Greta Blackburn – Through the Shattered Lens

While exploring the Egyptian tomb of King Tut, Prof. Douglas McCadden (Ben Murphy) finds a previously undiscovered chamber and a sarcophagus with a mummy inside. He takes the sarcophagus back to the California University of the Sciences, where he discovers that the mummy is covered in a dangerous green fungus. McCadden orders everyone not to touch the mummy. However, one of his students decides to steal the jewels that were buried with the mummy and also gives it a strong dose of X-ray radiation. The mummy, which was actually a hibernating alien, comes back to life and is soon causing havoc on campus. Frat boys and mummies make for a dangerous combination!

Time Walker was released in 1982 and features plenty of scantily clad coeds and green-tinted stalking scenes shot from the mummy’s POV. But the movie itself has more in common with the old Hammer and Amicus films than with the Friday the 13th era. The mummy is a throwback to the kind of monsters that used to haunt horror movies, and its alien origins bring to mind an old Quatermass serial, with Ben Murphy’s prickly American scientist serving as a stand-in for Quatermass himself. The idea of an extraterrestrial crash-landing in ancient Egypt and being buried in a pharaoh’s tomb is an interesting one. It’s just too bad that the film’s half-baked script and Tom Kennedy’s uneven direction don’t really do it justice. This was Tom Kennedy’s only film as a director. He was best-known for being one of Hollywood’s premier advertising men, overseeing the trailers for both the Indiana Jones films and the early Star Trek films.

Time Walker tries to be a little of everything: an homage to the old mummy movies, a slasher, and finally a sci-fi film about how humans should be nicer when greeting visitors from another planet. There are a few dependable character actors in the mix (it’s always good to see James Karen), but Ben Murphy is bland in the lead. The film ends on an overdramatic note and with the promise of “To be continued.”

The story would not be continued, but Time Walker later found new life and a new title when it showed up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as Being From Another Planet. The joke I always remember from that episode is Joel Hodgson suggesting that the mummy was actually Pete Duel. Even Tom Servo and Crow were shocked.

“Hot singles are waiting to speak to you!”

Remember those party line commercials that used to air late at night in the 90s? For just a few dollars a minute, you could call and talk to someone claiming to be a hot woman in your area of town. (The commercials always featured women because everyone understood that only men would be dumb enough to call the number.) Even when I was a teenager, I knew that there was no way that a young, hot woman was sitting at home alone and waiting for a stranger to call her. But obviously, some people thought they were true because those party lines commercials aired for a long time and really only went away once everything moved online.

In Party Line, Greta Blackburn and Leif Garrett plays homicidal siblings who have money to burn so they spend all of their time on the party line, enticing men to sneak away from their wives and come to their mansion so that they can be murdered. Detectives Richard Hatch and Shawn Weatherly are assigned to find out why so many married men are turning up dead. The chief of police is played by Richard Roundtree, who is so smooth that his main purpose in the movie is to remind us that not everyone has to use a party line to pick up women. It’s a standard 80s thriller that has some moments of unexpected humor, largely due to the contrast between the beautiful and rich killers and the people that they target. Richard Hatch is wooden in the role of the detective but Shawn Weatherly is attractive and likable as his partner, Greta Blackburn makes for an excellent femme fatale while Leif Garrett is twitchy but convincing as a killer who likes to wear a bridal gown.

Party Line was made when the idea of adult phone lines was still a new one. Apparently, when those lines first started to advertise, the part about it costing money wasn’t actually mentioned and could only be discovered by reading the small print at the bottom of a television screen. Since the small print was not only very small but also usually accompanied by a picture of a blonde in lingerie, no one ever bothered to read it. I was not one of them but I do know more than a few 90s kids who came home from school to discover a parent waiting to talk to them about the phone bill. The world was a different place back then. Today, everyone should know that most hot singles have something better to do than to talk to you and if they don’t, they’re probably killers like people in Party Line. It’s not worth a dollar for each additional minute.