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!).
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!).