Many of us speculate what happens when you travel through a wormhole. By essentially awarding us with a sense of escape from the confines of Euclidean space, wormholes provide us with an opportunity to enter the unimaginable, to a far off time and point in space that hopefully includes exotic humanoid babes, if that’s your kind of thing. In the 1960 B feature ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’, our hero comes out the other end of a wormhole to find himself interacting with a version of Earth he never thought possible, plus there are babes. This time traveling science fiction film is today’s Throwback Thursday, a column where sciencefiction.com looks at some sci fi pieces of the past.
Though not the best science fiction film the Cold War era had to offer, ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ is a noble try aiming to warn us that the future is always in peril if we continue with our nuclear testing and space traveling ways. US Air Force test pilot Major Bill Allison (played by the king of B sci fi movies, Robert Clarke) is tasked with flying his aircraft to sub-orbital space. However, Allison enters a wormhole, traveling faster than time itself… beyond time’s barriers, if you will.
Allison finds himself returning to Earth in the year 2024. Everything is desolate except for the remnants of life existing within an underground city called The Citadel. Allison is captured and taken to the very triangular Citadel where he learns that a plague cursed the Earth in 1971, turning everyone into mutants. Allison befriends a blind mute princess named Trirene (Darlene Tompkins of ‘Blue Hawaii’). Allison also runs into some other time travelers trapped in the Citadel. Once Allison finds his footing in this new space and time, he must find a way back to 1960 to warn his people.
Clarke produced ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ after directing and taking on the leading role in another B sci fi movie, ‘The Hideous Sun Demon’. Clarke hired director Edgar G. Ulmer to take the helm as the two previously worked together on ‘The Man from Planet X’.
I can only describe the special effects in ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ as adorable. It’s like watching the first home movies famous filmmakers made as kids. In terms of story, you just kind of assume Allison is heroic as he doesn’t really have that much of a backstory. However, ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ is entertaining, not too long, and definitely something to consider watching if you’re looking to take a little break from your current space-time continuum. Take a look at the trailer!
