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Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The first must-see film of the year.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This very much resembles two episodes of Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel (1966-67) series. The Tunnel pilot episode also begins with the time machine being rushed into service too early. The Tunnel series also has a command centre that looks amazingly like the command centre in JTTCOT. A much later Tunnel episode - Chase Through Time - has striking shades of JTTCOT.JTTCOT is still a fine film (that proudly sits in my DVD collection) but Time Tunnel did it all with a grand sense of showmanship and gusto...that is missing from JTTCOT.I guess this review is a statement on the crazy 1960s...a movie and television show can take on the same theme at the same time but the TV show, instead of the movie, comes out on top. Is it not meant to be the other way around?

There is definitely a place for movies like Journey to the Center of Time. I really believe that if it weren't for astonishingly bad movies like this, it would be harder to really appreciate the good ones. I also, on the other hand, wonder what the people were thinking when they were making movies like this, because no one makes famously bad movies deliberately, do they?At any rate, the movie starts out with a whole dialogue of scientific mumbo jumbo. A lot of it went right over my head because I have no background in science, but I don't think much of it makes sense anyway, because would a movie like this really make a serious argument about the logistics and technical aspects of time travel? I doubt it, because their destination, as you know, is the "center of time." Whatever or wherever or whenever that is. Early in the movie they describe their destination as "the balance between past and future," which until now I had always assumed to be the tenuous and fleeting place known generally as "now." But not in this movie, here there are enormously complex time travel experiments being conducted using enormously simple equipment. It's not long before we are given the bizarre explanation that this is a $14 million project to create a satellite that can show pictures taken 24 hours ago. Is that how much $14 million buys? 24 hours? That's really too bad. Maybe that's why most people can only afford surveillance cameras. The cheap, boring time-travel- less ones. No one makes movies about those!Then again, for all the cardboard simplicity of the lab, they did have a hydraulic lift built in to raise and lower people about 18 inches from the upper platform to the lower platform. A more frugal team would have installed the two stairs, but maybe these guys weren't quite sure what to do with all that money. There is a scene about 30 minutes into the movie where the crew, under a surprisingly effective 24-hour deadline, finally manage to conduct a successful experiment using the, ah, temporal displacement device they have been working on, and they are all shocked to see, on the characteristically 1970's oval-shaped big screen TV in front of them (and after more than a minute of pictures of galaxies, b-roll, and random head shots), what one of the scientists describes as "the test area. Time central!" I'm glad they knew what they were looking for, the rest of us may have reached the center of time and passed it on by without even knowing to stop!But soon they notice that they've opened a window through which they can see 5000 years in the future, so I reckon it's going to be a good idea to stop about then. But soon we learn that it's a window that matter can pass through, so it's not going to be long before some silver guys in shiny jumpsuits mosey on into the lab and say come with us if you want to live. They say that good science fiction movies, especially time travel movies, show us the future to comment on the present. This is a bad science fiction movie, but it still makes sure to comment on the present, specifically man's seemingly endless capacity and drive to kill each other in war. Even super-advanced future-people can be killed by man's "primitive" nuclear weapons!The last third of the movie seems to consist of nothing but seemingly endless montages shown on that video screen, mostly of modern wars, and yet there's still only enough here for an 82 minute movie. And don't miss the hilarious hand-to-hand combat scenes! Classic!!

I really liked two unique gimmicks of this movie.First, when they are traveling back in time, they discover they are on a collision course with another ship traveling forward in time. They try to hail the other ship, but it never responds. Finally when collision seems unavoidable and immediate, they fire on the other ship, destroying it. Later they suffer damage so they can't transmit, and then as they are traveling forward in time they discover they are on a collision course with another ship traveling backward in time, and on radio from the other ship they hear their own voices warning them, but with the radio out they can't respond. A perfectly consistent causality loop, well staged!! Near the end of the movie, the controls are damaged, and suddenly they go back into their own time, repeating the time-travel part of the movie at high speed. This is actually the part that I remembered fondly from when I was a kid, and yearned to see the whole movie again, but didn't know the name, until by chance I caught it on TV a few years ago and recognized it as that old lost movie, and this time I was prudent to learn the name of the movie!! I think the movie was totally hokey, but really nice, fun, unique, original, well worth watching if you like to see sci-fi that isn't just a clone of the standard themes of sci-fi. One of my two favorite sci-fi TV series was Blake's Seven, for the same reason, the Federation is *bad* not good, and the totally cheap special effects are exactly right every time, and unlike most such series, the end is **different** (I won't spoil it for you).

It's hard to believe that movies as bad as this were being made as late as 1967. It's about as technologically advanced as any "B" grade film from the '40's, but done in color. However the garish orange of the lab setting and time capsule is so bright it will make you grab for a pair of sunglasses. So much for the high points."Journey to the Center of Time" would be an embarrassment for a fledgling film student, that it was made at all with real money is to be questioned as much as the film's star Scott Brady questions his company's funding of research in the science of time travel. For two years, Doc Gordon (Abraham Sofaer), Mark Manning (Anthony Eisley) and Karen White (Gigi Perreau) have only managed to navigate twenty four hours into the past. That's all about to change, as the trio, along with owner Stanton (Brady) kick start their time travel gizmo five thousand years into the future for a rendezvous with aspiring screen star Poupee Gamin, surely you recognize her name. One of her futuristic aides is Lyle Waggoner, who fortunately managed to survive this mess to earn a spot on the Carol Burnett Show and later, "Wonder Woman".The time lab can best be compared to a time travel boomerang; from the future the gang whips back to one million years B.C. to pick a nice round number, where the greedy Stanton grabs a jewel and takes off in the lab once again, stranding Manning and White in the past. In a series of frenetic flashbacks and flash forwards, the entire movie is relived for those of you who dozed off the first time.Getting beyond the embarrassment, you can have a fun time with this one as long as it's with a bunch of friends and the right mix of refreshments. The film can be enjoyed on many levels; I know because it made as much sense played in reverse as it did played forward.