Scott LeBrun Try this wacky premise on for size: when a mummy discovered inside the tomb of King Tut is brought back to a university, it turns out to actually be an alien, which is soon brought back to life by an X-ray overdose. A fairly slimy student (the same one who overdid it on the X- rays) discovers crystals inside the sarcophagus and, when he can't get a jeweller to take them, he sells them to his classmates. Well, this pisses off the "mummy" who embarks on a murderous rampage to retrieve the crystals, while the heroic archaeologist / professor Douglas McCadden (Ben Murphy) tries to figure out what's going on. I wonder how Steve Martin might work all this into his famous "King Tut" song? Anyway, I won't deny that this is far from being "good" stuff, but if you dig goofy low budget genre nonsense like this, as I do, you may also find some entertainment watching this. Hell, it does have its moments, in particular an extended chase scene. And among its crew are the under-rated composer Richard Band and art director Robert A. Burns of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" fame. "Flesh Gordon" star Jason Williams is actually one of those responsible for the story, as well as being one of the producers and playing a small role. While the acting is largely, predictably underwhelming, the casting mix has to be seen to be believed: first off, it *is* awesome seeing "Assault on Precinct 13" leads Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston (sadly, this was Joston's last movie role) once again acting together in scenes. Also appearing are Kevin Brophy ("Hell Night", "The Seduction", 'Lucan'), the under utilized James Karen ("The Return of the Living Dead"), Shari Belafonte-Harper (getting an 'introducing' credit), Antoinette Bower ("Prom Night" 1980), Greta Blackburn ("48 Hrs.", "Chained Heat"), Nina Axelrod ("Motel Hell"), Warrington Gillette (the guy credited as Jason in "Friday the 13th Part 2"), future 'L.A. Law' regular Alan Rachins as the jeweller, and the late, great trailer announcer Don LaFontaine as a reporter cracking bad jokes on television. Sporting supposedly clever touches such as green tinted alien P.o.V. shots and the frequent use of wipes, "Time Walker" is simply too hard to resist for fans of silly schlock. The ending is downright priceless in its attempt at sentimentality, as well as its attempt to set up a sequel, stating "to be continued" before the end credit crawl. While some viewers may be very happy that never happened, I still say that this movie has a certain clunky charm. Five out of 10.

lemon_magic This is a perfect example of the kind of low-level, low budget, crummy movie that really should not have been made in the first place. It has the feel of a "direct-to-cable/3rd feature at the Drive-in" snooze fest that never really generates any interest or momentum. The best you can say about it is that it helped a bunch of B-to-Z level actors make their condo payments, that Sherry Belafonte-Harper was fairly cute, and that both the director of photography and the soundtrack composer worked really hard to pump up the watch-ability of this movie with a lot of extra jiving and filling.Poor Ben Murphy slogs along as best he can here, trying to make the audience (all 4 or us) believe that he is an archaeologist. I'll give him this; even in a snooze like this movie, where all the close-ups are held too long and every scene has the drama and pacing of a drivers' ed training film, he remains amiable and likable. God only knows how hard "Time Walker" would have been to watch if he hadn't at least given the movie his agreeable screen presence. People make fun of him, and he is a light-weight, but I've always liked the guy; I hope he made a million dollars and retired happily somewhere.The rest of the cast comes off as somewhere between "unlikeable" and "despicable", (I have no idea what they are like in real life, so please don't take this as character assassination), so you actually sort of enjoy it (instead of being horrified) when the mummy kills them. Of course, that may have been the intention of the movie, but in that case, the director could at least have made the deaths a little more memorable. I saw better staged monster attacks in the infamous "Pod People" - the victim's death-scenes here are like watching hamsters getting squished with a giant clown hammer. And Belafonte-Harper actually has some on camera charisma, but the movie doesn't seem to know what to do with her - she seems to be in, but not of, the film. It's as if she wanted the exposure, but she couldn't bear to actually be involved in the plot. The movie ends with Murphy's character teleporting off with the mummy to an unknown fate (good riddance) and the dean's assistant screaming into the camera as left-over space slime eats his hand. I think this was meant to leave us with a feeling of mystery and wonder and horror, but it left me with a profound feeling of relief that this bag of creaky dramatic devices was finally done. Not the worst or most incompetent movie I've ever seen, but definitely pretty useless.

jgarner136 My sister and I saw this movie in the theatre, and we and the other half dozen people agreed never to admit we were there or saw each other. As another reviewer said, this movie stinks out loud. I'm really sorry I missed it on MST3K.Others have recapped the plot, so I won't bother. I believe a good writer and cast could have saved it. Unfortunately, it had neither. We spent a good bit of the movie laughing, even though it is not a comedy. I think the best thing that can be said about the acting is that I don't see how these people said their lines with straight faces. Maybe they're better actors than I thought.*SPOILER" (?) A word about the crystals-as the mummy collected them, he put them on a small triangular board, rather like a section of a Chinese checker board. We decided it was an old table game from a Denny's. Also, the phrase "Don't x-ray it!" has become a running joke in our family.

Woodyanders 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.