“One thing I’ve learned: Common sense is no prerequisite for architecture.”

Justin’s rating: Don’t make a timepeep and this film might pass you by

Justin’s review: In this line of work, sometimes it’s fun to throw all caution and advance information to the wind and go into a B-movie completely blind. All I knew about Timesweep is that it’s some low-budget affair that marries time travel and horror in some way. And so another roll of the dice to see if I score big or go bust.

After five interminable minutes of a huge group of people introducing themselves to each other in a parking garage, Timesweep kicks off with an exploration of an abandoned film studio by a historical society of bozos. There’s a professor, students, TV reporter, cameraman, and plenty of other fodder bumbling about in a near-completely dark warehouse while Bad Stuff Happens.

This Bad Stuff usually involves the historical society splitting up and getting yanked into different time periods — movies? — where they usually die. Good luck seeing anything, as the lighting guy had the week off, but what Timesweep lacks in cinematography, it makes up for in kooky ideas that sound WAY better than are actually executed.

Cookies turn into cockroaches. The explorers stumble into an old black-and-white flick and then out again. An acid fog settles outside the studio. The hallways turn into a maze (allegedly). Mirrors attack people. A caveman breaks into our time. A dude tries to use the time warp to bring back his dead wife. Bugs try to eat people. A dinosaur head makes a cameo. Zombies go on the march. A cop shows up from the ’60s. And hey, is that a UFO?

But mostly it’s stumbling through the dark, slowly going up stairs, slowly going down stairs, trudging through hallways, and being frustrated with locked doors. At no point does the audience know where the characters are or what their plan is, other than just folks bumbling around until the evil gets its second wind and can kill them proper-like.

This is very nominally a haunted house movie, yet it’s never explained why this film studio is so insane and why it’s keeping these people inside and messing with them. There needed to be much better lead-up to the actual exploration so that we’d understand and even dread this place. I don’t think Timesweep even goes into why this historical society is interested in the place.

And not to belabor the point, but Timesweep is usually too dim to see what’s actually happening. That’s a pretty big movie pet peeve of mine, when filmmakers use the dark to cover their shortcomings and keep the audience confused. I was also pretty bummed that the time travel aspect was under-utilized and kept pretty vague.

One-time-only director Dan Diefenderfer seems out of his depth in a genre-bending multiverse, and it shows in every stilted scene. The entire premise here was done with more skill, better acting, and a higher budget in 1992’s Waxwork II: Lost in Time, so that’s where I’d recommend going if you like this concept.

Intermission!