Along with the dreary big budget bomb "The Awakening" and the enjoyably idiotic Italian splatter-fest "Dawn of the Mummy," this deliciously dreadful sci-fi/horror alien mummy abomination tried (and failed) to inject some much-needed juice into the all dried up mummy fright feature genre. Archeology professor Ben Murphy discovers the coffin of the mysterious Ankh-Venharis (that's "Noble Traveler" to you and me) in King Tutankhaman's Egyptian tomb. Murphy takes the mummified interstellar stiff back to the California Institute of Sciences. Naturally, the mummy comes back to life and shambles about the college campus, offing dipstick students with its lethal fungus touch as it tries to find the five glowing crystals it needs to go home.
Sluggishly paced, woodenly acted, poorly written, and flatly directed, "Time Walker" follows the basic pattern of many other then fashionable academia-set kill-the-collegians slash'n'gash movies. Boasting plenty of classically cruddy dialogue ("Listen you pervert -- if you don't get out of here I'll kick your bandaged butt!"), this wonderfully wretched stinker starts out pretty silly and becomes more increasingly ridiculous as it goes along, reaching an uproarious apex of all-out stultifying stupidity during its absurdly overwrought and sentimental conclusion. The cast reads like a veritable who's who of 80's exploitation cinema: "Motel Hell" 's Nina Axelrod, "Chained Heat" 's Greta Blackburn, Allene Simmons (she's one of the luscious ladies being eyeballed in the infamous shower sequence in "Porky's"), "Hell Night" 's Kevin Brophy as the dumb greedy X-ray technician who steals the mummy's hot rocks and accidentally revives it by over-amping the radiation; "Invasion U.S.A." 's Melissa Prophet (who does a brief topless scene and gets attacked by the mummy while taking a shower), and "Prom Night" 's Antoinette Bower. "Assault on Precinct 13" survivors Darwin Joston and Austin Stoker are reunited here as a diligent, no-nonsense police lieutenant and a wise pathologist, respectively. James "The Pathmark Man" Karen grumbles his way through the thankless role of the cranky college dean. Robert A. Burns (the titular psychotic white trash lunatic in the grimy, flesh-crawling "Confessions of A Serial Killer") was one of the set designers. Jason "Flesh Gordon" WIlliams not only co-wrote the story and co-produced the flick, but also has a small part as an overaged jerk frat boy. Prolific B-pic composer Richard Band supplies a surprisingly good creeped-out gloom-doom orchestral score. Robbie Goldberg's delectably cheesy cinematography goes overboard on the slipshod, would-be state-of-the-art fancy-pants visual flourishes: vertical wipes, shaky hand-held camera-work, green-tinted POV shots of the murderous mummy on the prowl, and some especially strenuous drawn-out slow motion. Bad to the point were it borders on the unbelievable, "Time Walker" serves as a potent reminder that sloppy, supremely ill-advised attempts at handy-dandy multi-genre combos can indeed be a surefire formula for superior shoddy schlock at its most entertainingly awful.
Sluggishly paced, woodenly acted, poorly written, and flatly directed, "Time Walker" follows the basic pattern of many other then fashionable academia-set kill-the-collegians slash'n'gash movies. Boasting plenty of classically cruddy dialogue ("Listen you pervert -- if you don't get out of here I'll kick your bandaged butt!"), this wonderfully wretched stinker starts out pretty silly and becomes more increasingly ridiculous as it goes along, reaching an uproarious apex of all-out stultifying stupidity during its absurdly overwrought and sentimental conclusion. The cast reads like a veritable who's who of 80's exploitation cinema: "Motel Hell" 's Nina Axelrod, "Chained Heat" 's Greta Blackburn, Allene Simmons (she's one of the luscious ladies being eyeballed in the infamous shower sequence in "Porky's"), "Hell Night" 's Kevin Brophy as the dumb greedy X-ray technician who steals the mummy's hot rocks and accidentally revives it by over-amping the radiation; "Invasion U.S.A." 's Melissa Prophet (who does a brief topless scene and gets attacked by the mummy while taking a shower), and "Prom Night" 's Antoinette Bower. "Assault on Precinct 13" survivors Darwin Joston and Austin Stoker are reunited here as a diligent, no-nonsense police lieutenant and a wise pathologist, respectively. James "The Pathmark Man" Karen grumbles his way through the thankless role of the cranky college dean. Robert A. Burns (the titular psychotic white trash lunatic in the grimy, flesh-crawling "Confessions of A Serial Killer") was one of the set designers. Jason "Flesh Gordon" WIlliams not only co-wrote the story and co-produced the flick, but also has a small part as an overaged jerk frat boy. Prolific B-pic composer Richard Band supplies a surprisingly good creeped-out gloom-doom orchestral score. Robbie Goldberg's delectably cheesy cinematography goes overboard on the slipshod, would-be state-of-the-art fancy-pants visual flourishes: vertical wipes, shaky hand-held camera-work, green-tinted POV shots of the murderous mummy on the prowl, and some especially strenuous drawn-out slow motion. Bad to the point were it borders on the unbelievable, "Time Walker" serves as a potent reminder that sloppy, supremely ill-advised attempts at handy-dandy multi-genre combos can indeed be a surefire formula for superior shoddy schlock at its most entertainingly awful.