Entry 59: Time Walker (1982)

Time Walker (1982)

Dir: Tom Kennedy

"Nothing can stop him, not even time."

 

A couple of dumbshit Americans (including college Prof Ben Murphy-TV's The Gemini Man) desecrate Tutankhmun's tomb and are promptly stranded by a (budget-consciously offscreen) earthquake.  Murphy escapes and returns to the "California Institute of Sciences (something tells me that's not a real place)" with a plundered sarcophagus.  Upon transcribing the inscription upon it, he and his students (including Nina Axelrod-Cobra, Kevin Brophy-Hell Night, Sheri Bellafonte-TV's Hotel and Melissa Prophet-Invasion USA) are puzzled to discover that it contains the body of a "foreigner."  Murphy proves to be a shitty Professor when he allows his students to x-ray the mummy inside with "10 times the amount of normal radiation!"  The radiation awakens the slumbering corpse, and he's no mere "foreigner," he's a motherfucking ANCIENT ALIEN, bent on resuming his mission of subjugating the earth!  Since this movie has a budget insufficient for world-conquering, however, he has to make do with slinking through the halls of the CIS (can I call it that?), killing the shit out of janitors and other "lower level functionaries."  Meanwhile, the sarcophagus grows a strange fungus that burns the hand off of one of the students, and we're treated to interminable scenes of the other kids goofing off (Belafonte DJs a radio show, Prophet shows her tits for no reason, Axelrod and Brophy go on an awkward date).  In one scene that had me rolling on the floor, a (white) cop's first question to the husband of one of the Mummy's victims is "Can you describe the attacker?  WAS HE BLACK?!"  Later, a bunch of stupid frat kids decide to hold an Egyptian-themed party; they're killed off, too.  In the end, the Mummy uses some alien crystals he's found to shed his bandages, revealing a stereotypical "Grey Alien" appearance.  While the authorities shoot the E.T. dead, suddenly sympathetic Murphy grabs his hand and disappears.  I'm not really sure why.

This movie has a KILLER concept (Karl Freund's The Mummy meets Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? meets John Carpenter's Halloween), but squanders it with a braindead script, amateurish-to-bored performances and utterly indifferent direction (unsurprisingly, this is Kennedy's sole directorial credit).  On the plus side, the night-vision-like "Mummyvision" sequences are okay and Richard Band (Re-Animator, From Beyond)'s Egyptian-tinged score is pretty great.  Not even an appearance from the great Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, playing one of Murphy's colleagues) can save this one from tedium.  Skip it.

*For a just-as-dumb, but bigger-budgeted, take on the same material, see Stargate (1994).  At least it has Kurt Russell...