MOVIE REVIEW: Time Trackers (1989)

In watching the 1982 B-movie classic The Sword and the Sorcerer, my mind fell on the love interest in the film, Kathleen Beller. A striking brunette beauty of the late Seventies to the mid-Eighties, she appeared in The Godfather Part II, the ABC-TV soap opera “Dynasty” and the NBC-TV drama, “The Bronx Zoo”. When I looked her up to see what else she had been in, a movie title jumped out: 1989’s Time Trackers. I had never heard about it before, and even stranger it was only available for viewing on the Internet Archive in the public domain. Why did this movie fall into the public domain — could it have been that bad? Yes and no, as I’m about to detail in my review.

In the year 2033, a group of scientists — doctors Charles Arsenal (Wil Shriner, Peggy Sue Got Married [1986], Hoot [2006]), Karl Zandor (Lee Bergere, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice [1969]), Alistair Craig (Futureworld [1976], Reptilicus [1961]) and his daughter RJ (played by Beller) — invent time travel in the form of a time-travel pod. Unlike the scientists in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”, they do not use it as a way to make money by selling time-traveling safaris to the Prehistoric Era. Instead, they take it one step at a time, proving the ability to change an outcome but only in small increments — a broken coffee mug is prevented from breaking by traveling back 3 minutes into the past to stop its breaking.
Dr. Zandor is unsatisfied with the snail’s pace of testing, and storms off in a huff…with valuable time-travel technology secreted away in his pocket. The team saw Zandor steal the tech and send the base’s guards after him, but he flees to the basement level lab where another time pod waited to hasten his escape into the past. The overly-dramatic Zandor also left a message for his former colleagues, detailing his master plan: to kill all the politicians that screwed up the world AND to kill the ancestors of Dr. Craig (and by extension, RJ). The team’s not having that, so they hatch a plan to send RJ and Charles into the past by tracking Zandor’s time-pod: wherever he stops, they’ll know when to find him. They are teamed up with historical expert Madeleine Hart (Bridget Hoffman AKA voice actress Ruby Marlowe, Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind [1984], Resident Evil: Vendetta [2017], Perfect Blue [1997]) to blend into societies of the period with period-specific costumes and hop into the timestream.

Our heroes, dressed in what the historian thinks is period costume for the 1990s. She needs her pay docked.

While this movie is a time-travel movie, they only visit two time periods: 1991, so Zandor can attempt to assassinate a politician he dislikes, and Medieval Europe (specifically 1146 AD). In these two time periods, they meet two men: LA police officer Harry Orth (Ned Beatty, Deliverance [1972], Superman: the Movie [1978]) and Edgar of Mansfield (Alex Hyde-White, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), allowing our original trio to survive a trip into the past…with quite the twist at the end.

Two words make this movie worse than it should have been: Grandfather Paradox.

To say this movie is bad would be incorrect, but it sure has a lot of dumb stuff in it and is generally low-quality, even for a TV movie. It was NOT made-for-TV — it was a Roger Corman movie. If you’ve been watching movies (or more specifically, bad movies) as long as I have, you know that prolific director/producer’s name is synonymous with “so bad it’s good”, as he’s the mind behind Death Race 2000 (1975), The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), and the Star Wars knock-off Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). While his movies are not good by Hollywood and critical standards, they were in high rotation on nascent cable TV networks desperate for content to fill their broadcast blocks. This allowed for a built-in audience looking for something to watch on cable, and many of his movies achieving “cult-classic” status. So for nearly every weird movie half-remembered from your childhood, it was probably a Corman cult classic. But it doesn’t explain how Time Trackers ended up in the public domain. I suppose that’s a mystery we’ll forget ever existed.

We will not forget this: while it may feel so right RJ, incest is still WRONG.

CHOICE CUTS (spoilers ahead):

• So, a scientist dressed differently than the others with a goatee AND his name sounds like a science-fiction villain? He’s the villain, y’all.
• Zandor — a science-criminal with expertise in time-travel technology — is punished by authorities in 2033 by trapping him in a time capsule with oxygen and no interior controls, then rigged it to travel through time forever. RJ said Zandor would travel through time until the end of time…and he’d be alive to see it all happen. There are so many questions to ask, with my chief concern: is giving a science-criminal a time machine for a prison really a good idea?
• Watching Harry eat the stolen pizza while on duty during a high-speed chase made me say “YOU FAT FUCK” out loud with a smile on my face.
• The artwork for the poster features one outfit in gold techno-armor, its design stolen from a 1987 sci-fi series called “Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future”.
• Time-travel to Medieval Europe is pretty popular, by any means or medium: interesting examples include Black Knight (2001), Timeline (2003), Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1986), “Arthur and the King” (1985), and the ur-example — the 1889 novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” by Mark Twain. NOTE: this list is not exhaustive.
• Edgar’s sister is about DAT LIFE: the word murder is on her lips more than Ja Rule in the early 2000s.
• To know that scientists are hard at work solving the world’s problems in 2033 gives me hope in 2023. Chiefly because the world still exists in 2033.
• The sets in 2033 are absolute dogshit, and I can clearly see the wooden joins on the panels painted to look like castle masonry in 1146 AD.
• Charles is the MVP of the whole movie, masquerading as the “Red Duke” and rallying the forest bandits to take Zandor’s castle in the third act. Did I mention his bumbling scientist act is what allowed him to blow his way out of prison using things found in his cell? Because he did. Charles is awesome, but he needs an ego boost.
• Speaking of an ego boost, Madeleine is perfect for him because she actually respects him and shows it. She also does a bit of the bumbling scientist bit, because she’s an anthropologist who dreams of pigging out on 20th-Century junk food (because the food of her native 2033 doesn’t measure up). She and Charles would be cute together.
• While amazingly hot, RJ has to be the dumbest time-travel scientist I ever watched in a science-fiction film. How do you NOT realize making out with a person from the past and falling in love with him is a problem? Even worse, when you carry on with the same behavior after learning that same person is your ancestor?
• The paradoxical problems get worse as this lady goes back in time to her lover — Edgar of Mansfield, AKA the “Red Duke” — to love him…and become her own ancestor. As a result, RJ has created the most egregious violation of the “Grandfather Paradox” since Time-Rider: the Adventure of Lyle Swann.
• RJ is all about those sweet incestuous kisses from her multi-great grandfather, simply because he speaks of courtly love. If these two insist on making babies, I sincerely hope there’s been enough genetic variation in the intervening 900 years for them to breed without significant defects.
• Oh wait, NOW I know why nobody knows about this movie~