The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

With distinct memories of loving this movie on VHS back in 1984, I was surprised to find it on Prime. I was excited to see it again after 40+ years! The concept still holds up, but THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT suffers from some seriously bad acting and a director who wants to focus more on romance than he does science fiction.

Four years before, "The Final Countdown" had seen Kirk Douglas at the helm of a battleship transplanted in time.

New World Pictures couldn't afford Douglas or the logistics of moving a whole cast, so they just threw a couple of soldiers into a wormhole.

But first....

We met Dr. Longstreet (Miles McNamara) who has created a new process that he thinks will render a US Naval Destroyer invisible. Things go awry and his two seamen in charge of the newfangled machine (which looks a lot like a couple hundred light bulbs stuck in the transporter controls from the Enterprise) disappear instead.

The sequence in which they move through time was pretty cool in 1984. Now it's pretty laughable with a slight twist or retro cool.

Our Naval men, David Herdeg (80's legend Michael Pare') and his buddy Jim (Bobby Di Cicco from "1941") fall through a wormhole and end up in the Nevada desert circa 1984.

The film has some fun with the "dudes out of time" concept, especially when they see Ronald Reagan on TV giving a speech and someone tells them he's President, but then it seems to throw all the fish-out-of-water ideas out the window as David adapts to his new era in about three minutes.

They boys didn't make that trip without consequence.

Jim's hand and arm keep lighting up in "Miami Vice" colors and lightning bolts appear out of nowhere, wreaking havoc on a roadside diners pinball machines.

The boys run outside and commandeer a vehicle and its driver, Allison, played by another 80's stalwart, Nancy Allen.

Allen has appeared in a lot of great films I love to this day. Spielberg's "1941", De Palma's "Carrie" and "Dressed to Kill" and Verhoeven's "Robocop" to name just a few. But the material strands her here as a helpless, whiny ride-along, too busy swimming in Pare's dreaminess to have any other emotions.

Pare' came to stardom after "Eddie and the Cruisers", this film and my favorite of his films, Walter Hill's "Streets of Fire". I had the chance to meet him briefly at a VSDA conference in the late 90's when he was doing a lot of straight to video films and he was a very pleasant and humble guy. Immensely personable.

He's coasting here on his brooding looks, with long stares at Nancy Allen to tide the audience over to the next action sequence.

In the 80's, studios like New World Pictures and Cannon turned out horror, sci-fi and action thrillers in a constant B-movie grind. The budgets were low, but the stuntmen were pretty damn good.

Stories around the production talk about Director Stewart Raffill being much more interested in shooting a romance than a sci-fi flick. He kept getting rid of scenes that focused on the time wormhole mystery so he could get back to Allen and Pare making goo goo eyes at each other in a series of cheap hotels.

That choice doesn't help the film much. LOL

You get actors like Steven Tobolowsky (so legendary in "Groundhog Day") forced to spill a ton of exposition just to try and justify the special effects sequences when they finally DO hit the screen.

Consider the story line in which David visits a friend on ranch. I'm not going to say anything more to ruin and surprises, but I ask you. Does that entire sequence make sense? How is he there and he....oh whatever. If the filmmakers can't be bothered, I'll just wait for the next car chase.

It's all very goofy, and only sporadically lifted ever so slightly above B-movie status by some good stunt work or a slightly clever twist.

The music score by Emmy Winner Ken Wannberg is surprisingly memorable and the photography by Dick Bush, who would go on to shoot MUCH better films like Friedkin's "Sorcerer" and Blake Edwards "Victor Victoria" is far superior to the material here.

If you're looking for nostalgic 80's B-movie thrills with enough wooden acting to encourage termites, THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT serves up a couple moments of fun, unintentional laughs and thrills, time traveling its way to a C.