The Day Time Ended (1980): Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie, or Brilliant Depiction of Fortean Phenomena?

After blogging about the swine flu epidemic, I thought I'd write about something more amenable, and closer to the topics we like best here at TDG.

So today I'm going to write about this movie which I think I only saw once on TV a loooooong time ago, and yet it caused me such an impression that I never forgot about it; and I've been thinking about that movie for quite a while recently.

The problem was, I'd forgotten the name of the movie! So, making use of my —rather pathetic— Interwebz searching Kung-Fu, I finally managed to find the name of the film I'd seen back when I was a child.

The movie in question is "The Day Time Ended". And as the movie poster informs us:

THEIR LIVES BECAME A LIVING HELL...
WHEN PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE COLLIDED!

The IMDB page also has this brief plot summary:

Aliens visit the solar-powered house of a middle-class family, and the house is suddenly sucked into a time warp that transports it back to prehistoric times

This explanation really sucks; and I'll tell you why in a minute...

One of the reasons I think this particular movie stuck with me for so long —after watching it only once— was because of all the weirdness that throws at you. Not only there's UFOs, but also weird little green gnome-like creatures coming into the main characters' bedroom, along with monstrous beasts that have reptilian features; so the first thing you watch the movie the initial natural reaction is... WTF???

And from some of the movie reviews I've read, it seems most people don't go beyond that first reaction and quickly label this film as a pointless Sci-Fi B-movie without a clear story.

Ah! But for an avid student of Fortean phenomena, this jewel of a movie discloses a hidden treasure...

For you see, "The Day Time Ended" has an interest number of correlations with one of the most famous cases of high-strangeness that we know of: The Skinwalker ranch.

I'll try to list some of the things I remember about the movie, and compare it with the Skinwalker ranch info:

• The setting of the movie is in the southeast region of the United States, in a ranch that is kind of a cool mix of modern and traditional "Pueblo" architecture. We of course know that Skinwalker ranch is located in Utah.
• The main protagonists of the movie —a senior couple who own the ranch and plan to spend their golden years in it— are shown enjoying the beauty of the night sky when suddenly they have a UFO close encounter. UFO sightings are fairly common in the Skinwalker ranch.
• The movie hints that, after some weird cosmic event, the are of the ranch become some sort of "Time vortex", that presumably causes the Past, Present & Future to collide on this little desert area [Take a look at this clip from the movie]. So in that sense the monsters that go scaring the stable horses are some kind of prehistoric beasts, but personally I think that explanation sucks; to me, the plot is more interesting if we see what's happening as some sort of "Portal" —what John Keel might call a "Window Area"— that permits the entrance of creatures from another Universe/Dimension/Whatever into our level of reality. And as you all probably know, Bigfoot-like creatures are awfully common around the premises of the Skinwalker ranch.
• The movie also shows diverse examples of paranormal phenomena: Poltergeist effects, lights that turn on & off by themselves, etc. All of this also reported at Skinwalker ranch.

I won't tell you the ending of the movie, but I will disclose that the plot never fully explains the cause for all the mysterious phenomena that terrorize the characters. Some people might find this to be a serious flaw, but I on the other hand find this more enjoyable. As with Skinwalker ranch, a possible explanation for all the high-strangeness might be forever beyond our reach.

So, I recommend this movie to you, because to my understanding it might be one of the few examples where a Sci-Fi movie dared to mix all these paranormal phenomena together; something rather refreshing, considering the fondness of Hollywood to pigeon-hole themes in movies —either it's an alien film, or a monster film, or a ghost film, but a film where you have all of them?? that would make a studio exec have a stroke!

Here is a Veoh link that allegedly permits you to watch the whole movie on-line, provided you download some program to your computer —something I'm not ready to endorse simply because I'm not familiar with this Internet site.

If you decide to watch the movie online, or you've already seen it, I'd like to know what you think of it.

I'm telling you, the only thing lacking in "The Day Time Ended" is a little Mothman cameo :)