New Releases for Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Time Loop

Genre: Sci-Fi

Directed by: Ciro Sorrentino

Run time: 83 minutes

Rating: Unrated

Format: Video-on-Demand

The Lowdown: Time travel as a narrative device, historically, has proven a tough nut for most filmmakers to crack.

When it works best, see Back to the Future, Synchronicity, Mega Time Squad and Timecrimes, such heady science-fiction can be thrilling, wholly unexpected and thought-provoking.

But when it doesn’t work, which is often, the resulting repetitive redo of scenes and sequences, often with multiple versions of a character struggling not to interact, becomes too much for a viewer to endure.

Time Loop, an Italian import, and the debut feature from director Ciro Sorrentino, starts off strong enough with a father and son building a device that looks suspiciously like the Stargate.

The father, Riccardo (Mino Sferra), is almost comically Italian, and speaks with such broad exaggerations that he becomes nearly annoying.

Before long, the son, Ricky (Sam Gittins, so good in Await Further Instructions), is trying to avoid and outwit his own clone after his father shoves him into the contraption they’ve invented and turns it on.

Time Loop might work better for other viewers, but for me, it became an interminable exercise in frustration, like standing in place yet jogging at the same time.

The Stuff You Care About:

Hot chicks – Not really.

Nudity – No.

Gore – No.

Drug use – No.

Bad Guys/Killers – You can’t time travel without messing shit up.

Buy/Rent – Neither.

Also Available:

Magnum P.I.: Season Two

Now on Video-on-Demand:

A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio (Uncork’d Entertainment, 100 minutes, Unrated, Video-on-Demand): As horror anthologies go, A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio sneaks up on you when you least expect it, delivering several memorable jolts.

The opening segment is one of the best, focusing on a young girl tasked with taking a funeral portrait of a deceased child about her age. It’s downright creepy as all hell.

Widow’s Point (101 Films, 87 minutes, Unrated, Video-on-Demand): Craig Sheffer (Nightbreed, Hellraiser: Inferno) returns to horror in an adaptation of the novel by Richard Chizmar.