come hither" from Medusa and I had to start taking four different prescriptions to keep myself from doing a Greg Louganis into the deep end of the "Dead Before 30" pool. Enough about me though, as I'd like instead to put forward the theory that John's brutal misogynist tendencies are no doubt a psychological result of being branded with a middle matronymic like "Leslie"... Having been quiet on the hooker butchering in recent years, Stevenson of course chose tonight of all nights to let Jack out for some fresh air and whore gore, leading Scotland Yard to the Wells household in their desperate sweep of the neighborhood. Of course Lesbo's nowhere to be found after a search of the house, cuz while everybody else was playing seek, he was playing hide... IN TIME! Yep, Jack the Ripper has stolen H.G. Wells's time machine and escaped into the 20th Century to begin his cleavage cleaving anew. Bet Herbie wishes he'd invented The Club before the time machine...

Not as dumb as he looks, Wells did include a manual recall device to drag his machine back to 1883 in such an emergency. So, tweaking his magic pixie stick and grabbing all the cash, silver, and jewelry he has in the house (and his trusty flask of brandy), H.G. hits the gas on his returned Wonka Mobile and heads to the year 1979 to amend the mistake he made possible and save "Utopia" from Jack the Ripper... provided he hasn't already been shanked by a junkie or killed by a street gang. Oddly enough, despite having never tested the machine out before, it manages to make two successful runs on its first time out. Also, though Wells says that it runs on solar power, both instances of the time machine's actual use so far have occurred in the middle of the night. Then again, while I'm at it I could point out that time machines don't actually exist either, so I'll shut up with the nitpicking now folks.

After a similarly Wonka-esque "tripping balls" montage of swirling colors and disorienting sound bytes (did I accidentally flip Media Player into "Randomization" mode?!), our hero show up in the 20th Century smack dab in the middle of a San Francisco museum display dedicated to his greatness... and he does so right in front of an 8 year-old Corey Feldman, making his first feature film appearance! Wow, that was random. Wells snags a pair of specs from his old desk (on display in the same room as his supposedly non-functional time machine) and a Sherlock Holmes hat, then it's off to do the "fish out of water" time displaced tourist thing. "Don't Walk" signs are ignored, car accidents are caused, fast food is consumed, laxative commercials are viewed, a cab ride is had, and escalators are traversed, but sadly we're not privy to the wacky misadventures of watching a man from 1883 try to use a 1979 public toilet. Denied. You lose. Good day Sir.

After casing every bank in San Fran trying to find a lead on any other limeys that might've been by to convert 100 year old British pounds into dollars recently, Herbie finally finds his answers with foreign currency officer Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen... meh). The mandatory and awkward "time traveler learns of women's lib" conversation ensues before Amy points him in the direction of the Hyatt-Regency she recommended Stevenson spend the night at. Chicks dig time displaced British authors, and since every other guy in San Francisco is of the mustache riding variety, Amy wastes no time passing her phone number along to Mr. Wells as wells... err, as well. Damn it, why can't I meet desperate aggressive banker chicks?! Do I have to bathe, dress nice, and do the Hugh Grant "nervous nitwit" thing too?! Why no love for the big unwashed beard-o with the mono-brow who just stands in silent judgment of the shitheads across the room? Frowny face is me. :(

Of course, just because he can find his friend-turned-enemy doesn't mean that Herbie's going to be able to bring Jack back to face the consequences of his crimes. I mean, the guy's got a good 6 inches and probably 30 or more pounds on him, so don't much like the odds of Wells taking the killer back by force. Given the madman's murderous mindset and sociopath ways, I'm pretty sure he won't be convinced to just go back to 1883 and shake hands with Death hanging at the end of a noose neither. Then again, Jack might be better convincing his pursuer that he's a better fit for the 20th century, what with violence rampant in the world and everybody embracing their bloodlusts. Wells figured the new world would be a Utopia, he just never expected for whom it would be as such.

Oooo, that sounded kinda poetic a shit. Nice.

After a chase through the city that can best be described as silly, John/Jack gets his by a car and taken to the hospital, only to supposedly die from internal injuries shortly after. Naturally this isn't the case, since we're only about half way through the movie. No, instead H.G. uses the time to get bedroom friendly with Amy, eat in a rotating restaurant, learn how to drive a car, maiming some silverware in a garbage disposal, and jackhammering his dental work with an electric toothbrush. Meanwhile, Jack is up and around, seeking out his usual victim types amidst the after dark hours of San Fran's seedier streets. Despite its dubious distinction for guy-on-guy situations, San Francisco is well stocked in prostitutes of the vagina bearing kind. After mutilating a few 20th Century flavored sluts, Lesbo figures out that it was Amy who pointed Wells in his direction and gives her a message for Herbie: give him the keys to the time machine and go back to his own time, otherwise Amy might find her way on Jack's ripping schedule. All efforts to get the SFPD involved are pointless, even without telling them about the time travel stuff. Since neither Stevenson nor Wells came into the country through "normal" channels, there's no customs record for either, so the cops have no proof that anything Herbie's saying is on the level. As you can guess, confessing the details of everything to Amy goes even worse, as she pegs Wells as the unfortunate nut bag whom all women in her position (the love interest of a time and/or space traveler) fall for. Her tune immediately changes though when Wells actually takes her a few days into the future... and she discovers that Jack made her his latest victim... which makes absolutely no fucking sense, since she wasn't even in existence between the moment of their departure and the time of their arrival in days later... but I said I wouldn't bitch about shit like this anymore, so I'll just move on... clenching my fists and grinding my molars.

Herbie tries to convince Amy to go back to the 1880s with him and avoid getting Jack-ed off, but she doesn't see it as a way to preserve her continued existence so much as H.G. being a chauvinist and trying to manipulate her into giving up the life she's worked so hard to earn for herself. If it were me? Let Amy get killed, jump ahead to 1984 and snag Barbara Crampton from the set of Re-Animator, then take her back in time to a point before man evolved where I'd be her only option for companionship and literally the only man on Earth. I figure that's about the only shot I've got with her anyway. Back to our endangered banker and her time displaced beau, they use the newspaper picked up from days in the future to figure out where and when Jack will slice & dice his next victim in an attempt to stop him. Given that Wells still insists on pacifism and refuses to give in the modern day blood thirst prevalent all around him, I'm not sure exactly how he thinks he's going to keep his former friend from spilling the red stuff again...

If the "man out of time" gimmick has lost its charm with you, stay far away from Time After Time. What was still something of a novel idea 30 years ago has been done to death, re-animated, then done to death again and again. The fact that it's two noted historical characters adds something of an interesting bonus to it, watching Wells come so close to compromising his personal morality when it means the life or death of the woman he loves carries a twinge of intrigue to it, and the nipple tweak ending comes with its own pros and cons, but I guess I was just hoping for something more. Though time travel is obviously not a science in itself, it's hard sometimes to leash your logical side and expect it to stay quietly tied up to a tree while you're in the drug store looking for that special "for mommies & daddies" type of rash cream. The idea of two versions of the same person co-existing in the same dimension at the same time, not letting knowledge of the future affect you in the past, dying even though you're not around for your own murder (though that part does at least get some explanation later on), and every imaginable complication and perversion of logic that falls under the same dirty tarp. <> The Jack the Ripper stuff doesn't live up the killer's gruesome ways since this is a mainstream effort by Warner Bros., so gore whores beware. And though Warner can do the "cold and calculating sociopath" thing with what looks like ease, Jack just doesn't get the screen time he deserves as the villain. Maybe I'm just spoiled by modern day "good vs. evil" movies that have since realized people audiences are more intrigued by the motivations of the monster rather than the emo self-guilt of the protagonist. I'm always a big McDowell supporter too, and though his H.G. has a wit, charm, and analytical mind that make him likable, he also runs like a little girl playing kickball and he's forced to do that befuddled thing with his character that annoys me endlessly. The latter is more the writers' faults than McDowell's though, so that makes the performance go down a little smoother. As for Steenburgen, I've never been a fan of her particular style of thesbianism (not a word) anyway. She always seems like she's doped up during her delivery and unless she's playing a depressed woman on pain meds, it never feels like a good fit. It's like breaking in new shoes: it's uncomfortable, painful, and leaves your feet covered in oozing pustules before it gets better.

Given the current atmosphere in Hollywood, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody was peddling around a script for an updated version of Time After Time as I type this. And you know what? There's somebody out there just stupid enough to produce it to. Mark my words, within the next two years you'll see Nicholas Cage (with a badly tacked on British accent and goofy mustache) chasing Gary Oldman through time in something that looks like a cross between a Prius and a swordfish, falling in love with Halle Berry along the way in between time travel related pratfalls and misunderstandings. You laugh now, but take your time machine to 2011 and prove me wrong. What's that? You don't have a time machine? Then I suggest you stuff the proverbial sock into the proverbial "it" and leave it at that.