Beyond the Time Barrier

1960 "Adam and Eve of the year 2024! Only they could repopulate the world!"
5.3| 1h15m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 08 September 1960 Released
Producted By: Miller Consolidated Pictures (MCP)
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

In 1960, a pilot testing an experimental rocket powered aircraft accidentally flies into the future and finds himself in a sealed city whose people suspect he is a spy from outside their walls, but who want to keep him to procreate with the ruler's daughter because the majority of the inhabitants are sterile.

... View More
Stream Online

Stream with Prime Video

Director

Producted By

Miller Consolidated Pictures (MCP)

Trailers & Images

Reviews

oscar-35 *Spoiler/plot- Beyond the Time Barrier, 1960. An AirForce officer piloting a new hi-speed jet aircraft that travels into the edge of space creates a time barrier and land in the distant future. The occupants of the distance future are victims of the nuclear war and wish to live under ground to survive and flourish.*Special Stars- Robert Clarke, Darlene Tompkins, Vladimir Sokoloff.*Theme- American ingenuity will win and change a dire future history.*Trivia/location/goofs- B&W. Texas Fort Worth's Carswell Air Force Base. *Emotion- Wonderfully campy and exciting to watch this film. A nice slice of 50's technology and panic from the space race. The lead male actor was the producer of this and several other films of this type and era.*Based On- The Cold War invasion worries.
Scott LeBrun The legendary cult director Edgar G. Ulmer certainly had made better movies than this but that doesn't mean that this isn't fun to some degree. The main problem is that the (lack of a) budget shows: there's a lot more exposition here than action. But the actors are sincere, the visuals and atmosphere are decent, and there's a nifty twist ending that one might not see coming. The result is a minor but amusing effort that kills time easily enough.Robert Clarke (also the producer of the movie), who'd previously starred for Ulmer in "The Man from Planet X", plays William Allison, an Air Force pilot who goes on an experimental flight. Somehow, he breaks the time barrier and ends up 64 years in the future, where a plague has decimated most of mankind and where various people hole up in an underground building dubbed The Citadel. The plague has caused various stages of mutation in people; some folk have become deaf-mutes, such as Princess Trirene (Darlene Tompkins); others are more sickly. The people of this future don't trust Allison, which just makes things more difficult for him as he seeks to find out how to get back to his own time.The supporting cast consists of performers such as Vladimir Sokoloff, Boyd 'Red' Morgan, Stephen Bekassy, John Van Dreelen, and director Ulmers' pretty daughter Arianne in a major supporting role as the dubious Captain Markova. Co-star Tompkins is positively gorgeous and may serve as a distraction for any viewers who are otherwise bored with the movie. (One can't completely knock any movie where female outfits of the future include miniskirts.)This may be no classic of the genre but it does entertain, and only runs an hour and 15 minutes anyway.The makeup effects are by the great Jack Pierce.Six out of 10.
bkoganbing It's always interesting to watch futuristic films made in the past and see how they turn out. The plague of cosmic rays foretold in Beyond The Time Barrier has not occurred and it's already 2011 and it started in 1971 according to the film and Robert Clarke returns in 2024. Still though the cause of the plague is destruction of the atmospheric barrier which is the ozone layer though not called that in the film and in that sense the film is curiously relevant though they got the immediate cause wrong.Robert Clarke plays a Chuck Yeager like test pilot who breaks the time barrier and arrives in a world where some folks are living in a hermetically sealed dome near what used to be White Sands Air Force base. The rest are mutants who are sterile, mute or both. The head of the group inside the dome, Vladimir Sokoloff decides to use Clarke with his healthy sperm as the savior of civilization if he'll only mate with his daughter Darlene Tompkins.The film spared every expense in the making it looks like it was shot with an old Bell&Howell home movie camera. Still it's an interesting bit of work and you can't expect all that much from American-International Pictures unless Roger Corman is involved somewhat and even that's a dubious proposition.
slabihoud So many reviewers already took this film apart and I mostly agree with them. When I saw this film at Vienna's Filmmuseum (Austria), there was one scene I really could not trust my eyes. When this test pilot lands after breaking the time barrier and walks around in search of people he SUDDENLY sees this futuristic city! Well... that insert shot of a city is so completely out of sync with the scenes before and after that at first I thought he is looking at a poster, especially considering that it is so obviously painted like for a comic magazine and to top it all, you could even see the top of the paper it is painted on!!! I was simply shocked by such a poor quality. The guy who shot the insert seemed not to be able to fill the frame. One or two more inserts like this occur in this movie with the same effect. There is a lot of senseless running back and forth inside the city, maybe just to kill time, since the story is so thin. Ulmer proved that he could make good movies, but here he proved that he could make really bad movies as well!