YMMV / The Time Machine (I Found at a Yardsale)

• Accidental Innuendo: "Well, now we know what the 'D' stands for..."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The detour to Planet "D". It has no relevance to the plot, and is never brought up again.
  • The belly dancer scene also counts, eating up three minutes of non-relevant screentime.
• Bile Fascination: The film is so incompetently made that it must be seen to be believed. The only good reason to watch it is to laugh at the terrible acting, convoluted storyline, and poor editing and special effects. Hell, for some people it's too awful to laugh at.
• Cliché Storm: The movie combines standard time travel and space opera tropes. An everyman gets a magical time machine, travels into the future, finds a slave girl, goes on space adventures with her, has to deal with an evil empire, and ultimately finds happiness with the girl.
• Designated Hero: Robert's supposed to be the protagonist, but he doesn't really do anything to endear himself to the audience. Instead, he's kind of callous and stupid, like stealing a spaceship he assumes to just be abandoned, being willing to shoot down an enemy ship without thinking about it, and being somewhat bossy with Sheba. This is even after the man who sold it to him asked Robert to use the time machine only for good purposes!
• Narm: The dinosaur scene is supposedly meant to be serious, but any intended drama is ruined by the crappy CGI dinosaurs and the actors' poor acting.
• Padding: The movie might as well be called Padding: The Movie, what with all the unnecessarily-long scenes of nothing important happening or the characters doing nothing in particular.
• Signature Scene: The overlong orange juice drinking scene is the one scene frequently brought up by reviewers.
• Special Effect Failure: Due to the film's low budget, this is expected:
  • The sound editing throughout the film is bad. Apparently, no one had any boom mics, since many times the characters' voices are hard to hear. Sound effects also frequently drown out speech.
  • The film overuses Chroma Key, and it's really obvious. The effect is like watching the local weatherman on TV, but worse.
  • When Robert and Sheba first enter the spaceship, Robert's actor shines the flashlight at the camera, messing up the lighting and making the chroma key even more obvious.
  • During the "cantina" scene, one of the actors is wearing reflective glasses, which causes a small portion of his face to disappear when he turns due to the green screen.
• Strangled by the Red String: The romance between Robert and Sheba kind of comes out of nowhere, considering the complete lack of chemistry between the two characters.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The time machine Robert gets doesn't appear to have any restrictions, so he could have gone to any time period at any time. Instead, he goes into the distant future and stays there for most of the movie so it can do a cliché space opera plot.

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