Time Signatures

Timequest is a science fiction film released in 2000 and 2002, directed by Robert Dyke. It stars the ensemble cast of Victor Slezak as John F. Kennedy, Caprice Benedetti as Jacqueline Kennedy, Vince Grant, and popular b-movie actor Bruce Campbell. After premiering in April 13, 2002, the film had a limited theatrical release in the United States, followed shortly by distribution on VHS and DVD to the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Plot
Timequest explores the science fiction theme of altering the present day by traveling back in time and tampering with past events. In this particular film, on the morning of November 22, 1963, a seventy-something man (Ralph Waite) who wears spacesuit-type clothing materializes in the hotel suite occupied by Jackie Kennedy (Caprice Benedetti). The Time Traveler shows Jackie future television footage of the assassination and funeral of John F. Kennedy (Victor Slezak). Shortly thereafter, the Time Traveler speaks to the president and to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy (Vince Grant), giving them details of their respective assassinations and of the public revelations of JFK’s sex scandals. The Time Traveler, knowing Bobby’s ways, won’t state his name or his birthplace, but does mention that he was born on this day. The Time Traveler asks Jackie to dance with him; she does. (The Time Traveller is obsessed with Jackie Kennedy.) The Time Traveler and the three Kennedys drink a toast in the hotel suite just before 12:30 pm, which is the time that history is definitely changed (JFK is shot-JFK is not shot). At 12:30 the Time Traveler turns into nothingness, and the lead-crystal glass that he was holding, drops to the floor and shatters. Bobby finds a piece of glass with the Time Traveler’s fingerprint on it. Lee Harvey Oswald (Jeffery Steiger) is captured, taken to Washington, and gives much info to the Warren Commission; as a result, the CIA is disbanded. Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy is determined to uncover the Time Traveler’s identity, but Jackie exacts an iron promise from Bobby that the Time Traveler-wouldbe will never be harmed. As it turns out, the Time Traveler-wouldbe is Raymond Mead (Joseph Murphy). At sixteen he commits a burglary, is arrested and put on a prison bus; his fingerprinting enables President Bobby Kennedy to know the Time Traveler’s name. President Bobby has the teenager pulled off the bus, he talks to the kid, and he gives Mead a full pardon. Years later, when Mead has become an artist, an elderly Jackie buys many of his paintings. In 2001, after JFK dies of old age (and Jackie is already dead), youngest son James Robert Kennedy (Rick Gianasi) explains to Mead why the Kennedy family has been so generous to him.

from wikipedia

Thrill Seekers (”The Time Shifters” –U.K. title–) is a 1999 Sci-Fi movie featuring Casper Van Dien, Catherine Bell and Martin Sheen, among others.

The film was shot in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Plot
Tom Merrick (Van Dien) works as a TV reporter when he’s nearly killed in an accident while informing about a fire in a power plant. The sight of a creepy-looking man leaving the place accidentally saves his life, but gets another reporter killed in his place.

After some time, he decides to do some research on catastrophes for a documentary he’s preparing when he accidentally stumbles upon several pictures of the man at the power plant (Richings), who appears to turn up in different disasters as far apart as 50 years, but who still looks the same in all the pictures.

He goes deeper into the mystery and ends up discovering that a futuristic enterprise –Thrill Seekers– will make time travel possible in the future and will sell trips to the past. These trips consist of travelers going straight to a catastrophe right before it happens, so they can experience the emotion but are able to travel back in time again before they get killed.

Thanks to that knowledge, Merrick is able to save a plane from crashing and killing hundreds of people. Unfortunately, this type of discoveries endangers the very fabric of space-time and his own life, when Thrill Seekers sends a couple of agents to find and kill him.

Cube 2: Hypercube is the sequel of the science fiction/horror film Cube. Released in 2002, Hypercube had a bigger budget than its predecessor, and a new director, Andrzej Seku?a. The industrial-style rooms of the first film are replaced with high-tech, brightly-lit chambers; instead of traps like flamethrowers and extending spikes, the rooms themselves are the danger as they distort time and move through each other.

Plot

The film starts with a shot of several people lying on surgical gurneys wrapped in plastic. It then cuts to what appears to be a series of flashbacks of medical rooms. The next shot shows a woman waking up alone in a cube, with a small black square on the center of each side. She calls for help and her company ID reveals that her name is Rebecca and she works for IZON. She approaches one of the black squares, which opens when she touches it. She looks through the opening and is yanked by an unseen force into the next room. We then see a man in a similar room with a briefcase handcuffed to his arm. He opens his briefcase, but finds it to be empty. In another room, a woman enters to find an unconscious man and attempts to take his pulse. He grabs her by the throat and brandishes a knife. He eventually releases after questioning her. Suddenly another door opens, and a boy looks through. They call to him, but he pulls back and the door closes. Door after door surrounding the white room opens, with the same boy looking through. The woman pursues him through the last door he opened despite the man’s protests, but finds only an empty room. When she attempts to go back through the same door to the man, he is no longer there.

The woman opens another door and finds a frightened blind teenager named Sasha. The woman reveals her name is Kate while trying to comfort the girl. Another door opens and a man stumbles in. He introduces himself as Jerry Whitehall, then explains that he has wandered for hours, marking each room with a number. He scratches a number 4 into the metal of one of the doors with the wristband of his metal watch. They open another door, and find a handcuffed man hung by his belt. The boy from earlier is trying to hold the man up. Jerry rushes to help while Kate helps Sasha climb into the room. The man with the knife suddenly enters from another door and is quickly recruited. Through their combined efforts, they free the man, who slumps unconscious to the floor. The boy’s name is revealed to be Max Reisler. Max goes through the unconscious man’s pockets and discovers he is Colonel Thomas McGuire, who works for the Pentagon. The man with the knife gives his name as Simon. An elderly woman in a sweatsuit suddenly enters from another room, asking if anyone has seen the shower room. She is Mrs. Paley, a senile woman who believes she is lost in a gym. The colonel wakes and Simon asks him about how to exit the rooms. The colonel says they have to solve for the code to leave. They are interrupted by one of the walls suddenly vibrating and Sasha’s panicked warning that “something horrible” is coming for them. The party watches the wall in disbelief as a ghosted version of the wall begins to move towards them. They quickly move into the next room. The colonel handcuffs himself to one of the nearby rungs on the wall. Kate pleads for the key to free him, but the colonel swallows it. Simon yells for Kate to come and she barely makes it into the next room. The colonel is burnt to ash.

Mrs. Paley notices a gray design in the metal of the walls and exclaims that it is a “beautiful tesseract.” Jerry confirms her sighting and explains that a tesseract is an example of the 4th dimension. They then share their last memory before waking in the room. Jerry reveals he designed the doors in the cubes. Kate is a psychotherapist who last remembers leaving her hospital at night. Mrs. Paley says the last thing she remembers is walking her dog. They eventually realize they are in a tesseract, with varying times and space. Jerry then notices the number 60659 written near the door. This number appears in many different places throughout the movie. Jerry opens a door to find a woman named Julia Sewell sleeping. They then discover the direction of gravity can change in some of the rooms. In the next room, they come across a dead man with complicated mathematical equations written across his body and on the walls. Meanwhile, Mrs. Paley is searching for her dog “Izon” – several members of the group find this odd, as Izon is the name of a large weapons manufacturer. They ask Mrs. Paley what she did for a living, and she mentions being a theoretical mathematician at Izon Research Affiliates. Max reveals that Alex Trusk is a mysterious hacker and may be responsible for the creation of the Cube. While searching, she opens a door in the floor where she sees herself in an alternate reality being murdered by an alternate Simon. He is then decapitated by a trap after warning the group not to trust Mrs. Paley. This scene shocks the group, but enables Jerry to explain the possibility of parallel alternate dimensions crossing over. Max and Julia insist that what they witnessed was instead an optical illusion. The group of seven attempts to escape the Cube, but after endless crossings and a montage concerning Alex Trusk and the nature of the Cube itself, they are no nearer to solving its mysteries.

While the others are sleeping, Simon reveals to Jerry that he is a private investigator. Simon tells him that the people who kidnapped them emptied all of his pockets with the sole exception of two items: his knife and a picture of the person he’s looking for: Rebbecca “Becky” Young. He begins theorizing that perhaps it is a message or possibly a warning. Sasha’s acute hearing soon awakens her, and she tells Kate she hears “something wrong.” Kate wakes the group, and they spot a floating square in the middle of the room as it slowly expands to form a cube, then a tesseract. Mrs. Paley extends her hand to touch it. Jerry, sensing danger, lunges forward, telling her to keep her hand back. Unknown to them, the “floating cube” is in fact a floating tesseract of blades that is attracted to movement, and promptly slices Jerry’s back. Kate, Simon, Max, Julia and Mrs. Paley manage to escape to another room as the tesseract continues to grow. Jerry’s writhing eventually attracts the blades and he is slashed into pieces. Kate realizes Sasha is still trapped in the room and returns to save her. Sasha and Kate freeze and the tesseract slowly shrinks and finally disappears due to a lack of movement. While the pair is safe, they are separated from the group.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Paley is bound and gagged by Simon, who is convinced that she is putting on an act as a senile old woman, and is in fact behind the creation of the Cube. Their confrontation is cut short by crystalline columns protruding from the walls, similar to the “ghost wall” of the room where Thomas died. Simon briefly tries to save Mrs. Paley but soon decides to kill her instead; he stabs her, leaving her to die as he makes his escape. Appalled by Simon’s murder, Max and Julia quickly flee to other rooms to distance themselves from Simon. Max and Julia soon stop running and it is then revealed that they are both linked to Izon. In a moment of heated passion, Julia kisses Max. Unbeknown to them, they are in a room where time passes quickly, and they age prematurely and soon die while having sex. Meanwhile, Simon succumbs to stress and goes insane. He meets Jerry from an alternate reality, and proceeds to kill him through shock and near-starvation, shortly followed by a similar encounter with Rebecca. It is then implied that Simon cannibalizes multiple alternate realities of Jerry and Rebecca to stay alive. Kate begins to encounter rooms containing grisly scenes from the past, shaking her confidence and causing her mental fatigue. Meanwhile, endless escape attempts have taken their toll on Sasha, who gives up hope. She also reveals that she is in fact Alex Trusk, who was mostly responsible for the creation of the hypercube and knows that there is only a matter of time before reality collapses in on itself and the Cube implodes. Kate, however, still searches for a way out, but each door she opens reveals a disturbing scene from the past. She then finds Simon, but grabs his knife and stabs him in the eye. She turns around only to realize that Simon, now aged and blind in the left eye, is holding Sasha hostage. He kills Sasha and moves towards Kate, who escapes through a door that leads to the opposite end of the same room (revealing that the cube is shrinking). Simon is taken aback, and Kate pounces on him. She manages to use his own knife to kill him.

Kate notes the time on Simon’s watch and, based on the recurring number “60659″ found throughout the Cube and Sasha’s theory of the Cube’s impending implosion, finally deduces that the Cube will implode at 6:06:59. Just as everything around her falls apart, Kate grabs Sasha’s necklace and opens the door in the floor, revealing a black void. She jumps in as the Cube implodes. She awakens in a glimmering pool and is escorted to Izon authorities. It is implied that Kate’s job was to locate Alex and retrieve the information she stole from Izon. Handing over Sasha/Alex’s necklace, which contains the stolen information, Kate is then executed with a single shot to the head. The film ends with the Izon authorities reporting that “Phase 2 is terminated.”

Alternate ending

The longer alternate ending included in the ‘extras’ on the DVD reveals the ‘owners’ to be the government. It is unclear in the shorter version who they are, but it is assumed they are Izon. Kate is executed in both versions, but she is praised for being the first operative to make it out alive. In the alternate ending it is revealed to Kate that she was in the Hypercube for just six minutes and 59 seconds. The cube is owned by the government. It was an experiment used for quantum teleportation.

from wikipedia

5ive Days to Midnight (sometimes called Five Days to Midnight) is a five-part miniseries which ran on the Sci Fi Channel in June of 2004. It stars Timothy Hutton as J.T. Neumeyer, a physicist who discovers a briefcase containing postdated documents and evidence which indicate he will die five days in the future. The miniseries was five hours long including commercials, each hour dedicated to relating the events of an entire day. It ran for four days, the first episode detailing the events of the first two days.

Plot

Day One

Physics professor J.T. Neumeyer is celebrating his daughter’s tenth birthday, as well as mourning the ten year anniversary of the death of his wife who died giving birth. While at the cemetery, Neumeyer’s daughter Jesse finds a futuristic briefcase with her father’s name on it behind her mother’s headstone. Thinking for some unexplained reason that it simply belongs to some other “Professor J.T. Neumeyer” who resides in the seattle area and visits his wife’s grave nonetheless attempts to open the combination-locked briefcase in order to discover more about its owner; he finally succeeds by entering his daughter’s birthday, because, (during scene with strange graphics of equations and astronomical phenomena swirling about his head), he arrives at the trivially obvious conclusion that it is the combination. Upon opening the briefcase, Neumeyer finds a police file complete with photos, newspaper clippings and evidence detailing his brutal murder in five days.

Neumeyer, creeped out by the whole thing, starts looking into where it might have come from. At first he thinks it is a prank perpetrated by an exceptionally brilliant but eccentric graduate student of his named Carl Axelrod. He tracks down Irwin Sikorski, the homicide detective whose name appears on the police file as investigating officer. The detective points out the holes in the story, citing that the file says he missed the autopsy and he states that he doesn’t even know the last time he missed an autopsy. Neumeyer goes home to contemplate the days’ events and figure out how to proceed. Neumeyer is given a blue parka, which he is wearing in the crime scene photos, by his girlfriend Claudia.

Day Two

More things from the file start to come true. A rental company sends him a green Jeep Cherokee which also appears in the photos and the detective informs Neumeyer that he has a doctor appointment the day of the autopsy and wouldn’t be able to be there. More strangely, on the back of the newspaper clipping telling about his murder there is a story of a young woman who is killed when a tree is knocked down by heavy winds during a storm and crushes her house. Neumeyer manages to get her out of the house in time altering the future and saving her life. It isn’t until this moment that he is completely convinced that the things in the briefcase are real. Also in this segment it is revealed that one of the people on the suspect list is Claudia’s (Neumeyer’s girlfriend) ex-husband, Roy Bremmer. He’s a gangster and he has been tracking Claudia all over the country and has finally found her. Carl Axelrod is cleared as a suspect and Neumeyer enlists him in discovering how the case could have come from the future. Claudia goes to Neumeyer, confesses that she is still married to Bremmer and gives him a gun for protection. Claudia is going to leave to go on the run again but Neumeyer convinces her to stay and that he can protect her. A car across the street is taking pictures of them.

Day Three

Motives are established for the list of suspects in the police file:

It becomes clear that Carl – who worships physics – begins to see JT’s death as inevitable.
Brad sees an opportunity to make money from reverse-engineering the suitcase but is rebuffed by JT. With Brad facing repossession of all his belongings due to bad investing, he sees JT as standing in the way of his financial recovery.
Roy Bremmer finds JT and threatens him and Jesse if Claudia (revealed to be originally named Angela) is not returned to him.
Claudia increases the life insurance policy on JT to $4 million dollars.
JT also seeks to escape his fate by buying a plane ticket to get out of the city. The plane takes off, giving JT a sense of relief, yet less than an hour into the flight, a sick passenger is needed to be removed from the plane, causing the pilot to return to the city.

At the end of the episode, it is revealed Mandy Murphy died in a horrible car crash. While the accident which caused her death was changed, it appears that JT cannot irrevocably alter someone’s fate.

It begins to seem as if his fate is sealed.

Day Four

JT resigns himself to his fate and makes a video for Jesse, listing things he would’ve liked to have seen in the future. Jesse begins her own investigation, noting that Mandy Murphy’s dog was also indicated as killed by the falling tree. The dog was not in the car, and no one knows what became of the dog, leading Jesse to believe that the future is changeable.

JT alters his means of trying to alter the future and tries to entrap or remove the motives / abilities of the list of suspects for doing him harm:

When unable to convince Carl that physics are simply physics, JT tricks Carl into a hospital for the mentally disabled.
JT promises Brad the briefcase after he will have solved his own case, to remove Brad’s potential threat.
JT meets Roy Bremmer and offers him the money to be earned by reverse-engineering the briefcase, but Bremmer is not interested. JT even tries to shoot him as a last resort, but is not able to pull the trigger. Sikorski arrives at the scene and has Bremmer arrested.
JT does not believe Claudia has a reasonable motive to kill him, and instead works with her to remove the other threats.
The day ends with the escape of Carl from the hospital. He steals the briefcase from Neumeyer’s house. Brad intercepts Carl leaving with it and attacks him, but without success. Roy is released from jail once his lawyer gets involved. All three suspects again have reason and ability to kill JT.

Day Five

Carl steals the green Jeep from the rental agency.

Sikorski is revealed to have been working angles against JT. Working with Bremmer, he knows of Claudia’s true identity as Angela Bremmer. He also knows that Claudia will inherit a lot of money on Roy’s death. Sikorski kills Roy so that Claudia will gain her inheritance. Sikorski aims to make himself rich by killing them all and gaining access to Claudia’s wealth.

Carl and Brad both head to the bar where Sikorski has taken Claudia and JT. Planning on killing JT, Brad shoots at Carl as Carl tries to run him down. Carl drives the Jeep into the bar, knocking out Sikorski. JT loads the empty gun Sikorski gave to Claudia with the unspent bullet that was present in the briefcase. Sikorski believes the bullet won’t work and is killed when he tries to shoot JT.

Carl approaches JT with the intention of killing him. JT tells Carl to look at the briefcase, noting that the police file has changed to reflect the deaths of Bremmer and Sikorski and their plot to kill JT. Carl becomes fascinated by the change, noting that the future has been changed and JT doesn’t need to die. Physics has been satisfied.

As the survivors leave the bar, JT concludes that Jesse must be the one that sent the briefcase from 50 years in the future. Her full name is Jesse Tracy Neumeyer, the other “J.T.” who owned the briefcase.

from wikipedia

Time Chasers (aka Tangents) is a 1994 science fiction film directed by David Giancola and starring Matthew Bruch, George Woodard, and Bonnie Pritchard. The film follows the adventures of an amateur inventor who goes through time with his female accomplice to stop an evil megacorporation intent on changing history for profit. The film was lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) in 1997.

Plot summary
Physics teacher and amateur pilot Nick Miller (Matthew Bruch) has finally completed his quest of enabling time travel, via a Commodore 64 and his small airplane. After being inspired by a television commercial for GenCorp, he uses a ruse to bring out both a GenCorp executive and a reporter from a local paper. To Nick’s surprise, the reporter is Lisa Hansen (Bonnie Pritchard), an old high school flame. One trip to 2041 later and Gencorp’s executive, Matthew Paul (Peter Harrington), quickly arranges Nick a meeting with CEO J.K. Robertson (George Woodard). Impressed by the potential of time travel, Roberston offers Nick a licensing agreement on the technology.

Later in the week, Nick and Lisa meet at the supermarket and go on a date to the 1950s. However, another trip to 2041 reveals that GenCorp abused Nick’s time travel technology and destroyed the future. Nick and Lisa’s efforts to reverse the damage take up the remainder of the film. This ultimately culminates in a fight in 1777 during the American Revolution, the deaths of the present Nick, Lisa, Matt, and Robertson, and the destruction of the time machine before the original demo, thus ensuring that the majority of the film’s events never happen in the first place. The film ends with a past Nick (now aware of the danger of his time machine) sabotaging his demonstration, getting Matt fired, and again meeting Lisa in the supermarket as he did in the previous timeline.

Production
The production was shot in the Rutland, Vermont area in summer 1990, though it has a distinctive assortment of mid-1980s cultural artifacts, sets, and props. It was made on a $150,000 budget by 20-year old director David Giancola and his company Edgewood Studios. The film initially lost money, but licensing fees for its 1997 Mystery Science Theater 3000 appearance took its earnings out of the red.

Some sources claim that the GenCorp executive’s desk is actually at the top of the stairs at Castleton State College near Rutland, but other sources claim it was filmed at the Rutland Opera House; director David Giancola says that “it was a combination of both the offices and studios of radio station WJJR 98.1 and The Howard Bank. The grocery store scene was shot inside Martins, an actual grocery chain which eventually became Hannafords and moved to another part of town. The former Martins site (formerly the Rutland Mall) is now where Big Lots exists, inside the Home Depot complex. The exteriors were of the local power utility, VELCO.” When heckling it, the MST3K crew lampooned it as being in a public library and featuring a “giant circus mirror.”

For the showing on MST3K, the cast and crew had a reunion party to view the lampooning. MST3K star Mike Nelson claims that some at the party were not happy at the mocking, in particular Peter Harrington. Director Giancola said they all “laughed their asses off,” but also admitted that some people at the time “took it a bit too seriously.”

A stray comment on the MST3K version led to this film incorrectly appearing on the IMDB profile for Lisa Kudrow for a number of years. The role of “worshipful one” is actually played by Vicky A. Bourn, in her one and only film role.

In 2004, when asked if he was considering a sequel, Giancola said: “We don’t have any plans for a sequel, there have been so many time travel films since covering the same material, I don’t feel I have anything new to add.”

from wikipedia