Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

mark.waltz Certainly among five different stories within one movie, there must be something redeeming. It certainly isn't the use of the castle from American International's cheepy "The Terror" (1963), so different looking as far as film stock is concerned that it becomes jarring every time the castle is shown, or the sets used within the film itself which seemed to be recycled from the first sequence throughout the fifth. The first sequence is probably the best, featuring narrator John Carradine in his only acting part within the film, playing the man who pays a visit upon the newleyweds who have purchased an abandoned mansion with a secret, followed by two individual stories about vampires (one with the obvious and already used name of Alucard) that features a Van Helsing with a secret (slightly amusing). But the absolute worst has Lon Chaney Jr. delivering his usual lame performance as a scientist who interferes in the experiments of some of his students, and gets the wrong body for their attempts to bring a Frankenstein like monster to life. Carradine and Chaney only appear in one sequence each, and at least Carradine's narration is subtle, if not juvenile. However, the younger actors all play multiple roles and their acting is certainly not anything worth writing about.

jonathan-577 Hewitt's trademark is vaulting ambition approached with the scantest possible means, and when he applies himself to a horror anthology format the result is gruesome and calamitous, and kind of fascinating for it. The first story relates to a bewitched grandfather clock and just about the whole damn thing is shot from a single camera setup. The second tackles vampirism, first from a police HQ with the unmistakable acoustics of an empty warehouse, then from a streetside crowd scene almost entirely composed of offscreen murmurs; the louts who do wander into frame offer the most fascinatingly various and mangled British accents on record. Volume three mainly features the rantings of a corpse over some looped footage borrowed from Roger Corman, to whose bountiful resources Hewitt can only aspire longingly, with the added bonus of Rochelle Hudson (James Dean's mom in Rebel Without a Cause!) playing one seriously antiquated love interest. Lon Chaney Jr. stumbles on set for part four, a Frankenstein variant whose loutish flatness does actually take on a certain lovable aspect in this company, especially the two lab guys with their frat boy impersonations. Finally we return to the vampire theme in part five, accompanied by the dumbest twist ending of the lot, not to mention the most haphazard pan-and-scan job in a crowded field. Toastmaster John Carradine shows up once in a while and mumbles into his sleeve.

madsagittarian Okay, there's one thing about the 80's that I miss. At 4AM, one used to be able to see Grade Z gems like this on TV. Now it's nothing but those rotten Infomercials. You could say that Ted Turner killed film culture, but I would argue that it was Anthony Robbins. In fact, during that golden hour of the day/night, one could see many films unleashed by the maverick no-budget director David L. Hewitt. THE MIGHTY GORGA, WIZARD OF MARS and JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME used to tickle many a bad-film lover (or torture an unsuspecting insomniac) who tuned in.This film, which I saw under the title RETURN FROM THE PAST, is a gloriously inept, amazingly miserable cash-in on the then-popular trend of horror anthology movies (in which a few short, separate tales of horrific irony are strung together by an onscreen narrator). All the hallmarks of Hewitt's unmistakable authorship are in abundance here.First, there is the hiring of once-great, "anything for a buck" actors; in this case, John Carradine (naturally) and Lon Chaney Jr, in small roles which nonetheless gave the theater owners a name to put in the marquee. Secondly, Hewitt once again fills the cast with his oddball stock company of dreary, nasal-sounding "actors" (who is this Roger Gentry, anyway?). As well, the director's sterling use of half-finished sets, or plain black backgrounds (when there were none at all!) is such a feat that would even make Ed Wood blush if he worked under such insane conditions. Add to this, the surprisingly ambitious writing (for bargain-basement cinema, anyway) which paradoxes the miserable attempts at mise en scene. For such a bottom-of-the-barrel project as a Dave Hewitt film, one wonders why he bothered with such an adventurous screenplay (like WIZARD OF MARS or JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME, especially), when the insultingly bad production values would work against the ambition of the writing anyway. Thus, therein lies the strange dichotomy of Hewitt's work as a director. With a thrift-store budget, he really tried to make something out of nothing. Who can blame him if he didn't succeed?Add some haphazard dubbing, some great juvenile cartoon blood dripping on the screen, and you have a truly beguiling piece of work. Anyone who insists on making tired, threadbare projects like this has to get a medal for bravery alone.

rufasff Look, I'll be brief. If you have ANY taste for the so-bad-they're-great classics (Plan 9, Robot Monster, Brain That Wouldn't Die), hunt down a copy of this, the most overlooked member of the club. Amazingly, this was put out in letterboxed form; but anyway you can find it, WATCH THIS MOVIE. It is fantastic