Time Trap |
USA • 2017 • 87m •
   • Directed by: Mark Dennis, Ben Foster. • Starring: Andrew Wilson, Cassidy Gifford, Brianne Howey, Reiley McClendon, Olivia Draguicevich, Max Wright, Hans Marrero, Rich Skidmore, Chris Sturgeon, Gopal Bidari, Elena Diaz, Troy Dillinger, Benji Jones. • Music by: Xiaotian Shi.   A group of students venture into the deep caves of remote Texas to locate a favorite archaeology professor who inexplicably has gone missing while searching for the Fountain of Youth. In the course of their pursuit, the group unwittingly rappels into a break in the space-time continuum, where time passes much slower than on the surface.
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Review:
So I watch a lot of movies. Since great movies are fairly few, I end up watching a lot of trashy movies whether I like it or not. Low budgets, low-quality special-effects, low quality acting and etc. are a daily diet for me. I'm an expert on films where someone said, "Hey! Let's make a movie in the barn!"
TIME TRAP is a real rarity. While not a summer blockbuster or awards night darling, it somehow manages to be both cheap'n'cheesy and a really good, entertaining movie. It's proof that just because you have to make a movie with your allowance money doesn't mean the resulting flick has to be unwatchable.
Perforce, the plot is very simple. If you think about it, nature is full of surprisingly large-scale booby-traps. As examples: the La Brea tar pits have trapped countless thousands of animals for literally tens of thousands of years (and even one human girl). Whole valleys located near volcanically active areas have seen entire populations of animals wiped out by escaping poison fumes. Even whole large-scale dinosaur nesting sites, complete with nesting dinosaurs and eggs, have been wiped out en masse by some natural disaster or other. Sinkholes and caves with vertical walls have been treasure troves of ancient animal skeletons trapped over thousands of years.
And so on.
Similarly, in TIME TRAP, we have a cave system that, for some unexplained reason, has varying levels of time "bubbles" within which time is operating on different scales relative to the larger, outside world. Anyone venturing within the cave system becomes "trapped" in the sense that while they are inside the cave system they are like bugs trapped in amber, effectively frozen in time while the outside world races ahead in "normal" timescale. Technically, people CAN leave, but if they've been within the cave system for any length of time beyond a minute or so, the outside world will have changed beyond recognition when they return to it.
Many of the situations that you might imagine given such a plot description properly play out in the movie. Characters standing outside any time bubble (or within a "faster" time bubble) view other characters standing in other bubbles as either frozen statues or vanishing in an instant. Moving from one bubble to the next, characters who were looking like statues suddenly start moving. Throwing an object from one bubble to another sees that object suddenly freeze in midair. Standing inside a time bubble and looking out upon the outside world one sees the sun flashing by in streaks, very similar to what one sees in any time machine movie.
Fascinatingly, again like bugs caught in amber, over the eons, humans from different eras and different levels of evolution have become "trapped" within the system. The characters which represent the protagonists in the movie encounter everything from cavemen to people from the future. There's one particular scene which depicts an ongoing free-for-all brawl occurring within an especially slow-moving time bubble featuring and including people from many different eras. Wonderfully imaginative.
There are a few relative-time errors within the movie that the viewer has to turn a blind eye to in the name of poetic license. TIME TRAP is somewhat careful in laying out the speed of the time differential between the outside world and the main bubble that our protagonists are trapped within and then clearly violates those time relationships in order to play out some poignant scenes between some of the characters that know each other. Oh, well. Wink wink nudge nudge, give the makers a break. Considering how well they did with the rest of the picture, made with $1.95, I choose to let this one go. Most movies with these sorts of resource origins have too many screw-ups to count. All things considered, TIME TRAP does a pretty nice job with its premise.
I gave this movie a 910 which some people might interpret as my claiming that it's on a par with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK or something, which is not my intent. I simply feel that a low-end movie that rises so far above its station should be well rewarded. TIME TRAP is what it is, and judged relative to the other movies in the bargain bin it comes from, it is a sort of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK of the stand next to the checkout counter.
Review by S. Soma from the Internet Movie Database.
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