This silly little time-travel fantasy is infinitely more entertaining than it looks. Thrill Seekers looks like a pilot episode to a television series that never made it. While that’s not exactly high praise, this movie has enough clever ideas and B-movie silliness to warrant a viewing. It originally aired on television under the title The Time Shifters.
Casper Van Dien stars as Tom Merrick, a reporter who’s been ‘burnt-out’ ever since he accidentally caused the death of his camera crew. The fact that Casper’s maybe 25 years old makes it a little tough to buy his world-weary performance, but he’s got a square jaw, which is the only real requirement for these B-movie hero types. While working on an article about disasters throughout the ages, Merrick notices that there’s a creepy bald guy in pictures taken around the time of each disaster! At the Hindenburg explosion, the bald creepy guy is there. The Titanic? Yep, same bald creepy guy. With the help of his perky new girlfriend (Catherine Bell), Merrick digs deeper and discovers the truth: it’s something that’s come from the future that’s causing this remarkable coincidence of witnesses. Like I said, it’s a wacky B-movie romp that includes train wrecks, massive fires, exploding stadiums, futuristic Matrix-style assassins, and some bizarre time-travel mishaps.
As long as you don’t take any of it seriously, Thrill Seekers is a fun way to spend 90 minutes. While not up to par in comparison with the great time-travel concepts presented in Back to the Future or Time After Time, the ideas presented in here are certainly diverting enough to entertain. As futuristic assassins fail to eliminate Merrick, the hero’s actions (and his very existence) have already caused massive changes to the future, thereby threatening the existence of the ‘Thrill Seekers’ organization – a new kind of tourism that’s yet to be invented. The longer Merrick lives, the more damage he does to the future…see, these time-machine movies get really confusing sometimes.
In the style of old 1950s sci-fi flicks, Thrill Seekers succeeds despite its obvious low budget and B-rated cast. Appearing only as a face on a computer monitor, Martin Sheen shows up for a few scenes, which means that the producers can plaster his name on the video box as if he were the star. But our star here is Van Dien, and he’s certainly in his element with this movie. After a less-than-award winning debut in Starship Troopers, Casper has fed us a steady diet of straight-to-video corn like Tarzan and the Lost City, Shark Attack and Modern Vampires. Suffice to say he fits in perfectly in this one.
Since Thrill Seekers features a handful of awful acting performances, some pretty cheesy special effects and several lines of unintentionally hilarious dialogue, my advice is to watch it when you’re in a silly mood. It’s certainly not an awful movie, and the time-bending plot is a lot of fun, not to mention a few shocks you won’t see coming.
