Time Travel Movie Fest: Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann

1982 movie with a guy named Lyle

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A motorcycle racer is whisked a hundred years into the past where he confuses the locals and

I'm going to save all spoilers for the last paragraph of this write-up. Unfortunately, the very best thing about the movie is something I can't really talk about without spoiling the entire movie.

First off, I don't think Lyle Swann is a good name for a hero. This movie is cowritten by the Monkees, and you'd think the Monkees would know better than to name their hero Lyle Swann. I don't like the name Lyle, and I don't like that Swann has an extraneous 'n' in it.

William Dear was Michael Nesmith's cowriter and also directed this. He's responsible for both Harry and the Hendersons and Simon Says with Crispin Glover. So right off the bat, you know there's talent involved. The score for this is a distraction most of the time, and most of this movie feels like one of those made-for-television jobs. It builds to a climactic shoot-out that is far too lengthy and gets a little boring. And it's accompanied by more terrible music. Things fall apart a bit and get a little dopey.

However, the goods outweigh the bads in this one. You've got Peter Coyote playing a silly villain, yelling about wanting machines. Fred Ward plays our hero, right before he played Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff. He's not exactly made from hero material, but that actually works perfectly because the character is completely unaware that he's even in the past. That's kind of a neat twist actually--a time travel movie in which the character hasn't even realized that he's out of his time. I really enjoyed watching Belinda Bauer as the love interest.

She's fetching, and the character, at least until she becomes yet another damsel in distress, is cool. She shoots off a guy's nose ("He's hurt real bad! Oh, God! She blew his nose clean off!"), and she forces our hero to strip at gunpoint which is pretty hot. I also like how they manage to incorporate "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" into their lovemaking. I know I can't think about that short story without getting horny. Afterward, she tells Lyle that he can leave--probably because she found out his name--because "I'm through with him."

The other characters add color. Carl, the unfortunate guy who lost his nose, has a terrific voice, and Jack Peoples, although he's not in the movie for very long, is fun. Peter Coyote's sidekicks bumble, and they can't shoot at all. Swann can though. Well, at least there were some pew pew sounds when he flipped somebody the bird. That's kind of like shooting. There's a cool enough setting. It's mostly miles of desert, but you do get some pointed rock formations a little later on. And there's a great "Attaboy, Luther" moment when one extra gets pretty goofy and loud when Coyote's trying to ride the motorcycle. "Kick it again, Reese. You're gonna have to do better than that."

Also--I learned that the Confederacy totally would have won the Civil War if Lee had had a motorcycle. They don't teach you that in American history.

Here's the last paragraph. There's a Somewhere in Time necklace trick here, the kind of thing that I would have caught earlier if I was a little smarter. Like in Somewhere in Time, the necklace will forever be caught in this 100-year loop where it shuffles back and forth from the 1880's and 1980's. That's cool enough, but what that necklace really reveals is either the most embarrassing oversight in the history of film or a giant slice of mindfuckery. I'm definitely leaning toward the latter because there's no way this can't be intentional. Lyle Swann's biggest adventure in this movie? The dude becomes his own fucking grandfather. That's the kind of time travel nonsense that would make Doc Brown shit himself. I think that might be my favorite movie twist ever.