I'm giving this one a "3" mainly for its curiosity value. Have you ever treated yourself to a really bad movie? A movie that has no plot, for instance? Well, this one goes a bit further than that. It introduces and then ditches so many plots that I stopped counting after seven. Part of the problem undoubtedly is that the producer obviously ran out of money. He did spend up big on special effects and that presumably wiped out the budget. No money for a script-writer, so he was forced to improvise. He doubtless hoped that patrons would go so ga-ga over his library of special effects that no-one would notice that the plot he and/or some lackey made up on the spot, made no sense. Maybe he took suggestions from the players? Maybe he wrote up some scenes with his kids at home? Maybe he asked the watchman at the studio gates? Or more likely, the special effects people? The movie is crowded with special effects, that's for sure. Most of them - indeed probably all of them - make no sense, of course, but who's going to notice? The audience? What audience? The title is all wrong for a starter. What day? What time? What end? It should have been titled: "The Day They Tried To Make a Classy "A" Movie On a "B" budget".

When 'Charles Band Productions' comes up in the opening credits it gives a clue as to this film's content: Band's B-movies have always tended to focus on low-rent special effects over the necessities of plotting and dialogue. As it turns out, THE DAY TIME ENDED is one of the most plot less films I've ever watched; it tells a story via action with no real explanation as to what's going on. At the end you'll be scratching your head and wondering what you watched.What story there is begins with a rural family meeting up in a remote desert house. This reunion soon descends into calamity with the arrival of mini alien spaceships and even a few flesh-and-blood critters who seem intent on wreaking havoc. It's all to do with some strange alignment in outer space, but other than that I really had no idea what was going on...or, indeed, who the 'good' aliens and 'bad' aliens were.As is typical for a low-budget B-movie, hardly any attention is given to the performances, although there are a surprising number of familiar faces in the cast. Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone bring gravitas as the old-timers, Robert Mitchum's lad Chris shows up, and the little girl from THE ENTITY and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR has a major role. The special effects are pretty ropey, although I always enjoy stop motion no matter what, but it is all rather silly and ends up descending into farce at the climax. John 'Bud' Cardos made some great little films in the 1970s like KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS and THE DARK, but this ain't one of them!

According to the opening credits for "The Day Time Ended", four writers are credited with developing the story and writing the screenplay. And none of them apparently were able to make the movie's story make much sense. I'm not sure even if you can call what's in the movie a story - much of the movie seems to be just a series of random supernatural events, and even the resolution at the end doesn't answer what the intents of the creators of the events are. Though the problems of the movie go beyond the bad script. Director John 'Bud' Cardos makes much of this theatrical movie have the feel of a made-for-TV movie of this period. Is there anything positive to say about this movie? Well, some of the special effects aren't bad for a movie that had a pittance of a budget. But I'd rather have a good script with bad special effects than a movie with good special effects and a bad script.

While watching John 'Bud' Cardos's The Day Time Ended (1979), I couldn't help but think of Tobe Hooper's (i.e. Steven Spielberg's) Poltergeist (1982): replace aliens with ghosts and you have eerily similar movies. A series of inexplicable, supernatural events; a family moving into a recently built house in the desert; the young daughter disappearing into a vortex only to be followed by her desperate mother: it's all there (my somewhat crack-pot theory posits that Poltergeist was payback from Spielberg, whose 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' was clearly ripped-off by Cardos for The Day Time Ended).Of course, Cardos's movie is—to put it mildly—nowhere near as good as either Close Encounters or Poltergeist: the random script feels as though it was written on the fly, the special effects are ambitious (given the budget) but still shonky, and the acting is mediocre at best (watch the reaction shot of Dorothy Malone when she answers a knock at the door from a surprisingly polite, poorly animated, stop-motion monster—it's hilarious!). After much preposterousness featuring dazzling lights in the sky, battling beasts, and malevolent machines, none of which makes any sense, the film conveniently reunites the entire family with no explanation whatsoever and leaves them heading for a futuristic alien city (where, for all they know, the inhabitants are hideous monstrosities with a taste for human flesh!).