TIME WARP (1981)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

There are only two things that are good about TIME WARP.

One is that in the midst of its general awfulness, it sports one of Adam West's better post-BATMAN performances, which is the only thing that makes this "comedy" even a little bit amusing.

The other is that reading IMDB reviews of TIME WARP, particularly this blogpost, informed me that about half a dozen of the super-cheap SF movies I occasionally caught in late-night showings all emanated from the same production team: Robert Emenegger, Allan Sandler, and Anne (sister of Steven) Spielberg. Those that I saw I disliked, not because they were cheap, but because they were dull and unimaginative.

The protagonist of WARP is Mark Devore (Harry Johnson), who embodies a brand-new oxymoron, "the happy go lucky astronaut." He's sent all the way to some distant quadrant of the Milky Way to investigate a possible black hole phenomenon, but he's first seen sitting in his spaceship reading a comic book. 

Devore's slacker character is opposed by his commander Ed Westin (West), a typical stick-up-his-butt military man. Westin's calculations were the basis for the expedition, though its utility for military purposes is never rationalized, since the alleged black hole doesn't present a threat. Covertly, Westin has a special reason for wanting Devore gone: he's sabotaged the ship so that the slacker-naut will be Lost in Space. Then Westin hopes to console Devote's grieving widow Ellen (Gretchen Corbett), while presumably finding some way to pack off her pesky young boy Ron to boarding school.

The sabotage doesn't work as Westin intends. Devote gets back to Earth, but he's experienced that peculiar dance known as "the Time Warp," and it's made him take a jump to the left, leaving him out of phase with everything and everyone on the planet. The spaced-out man can however communicate mentally with animals, which leads to various dopey seance-shenanigans. Eventually, Devore-- whose hijinks as essayed by Johnson are tedious in the extreme-- is able to hijack a second spaceship, ride it back into outer space, and get back in phase, though the film concludes before we see his triumphant return.

I have to give minor props to actress Corbett as well, as she sells Ellen's embarrassed attempts to courteously fend off the groping fingers of Commander Westin. I tend to think that, had Adam West never gained the association of playing the super-straight Caped Crusader, I still would have valued his performance as a letch barely able to contain his lustful impulses. But scripter Anne Spielberg even manages to blow the one good thing in the movie, in that Westin suffers nothing more than mild discomfort as a penalty for both coveting his friend's wife and attempting murder.