Well,there certainly were a lot of them,nasty green - skinned things with ratty hair and eyes like fairy lights.And their teeth.....scary to think that 800,000 years in the future there still won't be enough N.H.S. dentists to go round.Their eating habits were disgusting too,ask the Eloi - it was them they were eating. H.G. Wells is turned from a bookish Fabian - type socialist to a Rambo - style fighting man after one look at them.Didn't notice any lady Morlocks,perhaps that was part of their problem. At the dawn of the 20th century Mr Rod Taylor invents a Time Machine.Unlike Sam Beckett in "Quantum Leap" he can't go back in time and right wrongs (the reasons are fudged over half - heartedly)so he goes into the future with the words of his friends in The City and the military ringing in his ears - armed with the knowledge he could bring back, Britain could rule the waves for ever. He returns in 1917,for no good reason,and 1966 when a nuclear war settles his hash for more than half a million years. When the mountain that had apparently engulfed his machine has finally eroded he finds himself in idyllic surroundings along with a lot of blonde - haired young men and women in classical dress.No,there has not been a fourth Reich,,he has appeared amongst the Eloi,a placid people bred to be eaten by the aforementioned Morlocks. After saving the life of an oddly ungrateful lady Eloi they are all summoned by siren to the Morlock caves for supper.The Morlocks will be doing the supping - obviously. Mr Taylor discovers that these natural - born killers are afraid of fire and,in the country of the pyrophobic the man with a box of Vestas is King. Perhpas not surprisingly in the circumstances he sets fire to half the countryside and only just manages to crawl back to his machine,leaving Weena - his favourite Eloi(a lady,nothing strange about Mr Wells) - behind.Back in his own time his friends refuse to believe his story and - in a fit of anguish - he climbs back into the machine,sets the dial to a very long time in the future and disappears. Mlle Y.Mimieux blushes prettily as Weena in probably the best performance of the movie.Mr Taylor switches between English,Strine and American and hopes you won't notice.I will draw a veil over the performance of the actor who played his best friend who for some reason was given what he fondly imagined was a Scottish accent.Never mind,but sadly he was no better at playing his own son with an upper - class English accent.No,life's too short to explain - you had to be there. Harmless stuff then but not to be taken seriously for a single minute.
Review of The Time Machine
